Zac Martin

How To Freelance In Advertising When you decide to freelance, the most common advice you’re given is to expect quiet Januarys. So I wrote How to Freelance in Advertising – a practical guide to getting started and not being homeless, by someone who’s been doing it a while. It’s real long tail stuff.

This camping store won’t be winning any creative awards, but the campaign will work its guts off. This car ad doesn’t have a human insight or big idea, and yet is distinctive and positions them as the fun SUV. But if you’re ever worked in an agency, you know getting to a big ideas is hard, and making one is even harder. If you’re new, start with the six best posts I’ve ever written.

Most recently it was BBH planner Mel Arrow’s piece Forget Human Truth, Brands An evolutionary truth – human behaviour that has always been true and will always be true A target market truth – a unique behaviour true only to our audience and no one else Arrow asks a bigger question – do we need a truth at all? Like the greatest product demonstration ever made, for Volvo Trucks, which is entirely devoid of truth: John Hegarty said “Advertising is 80% idea and 80% execution.

And with repeated reference to Apple, who he arbitrarily claims have the attribute of ‘purpose’ (rather than the more realistic ‘good at brand building and product development’.) Despite a few millennials claiming purpose is the biggest influence on their decisions (which is stated behaviour only), there are other ways to do brand positioning. They spend most of their marketing effort building the brand (reinforcing their positioning), or selling through product demonstrations and five star reviews. If you’re doing brand communications, your job to create and refresh memory cues, then reinforce a long term positioning strategy.