Where’s the future for daily deal sites? The landscape is certainly shifting, what with the introduction of Google Offers and the speculation about Groupon’s going public. Has it had its heyday – I know I’m tiring of receiving three to four emails a day – or is there plenty more steam in the engine?

Lab42 have researched that there are as many as 660 live deal sites, with more springing up daily, making for a competitive market place. Groupon’s growth has been astronomical, but, now reaching 115 million users, it has seen a decline in web traffic since July 2011. Lab42 surveyed 500 daily deals users on how they use the sites and have helpfully created this nifty infographic to answer a few question.

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy, New Zealand
Executive Creative Director: Damon O’Leary
Senior Copywriter: Ben Pegler
Creative Group Head / Art Director: Darran Wong Kam
Retoucher: Dan Spataru
Typographer: Chris Leskovsek
Account manager: Ben Hopkinson

“Should’ve gone to Specsavers Frankton”

Advertising Agency: Smart, Australia
Creative Director: Annie Price
Art Director: Ben Clarke
Copywriter: Tristan Graham
Retouching: Visual Thing
Published: June 2011

“Take a shave-cation. A whole weekend away from your razor.”

Advertising Agency: JWT, New York, USA
Chief Creative Officer: Peter Nicholson
Executive Creative Director: Sarah Barclay
Creative Directors: Billy Faraut
Art Director: Yangjie (Jay) Wee, Kirstin Roquemore
Copywriters: Alexis Reid, Tiffany Appleton
Planner: Jason de Turris
Director of Integrated Production: Clair Grupp
JWT Director of Brand Production: Matt Anderson
Print Producer: Dana Pettit
Art Buyer: Richard Cardinali
Account Executives: Claire Capeci, Ariel Stern, Monica Lewin, Jeff Branz
Photographer: Chris Clor
Retoucher: Chris Clor, Traian Stanescu
Media Agency: MEC

“Baby wake up call. Panasonic Baby Monitor.”

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Copywriter: Lucas Antunes
Art Director: Daniel Corrêa

What determines whether a damaged brand has reached a tipping point from which it cannot recover?

One of the remarkable facts of brand equity is its persistence. A strong brand can withstand almost anything. The Apple and Harley-Davidson brands survived years of shoddy unimaginative products and are now among the strongest brands. The AT&T brand suffered from decades of terrible service, yet is now probably the strongest brand in its space. Incredible.

However, some brands do not recover easily. The GM brand was tarnished by the mismanagement of the 80s and parts of the 90s. According to Bob Lutz in his book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, its sullied reputation lingered for decades. Even in the last few years the media ascribed an inability to design quality cars that objectively was not justified. The Audi sudden-acceleration problem exposed in a 60 minutes piece in 1986 tarnished its brand. Even though according to the CEO of Ford (in a private conversation), Audi had…

Continue reading…

Shared by Persuaders
A great evening indeed and one that I and Michael Clyne from Path Pacific were delighted to help Livestream to the global creative community.

Marvellous. Bloody marvellous. How can you not love it when an idea catches fire and enough people see enough potential that they’ll invest enough time and energy to make it fantastic? Portfolio Night is just such a beastie. Ogilvy have hosted it twice in Dublin now, and very smart they are for doing so.

60 aspiring creatives were baring portfolios and souls to the well meaning but unyielding rigours of two dozen of the town’s top creative directors. Each young creative’s book benefitted from three 15-minute deep dives with three CDs, and the open spaces of Ogilvy’s beautiful building were used to wonderful effect, intense huddles everywhere you looked. The early atmosphere was beautifully balanced: relaxed and friendly sage advice meets huge dollops of youthful anxiety. It is after all probably the one occasion on the calendar when CDs can rub shoulders and enjoy each other’s company without the intense competition that awards shows bring.

The presence of so many digital agencies on the night cements the importance of Portfolio Night across disciplines. I spotted reps from Cybercom, Bluecube and Eighty Twenty lending their expertise to the newbies. ICAN’s Ian McFarlane said digital content was both improved and increased on last year’s event. It was heartening to see digital education represented by IAPI and DIT as well. Their joint Aungier Street postgraduate diploma in advertising and digital communications, also in its second year, is starting to get noticed by prospective employers. (As I oh-so-casually mention that, I should also disclose that I’m one of those involved on the lecturing side of the course.)

This is the ninth year of the Portfolio Night project, dreamed up by Toronto-based ihaveanidea.org. It happened in 30 cities simultaneously, which is a fairly cool thing, on my highly scientific scale of coolness. Locally, the whole evening was livestreamed to the world by Alex Gibson of Persuaders marketing blog and broadcast fame. Dublin’s second year has set a particularly high standard and I’m beginning to suspect that JP Donnelly (below) et al are glad they snagged this little annual creative corner.

“Taste the good old days.”


Advertising Agency: Publicis Conseil, Paris
, France
Art Director: Philippe Boucheron
Copywriter: Patrice Lucet
Assistant Ad : Antoine Dezes-Richard
Chief creative Officer: Olivier Altmann

Creative Director: Fabrice Delacourt, Olivier Desmettre


Photographer: Hervé Plumet
Art Buyer : Soone Riboud
Retouching: Adrien Blanchat/Benjamin Bastide
Production: Organic

Advertising Agency: Dare, Vancouver, Canada
Creative Director: Bryan Collins, Rob Sweetman
Art Director: Eric Arnold
Copywriter: Jarrod Banadyga
Published: May 2011

“Nokia N8 now with panorama.”

Adverising Agency: JWT, Gurgaon, India
Chief Creative Officer_ Adrian Miller
Executive Creative Director_ Priti Kapur
Creative Director: Anupama Ramaswamy, Simran Sahni
Art Director: Nishit Shankar
Copywriter: Amish Sabharwal