Air travel: both miracle and nightmare

My first ever post from the Southern Hemisphere – exciting stuff! A pink-tinged dawn greeted our arrival at Sydney airport at 5am yesterday after a plane journey that seemed to last for several lifetimes. I’ve never been a great lover of air travel. So the thought of 7 hours on a plane to Dubai, almost […]

Pork. The Other White Meat – the allure of Australian advertising

I’m heading off on a well-earned late summer break to Sydney this week. Aside from the obvious allure of summer, sunshine and the potential for some quality Aussie hospitality, I’m very much looking forward to seeing some new examples of the magnificent bluntness of Australian advertising. I should say at this point, that my partner […]

There are lies, damn lies and advertising copy

There’s an advert that’s currently running on UK television for Knorr stock pots that’s been driving me slightly batty. In this ad, the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White extolls the virtues of Knorr’s new range of stock pots which are ‘made with real ingredients for a real meaty taste’. Now I am no culinary authority, […]

Why we need punctuation – the battle for the apostrophe

I’ve just started re-reading the excellent Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss – a really great book with a ‘zero tolerance approach to punctuation’. If you see yourself as a bit of a punctuation stickler, or your family and friends habitually accuse you of being a pedant, this is definitely a book worth reading. […]

The beauty of slang – knowing your twerk from your selfie

Good to see that the Oxford English Dictionary – not usually an institution you’d imagine as being ‘down with the kids’ – has included both ‘twerking’ and ‘selfie’ in its new edition. People can get rather sniffy about slang, but it’s the colloquial and social changes to our language that give it that essential colour. […]

Don’t settle for predictability in your brand language…

There’s a great piece on the Marketing magazine website from Neil Taylor of The Writer. Although we all think very hard about the language we use in adverts, web content and blogs, do we pay as much care when writing the small print and disclaimers that are an equally important part of the customer experience? […]