Like the phoenix, the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) is reborn as the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON). With this rebirth comes a new set of fangs and claws in the form of the ARCON Act 2022. Goodbye to the impotent APCON Act 2004. All hail the ARCON Act 2022. Now, how potent are these new ARCON powers? …
Picture this. You are on your bed in your boxers. The mood is right. Barry White’s deep sensuous voice comes up on the HomePod. Telling you this. Telling you that. Or maybe Joe is your thing. Or Ed Sheeran. The room is chilled by the air conditioner. The lights are dimmed. Your bonnie lass is in the bathroom. You can …
A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on the absence of comparative advertising in Nigeria. You can read the piece here. A debate ensured on a WhatsApp group on the subject. Several people believe brands in Nigeria do in fact run comparative advertising. The advertising below was cited as an example. Well, intelligent people of WhatsAppville, hear …
So, it is that time of the year and I was rummaging on the Tesco website for some Christmas feasting ideas. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of eating jollof rice and fried rice at Christmas. The birthday of my Lord and Saviour is too important for such trite fare. Oyinbo people know how to throw …
There are those who swear that the greatest human invention is writing. That is nonsense. It is tobacco. So I believed when I smoked. I’ve been clean nine years now. But I smoked for seventeen years before quitting. I know that is scarcely deserving of any recognition considering a friend’s grandpa smoked till his nineties. He died on his bed …
Lust of the eye. Pride of life. Instant gratification. A marketer’s best friend. We love that you have them. We tell you it’s OK to have them. To sate them. After all, you only live once. Humans have had those predispositions since Mrs Adams bit on that fruit. I imagine how the serpent hustled her. Serpent: Yo sweetness, let me …
They just had to do it, didn’t they? It’s in their blood, in their essence. To challenge. To inspire. To dare. It’s not a Nike ad if it pull punches. I’m talking about Nike’s recent ad commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Just Do It campaign. The ad headlined by Colin Kaepernick.
Recently, a few Nigerian advertising agencies won ‘big’ at the African Cristal Festival in Marrakech, Morocco. Nigeria’s Noah’s Ark won ‘Agency of The Year’. X3M Ideas, DDB Lagos and Insight Publicis all had a decent showing too. There have been a lot of congratulations and reportage across the media. There have also been questions about the prestige and worth of …
In case you just crawled out from under a rock, Dove’s done another clanger. It ran an ad on Facebook where a black woman removes her brown tees ( an allusion to skin colour?) to transform into a white woman. The interpretation by many is that the ad depicts white skin as being superior to dark skin. Dove has been …
Is there something in the water on the ‘client side’? Something that turns good people into ogres? An agency guy crosses over to the client side and then haunts dreams and kills libido. What gives? I have drunk from the water on both sides and I share my thoughts on why the relationship is often fraught. It might seem I’m …
No disrespect to the good chaps at Honeywell, but there was a particular Honeywell Wheat Meal commercial that made me want to slash my wrist every time it came on. Not least because it always seemed to come on when Manchester United was losing.
I started out my career as copywriter writing obituaries. And if that wasn’t distressing enough, my parents constantly asked me what it was I did for a living again. Somehow, when they were paying for my education, they had imagined me in a suit and tie, poring over important documents and solving real world problems. They also didn’t imagine me …
“The most important element in advertising is the truth” – Bill Bernbach. For a people with such an interesting culture, beliefs and attitude, it’s disheartening that a lot of our advertising do not mirror our lives and peculiarities. Let me regale you with an experience I had about thirteen years ago. A chum was getting married in Jos so I flew …
When NASA’s space probes hurtle through the Solar System, they take some pretty astonishing pictures. But there is one picture that NASA dare not release. That is because that picture has profound implications for humanity, and is also deeply bruising to the ego of the West. They have found an Igbo man on Mars.
In a blog post in April 2016, Damon Stapleton recounted a conversation he had with fellow creative blogger Rich Siegel on the frustration of the latter with a client. Rich and his partner had pitched a powerful idea to the client for the Olympics. It involved telling the stories of athletes who come last in their events at the games. …
The first time the Guinness ‘Udeme’ TV spot was shown to the Marketing Team in Lagos, not many of the lads were sold on it. It didn’t look like a great ad. It had no drama. It was too poetic, not ‘aspirational,‘ and it was apparently shot for the whole of the African market, not for Nigeria, the biggest …
There are those who will swear that the greatest human invention is writing. Nonsense. It is tobacco. Or so I believed when I used to smoke.
