Russell Davies

Taking a shortcut is no way to get ahead in the advertising business

The ad business loves business process novelty. New management techniques very quickly get sucked into the advertising maw and regurgitated as thin slices of PowerPoint manifesto. Differentiation, new news and a shiny new press release all off the ba...

The easy way to judge a creative agency: look at what's on its walls

If this sentence doesn t grab you, then I m wasting my time. That seems to be the general rule with articles we use the first sentence to determine whether the whole thing s worth reading. I ve been thinking about this recently because I ve been ...

A billion-dollar mistake is just around the corner for electronic adland

One of my first jobs was as the regional account manager on the Fiat dealer account. I made sure the dealers ran ads that Fiat HQ was happy with and one of my first tasks was managing the announcement that the fabulous Fiat Tipo had been awarded the ...

They're big and clever, but televisions just need to have an 'iPhone' moment

I've always thought of myself as a top TV geek, always on the latest trend, a voracious absorber of new channels, programmes and technologies. I realised the other week that the reality is a little different. We'd wandered into our enormous but incom...

Journalism is changing from how we're reading to how much we're reading

Whenever I m tempted to slag off some Big Dumb Agency move, I think of something Clay Shirky wrote, comparing our era to the advent of publishing: "We re collectively living through the 1500s, when it s easier to see what s broken than what will repl...

Sometimes problems aren't complicated, they just take time and effort

Sometimes the most useful thing is a phrase or story that crystallises a thought or idea. Here are three that work for me. I once worked for a media director who d been well-trained to never talk about problems, only opportunities. Talking about ho...

There is nothing weird about questioning your marketing assumptions

You ve probably seen the M ller-Lyer illusion. There are two vertical lines next to each other. Each has lines making an arrowhead at the top and bottom. The arrowheads on the left-hand line point inwards; the ones on the right-hand line point outwar...

Beware the pitfalls of allowing computers to do your advertising for you

Remember the kerfuffle about the company selling deeply offensive T-shirts on Amazon? They had horrible slogans such as "Keep calm and rape a lot" and "Keep calm and choke her". People were rightly upset that Amazon was selling these things and deman...

All the big data crunching that brands love turns out to be irrelevant in China

My favourite conference is one I never go to. It s called Strata and it s about, basically, the intersection of business and "big data". I like it because it seems to be the moment when a lot of very clever data people realise they need to communic...

Netflix has become the envy of TV with so much data on our viewing habits

Sometimes you see a quote you know you're going to be seeing in presentations for the rest of your life. Reed Hasting, the chief executive of Netflix, uttered such a quote in an interview with GQ. "The goal," he said, "is to become HBO faster than HB...