by Luke Sullivan | Jan 10, 2016 | Advertising, Creativity, Education
These days, Mark Fenske, is a bad-ass professor of advertising at the Brand Center at VCU in Richmond. But back when I was in the ad biz, Mark was a copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy and he was bad-ass then, too. (Digression #1: And when he wasn’t being a bad-ass...
by Luke Sullivan | Dec 21, 2015 | Advertising, Commentary, Digital
Content-Schmontent. Yes, the smart brands will continue to produce content that is helpful, beautiful, engaging, and useful. But content can be clutter just like ads and just posting cool content on the site-of-the-month probably isn’t going to be enough to...
by Luke Sullivan | Dec 11, 2015 | Advertising, Digital, Education
I got my first job in the business in 1979. Some kid out there just went, “Nineteen Seventy Nine?? Dude, did they even have ads back then?” Why, yes we did, thank you very much. In fact, my first agency job was at Bonetool, Thog & Tarpit and I worked on...
by Luke Sullivan | Nov 21, 2015 | Advertising, Education, Portfolio
I’ve seen a pattern in student books over the years. The first of these two common mistakes is in the set-up, in a section students commonly title “the insight.” Most of time these read something like “People buy this product (for example) because it’s the quickest...
by Luke Sullivan | Aug 20, 2015 | Advertising, Creativity, Digital, General
“Working in advertising can make you cynical, but if you can aspire to look yourself in the mirror and see the kind of person your 8- or 14-year-old self would not hate – if you can treat people and customers and clients and vendors and the world with respect;...
by Luke Sullivan | Aug 6, 2015 | Advertising, Digital, Education
In January, the fifth edition of Hey Whipple is gonna come out. I asked Edward Boches (digital smarty-pants from Mullen and now Boston U) to contribute and add his deeper digital smarts to the book. And he did. And with a whole lot of other revisions and new stuff,...