The quality of creative work coming out of small and mid-sized independent agencies keeps getting better, often rivaling or surpassing what comes out of agencies many times their size. Here ...

Anyone who has worked in the agency business long enough has learned one of its odder truisms: the most effective creative ideas are often the riskiest ones. Higher-risk creative tends ...

A lot has been said and written about the value of an agency doing genuinely great creative work. The debate runs from agency to agency and client to client. Some ...

Many clients in the advertising and marketing business genuinely envy agency people. Agencies tend to avoid suits and ties, operate with more creative freedom, and work in environments that look ...

Bill Bernbach, the founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach, once said that for advertising to work, it has to leave the recipient of the message a little happier. In other words ...

We need to "hack" human behavior to succeed in advertising.

It's a word that gets thrown around in creative circles, and for good reason. "Hack" in this context doesn ...

Jeff Welch, principal of Mercury Advertising in Bozeman, MT, tells us how his agency started very, very small (just Jeff and co-founder Jamie Hurd) and grew to 25+ employees largely ...

If you are a marathoner, “hitting the wall” can be very bad. But in reference to the creative community, the “wall” we refer to is a tool for brainstorming.

The ...

Small agencies and marketing firms have a fighting chance at winning big-name accounts. Smaller agencies are considered more agile, more innovative in thinking and execution, and possessed of skill sets ...

Well, SELL, like, literally is, by the law of the letter, four letters long, but figuratively, it’s just the opposite. In my mind, “like” has become a four-letter word ...

Being innovative is seen as a way to distinguish an agency from its more routine competition. But agency owners need to dig deeper to decide if they can claim innovation ...

The debate rages on… should design be a tool of marketing and sales, or should it pursue purer, more aesthetic goals? As agency creatives from way back, we have to ...