Alex Woodruff Biz Buzz

With the trained eye, the marketeer will often look at a campaign and at a glance spot things that just don’t stack up or match the target group. On a recent car journey my passenger looked at this campaign and was able to instantly reel off a number of things on this poster that, with [...]

Unilever brand Du Darfst (indirectly linked to the UK brand Too Good to be True), seems to have changed its mind about a somewhat daring TV campaign. The original version encouraged women to stop strict slimming regimes, with the somewhat shocking tagline ‘fuck the diet’. Luckily I caught the ad and took a picture of [...]

The case study winners from WO59 were going full whack for energy chocolate with a concept called Flying Knight. It offered a 2-in-1 USP, the “have a break, have a Kitkat” concept combined with the right ingredients to add a skip to your walk and keep you awake after a late night out. But the [...]

A couple of months ago I came across a campaign for a regional gym brand with a more than suggestive slogan: Fit mich. At the time I decided not to post it, as I try to focus more on the international angle on marketing stories in Germany. To explain to non-native speakers what the intended [...]

I seem to be an intensive poster on posters recently. Maybe a good idea, in case they get banned like in one city in South America. Here an example of two posters I spied in Berlin, again using QR codes, but this time much more sensibly. The reason I say this is that they both [...]

Students on my course will be familiar with the best-practice example of Nivea, who knew the naughty meaning of a gesture and the marketing disaster it could have caused. Last year I stumbled across a German book showing what I thought is a naughty gesture. I’ve been told by many Germans that you can be [...]

Living in Germany, especially in a city as car-obsessed as Stuttgart, you’re constantly bombarded by advertising messages relating to modern travel, life on four wheels and Mobilität. Mobility? What, old people with walking problems desperate to get about more? Well pimp my scooter. Not Mercedes mobility Fine in German. But please don’t produce new materials [...]

Yes, a joke. A huge problem with seasonal markets is, well, seasonality. People complain about Christmas goods appearing in the shops in September but it’s the only way to push stock into the trade (and out of the factory) to answer the huge surge in demand. So what happens for the rest of the year? [...]

Following on from my previous post on direct response advertising with the new QR codes, how did it go…? Moving target Well, the answer is: pretty badly. First: It was on a moving poster that rotated different ads up and down. Every time I got the code in my viewfinder (not pictured here, this is [...]

Addicted? Plug in and suck. I’ve recently had two bizarre products pointed out to me. Both leave me shaking my head in disbelief. The first is the e-cigarette. Yes, you heard it here, the cigarette that isn’t actually a ciggie, it’s an electronic device pretending to be a ciggie. As they say on some of [...]