Marketing

It was 1993. Holmes, Knight, Ritchie/TBWA had hired Nigel Rose, formerly of Collett, Dickenson, Pearce and Partners, as a joint creative director. He arrived at an unfortunate tim…

In the 1970s, unemployment dominated the Conservative Party's campaigning not once, but twice. Expecting James Callaghan to call an early election in fall 1978, they plastered Bri…

David Abbott had his reservations when he was asked to pitch for The Economist business. Media owners were notoriously tough to deal with, with their strict schedules and inter…

During a strategy meeting in 2002, a predominantly lady agency-client team (Ogilvy and Unilever) tried to explain to their male colleagues why women dislike most beauty advertisin…

One evening Kishore Subramaniam, the planner on Sonata watches walked into Rajesh Ramaswamy's (Ramsam)’s room for a chat. Kishore: Machaan, we need to do an ad with Dhoni for S…

Flipkart just updated the look of their company. It intended to convey that it has a diverse group of customers, spanning age groups, genders, and locations. While they had bee…

When a friend showed Vinny Warren a "super-grainy and deteriorated" VHS film of guys screaming "WHAAASSSSUP!" at each other over the phone in 1999, he thought he'd struck gold. Th…

Ogilvy won the mandate for Diu Tourism, amid intense competition. It was our attention-getting creative idea that clinched it. We went on to launch the campaign with teaser ads de…

McDonald's and Burger King dominated the fast-food burger market, with products like the "Big Mac" and "Whopper" emphasizing the size of their burgers. Wendy's didn't offer any…

Anheuser-Busch began the 1970s with Schlitz as its main competitor, but by the end of the decade, it was up against a new No. 2 Miller.  Anheuser-Busch was jolte…

McDonald's was the undisputed king of burgers. In comparison to Burger King, they had more locations and a bigger market share. Burger King had the Whopper, which was a differenti…

In the face of mounting concerns about AT&T's (Bell Systems then) impending monopoly, N.W. Ayer, one of America's oldest advertising companies, required a creative way to assi…

BMW had a simple, and now Bavarian, recipe for success before the mid-1970s. It created cars with consistent and basic designs that were appealing from every viewpoint and would a…

I do believe that Nestle Sunrise is a case study where the classic “new, improved” product story (much exploited in those days!) was turned into a huge property and the start of a…