Advertising
Sydney Sweeney, the Hollywood radical
Every time you feel down about Britain’s out-of-touch elites, a look across the Atlantic is a reassuring reminder that it…
How emotions shape our decision-making
Ask any estate agent: most potential house buyers arrive with a detailed list of criteria for their new home, only…
The marketing genius of Jaguar
Woke it may be, but Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ video is a work of marketing genius. With its ungendered models, ungrammatical…
Nothing beats a 1980s brick phone
In the late 1980s, a story entered advertising folklore. A group from an ad agency had boarded an evening train…
The problem with empathy
Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs…
Seeing is believing
In Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis gave it a name: he called it ‘the inverted pyramid of piss’: ‘One of [Geoffrey…
Classified information
The seduction of back-page ads
The Mozarts of ad music
Richard Bratby meets the hidden men and women composing melodies to make you buy
Powers of persuasion
The art of the public information ad
Why the left wants a political advertising ban
An easy, crowd-pleasing opinion column would maintain that banning political adverts from social media platforms is wrong because it implies…
Just do it: the advertising industry should embrace its right-wing roots
Am I allowed to mention Nigel Farage? Of course I am, this is The Spectator, and its readers enjoy analysing…
Transforming Goosefish into Monkfish: branding’s slippery secrets
We live in a logic-obsessed world, from computer modelling of the economy to businesses run by spreadsheets. But we also…
Could my slogan have swayed the Brexit vote?
People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’.…
When did advertising become so banal?
Walking down the street on my lunch break, I sometimes pass a delivery man wheeling a large handcart of Japanese…
Why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4?
Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have…
Vital signs
Exhibit A. It is 1958 and you are barrelling down a dual carriageway; the 70 mph limit is still eight…
Why ‘my’?
There’s a plague of first-person advertising
Bursting the bubble
The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For…
Sworn out
The advertising industry is obsessed with innuendo and dirty words
The writing on the wall
It is a common prejudice about modern politics that it is all focus groups and spin, all public relations and…
Shopping and viewing
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
The dark secrets that your clicks reveal
About four years ago, an irate father in Minneapolis walked into his local Target shop with a complaint. He wanted…
Mandatory fun
Forced, studenty wackiness has taken over our culture. It’s time to take a stand
McBess
My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he…
Why I’m on board for the homophobic bus
London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people…
