Simple but powerful brand positioning created for the luxury boutique hotel, Kings Head, Cirencester and used throughout their marketing activity, across all platforms.

Agency: Robson Brown. Designer: Sarah McCrady

Abu Dhabi wanted a strong campaign line to leverage its commercial relationship with Man City and create more awareness of the Arab state as a sun-kissed holiday destination. 

Given the brief "Into the Blue" seemed to make a lot of sense.

Agency: Cravens, Newcastle.

Way back in 1977 a bloke called Milton Glaser created a logo that spelt out “I Love New York.”

Being a native New Yorker, I expect Milton felt rather good about that at the time.

As a native Geordie, I felt pretty much the same way about coming up with this line and being a key member of the team that got to brand North East England.

The campaign ran for six years on just about any kind of media you'd care to mention.

It won at the World Travel Awards.

Not once, but twice.

Then the Tories pulled the plug on it.

To be fair to them, given the level of visionary thinking they generally exhibit on creative matters, they’d probably have done exactly the same thing to Milton. 

Brand positioning and copy platform for leading executive-search specialists, Drayton Partners.

Design Agency: Absolute

Human Capital is a bi-monthly e-mag and bi-annual printed magazine. I write and edit it for a senior-level recruitment company, Drayton Partners.

It is a people-focussed business publication which is distributed to thousands of UK and international CEOs, MDs, and HR Directors.

Unusually for brand journalism, we even managed something of a scoop by speculating on the possibility of Facebook launching their own Bitcoin variant a full year before they announced Libra.

Designers: Absolute Design

Founded in Germany in 1897 Kempinski is the oldest luxury hotel group in Europe.

The company's Du Parc private residences on the shores of Lake Geneva start at eight million euros each. 

Their clients are the world's elite. They wanted an elite tone of voice to match them. 

And, yet, for some reason, known only to themselves, somebody, somewhere, thought a Geordie copywriter might be exactly what was needed.

Agency: FPP

This campaign was mainly aimed at heroin addicts.

It was heavily researched during its development.

NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) techniques were used to fine tune the copy for the target market.

We also conducted interviews with drug dealers to make sure we really understood the little triggers that might help change behaviour.

As well as conventional media channels, like posters and cinema, it also utilised more unusual opportunities to get noticed; messages printed on paper bags at needle exchanges being just one example.

This was a fun job.

Iveco Ford wanted to create a unique customer experience for their motor show at Donington race track.

So, we came up with a fictitious heavy rock band, Evolution, and their Iveco-obsessed roadie, played by Geordie comedian, Brendan Healy.

The band appeared in person at the show and played (Ok, let's be honest, mimed) to the delegates. They then mingled with the crowd, signed copies of the DVD we'd filmed, generally messed about and made people laugh.

Iveco signed orders for 1.5 million pounds worth of trucks at the event itself. (The first time that had ever happened.)

The campaign won the top prize at that year's UK Business-to-Business Awards run by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

A tongue-firmly-in-cheek content campaign with digital marketing company Future & Co designed to raise the profile of the Great British Meat Company.

The video was shared on sites all over the world including the BBC, Uproxx and Modern Farmer.  

And, Sam Wass, the GBMC spokesman, was interviewed on numerous major news outlets including BBC, Five Live and Heart FM.  Newspaper coverage was extensive.

A man at a charity auction actually paid £500 to meet the Cowdashians.  

I'm happy to admit that it is possible some measure of strong drink had been imbibed prior to the commencement of the bidding process. 

Smoking and babies don’t mix. Not all mums understand that. This ad for the National Health Service helped get that message across in a simple but powerful way.

It won a number of different advertising awards including a Silver nomination at D&AD and a Gold, at Campaign Direct.

Campaign magazine called it: “Proof, if it were needed, that inspired creativity exists outside the capital.”

Which was jolly nice of them.

Procter & Gamble invested heavily in this campaign.

It ran in women’s magazines like Red and Cosmo.

It promises whiter whites, even at lower temperatures.

From a philosophical point of view I’m not sure white actually can get whiter.

Are you?

I worried about that a lot at the time.

But, you’re right, I didn’t ever pluck up the courage to mention it to Ariel’s Marketing Director. 

For some people marketing will always be the Devil's work.

The kind of folks who knit their own sandals out of leftover tofu burgers, will never be convinced otherwise.

Even if you point out that all advertising does, really, is help companies sell more stuff.

And, then, because they've sold more stuff, those same companies need to take on more workers to make it.

I know Karl Marx wrote books about workers and all that, but, to my knowledge, he didn't actually help create any did he?

Bill Bernbach and Charles Saatchi, on the other hand, almost certainly have done.

Anyway, here's some stuff for good causes that I've worked on in my capacity as either: an enthusiastic creative chap, or cynically-depraved slave of Beelzebub.

Which side of that argument you come down on will, I suspect, depend, somewhat, on your weekly consumption of tofu burgers.

(The gravestone ad won Campaign's Silver award for that year's best copy execution and got into D&AD.)

I went to the Digital Conference of the London Book Fair in 2010 and came back with a mission. 

I decided to create a novel that truly embraced the new technologies that have revolutionised publishing.

Part of the answer I came up with was creating an entirely make-believe online provenance for the pen-name James T. Raydel, writer of the novel Shuffle, in the form of a fictional fiction-collective called Lulzlit.com.

I then recruited seven writers and PhD students to Tweet for three months as the collective.

The Lulzlit part of the expanded narrative was nominated for Best Transmedia project at Digital Book World’s Publishing Innovation Awards in New York.

“Exemplifies the best in innovative reading experiences.”

Digital Book World

A novel has to be structured in a certain way because it’s printed on paper.

An e-novel doesn’t have to follow the same rules.

This one didn’t anyway.

It involved, amongst other things, seven different beginnings and seven different endings, an entirely fictitious online provenance for the pen-name James T. Raydel, and a crack team of writers and PhD students, recruited to post in-character for three months, as Lulzlit.com, a fictional fiction-collective, on Twitter.

The novel was included in Amazon.com’s first ever list of 100 best debut novels on the platform.

The only experimental novel to make the list.

It also won Best e-book Fiction at Digital Book World’s Publishing Innovation Awards in New York.

“An endless possibility of multiple universes; allowing any pasts or futures to be true.”

Wired

“Reinvents the e-book.”

Good e-reader.com

I was a punk in the days of my youth.

Not a proper one.

A part-time one.

Respectably dressed clerical worker by day, but by night, with the addition of a couple of well-placed safety pins and a hole or two in my Levis, I was transformed into...

Well, “transformed” is probably over doing it, but I did pogo a lot at the local youth club, and used a Johnny Rotten badge to pierce my ear. (It blew up to the size of a cauliflower, so my mum said I had to take the earring out.)

I put a bit of that experience into the script for this ITV comedy drama.

The comedian, Sean Hughes, did a great job of bringing the character of Harry to life.

The programme was commended by the Royal Television Society.

I got my tux out and went to the do. It was full of middle-aged blokes, like me.

Not a safety pin in sight.

In the angling world House of Hardy is spoken of in hushed tones.

When Prince Charles gets his waders on, chances are it will be a Hardy rod he’s holding.

Unlike HRH I’m not a fishing fan myself.

So, one of the things I’m proudest about with this campaign is writing copy that really got inside the heads of the pike, bass, panfish and carp-chasing target market.

This social media campaign recruited six second year students from Sunderland University to blog, post, and film their own lives for twelve months.

The content they produced was housed on a unique section of the University’s website, alongside direct links to specially created pages on Facebook and Twitter.

It was awarded Best Digital Campaign at the Heist Education Marketing Awards and, now expanded to eight students, is in its third successful year.

I can’t remember what colour my hair was before I started to make this TV series for Five.

In my mind’s eye I see it as a deep and lustrous brown. (I could, of course, be wrong about that. It’s a little-known historical fact that mind’s eyes are notoriously deceptive.)

4,000 entrants were whittled down to 400.

Then to a final ten.

Judges art critic, Brian Sewell, designer, Wayne Hemingway, and video-artist, Jane Wilson,*politely discussed who should win.

My hair's grey now, that’s all you need to know. Very, very grey.

* (After extensive discussions with my legal team, we have settled upon the word “politely” to try and give some sense of the deliberations that actually took place between Mr Sewell and Mr Hemingway, during the making of this programme.)

Who better to warn children and teenagers about the dangers of fire around November 5th than Fire, himself?

That was the thinking here.

Dramatically reduced call-out rates for fire engines on Guy Fawkes Night suggested that it worked.

Wayward Women, a kind of Horrible Histories for grown-ups, was hosted by Daddy Single, compere of Club Noir, Scotland’s biggest burlesque venue.

It combined interviews with serious academics and broadcasters, like Germaine Greer, along with comic contributions from Ex Viz Editor, Simon Donald, and a troop of gyrating burlesque dancers.

The ITV series went some way to proving that, contrary to rumour, you can make a history programme for couch-bound, kebab-holding, post-pub men and women.

Given the slot time, it achieved excellent ratings. 

It’s grim up north.

Unless, that is, you are living in the Turnbull building, as a proud owner of one of Newcastle’s first one million pound apartments.

This campaign included online, print and traditional media.

It used a simple psychological tactic: urging people not to tell anyone else about this exclusive development, ensured they felt absolutely compelled to mention it to everyone they knew.  

The apartments all sold out.

Job done, then.

I was just at a tricky point - in terms of putting this site together. Thinking to myself that, if I have to re-size one more image, my brain will explode.

Then I remembered this campaign for specialist running shoe, Innovate.

It's aimed at the kind of people who run ten miles up a mountain before breakfast. And, then, run another ten miles back down again after lunch.

They have stamina to spare.

So, suitably inspired, I decided to re-size once more.

Your average Geordie bloke likes the odd pint and a pie.

Unfortunately, for him, his heart's not so keen on them. 

You could point that out in a subtle way. 

Or, alternatively, you could do it like this.

Dan Brown might like this campaign.

His hero, Robert Langdon, would take only seconds to spot those caravans subtly hidden in the back of some of Europe’s most famous paintings.

And, then, in moment of stunning, almost superhuman, insight, connect them to a secret society of extreme-campers who, since the very beginning of time, had been planning nothing less than world domination.

Sorry to disappoint you, Dan.

There is no conspiracy.

These are just some rather nice print ads for Elddis that went in specialist press and helped them flog a few caravans.