There are some terrible examples of how not to write SEO copy out there: “Making a cake can be fun, but making a cake is also quite hard, expecially if you are making a cake that’s complicated.” That sort of thing. Hopefully, my foray into the genre is a little more entertaining than that.

This page is about the south of France.

Mauritius and more.

A page on small airports.

Turtle watching in Cyprus.

The Alhambra.

Tips for driving in France.

Finally, some thumbnail sketches of major cities that I wrote for American Express. I shared the job with a few other copywriters (some 70 cities’ descriptions were required over just one weekend). My cities, should you not be able to detect my slightly word-weary style, are Toronto, Vancouver, Acapulco, Puerto Vallerta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington DC and the Bahamas.

Please let me know if any of the links are broken. Or if you want me to write some travel copy, of course.

Pavement art

One of the 'clean graffiti' ads that appeared outside busy stations around London

Radio

The first two radio commercials each took a dig at speed-dating, with the protaganists having to sit through a procession of clearly unsuitable dates:

Lovestruck radio ad 1

Lovestruck radio ad 2

The third ad was based on the fact that people who know each other well will finish off one another’s sentences - correctly, of course.

Lovestruck radio ad 3

Press

This press campaign ran in CityAM, one of London’s freesheets aimed at business readers. They get lonely too, you know. The ads ran in 2011 during particularly turbulent economic times.

An extension to the campaign used CityAM’s symbols in a slightly more knowing way:

Taxi sides, tip-ups and receipts

Tube Cards

Life imitating ads

See? He was.

Banners

Here’s an example of the PoS:

Slightly more fun were the radio ads. Amex is a challenging client to work for with a complex approval process that involves numerous stakeholders in the UK and the US. So I am very pleased that these ads were eventually recorded.

The campaign encouraged Amex cardholders to use their cards more often by getting them to think about the rewards such cards would bring. Rewards that could include free flights, special experiences, free gifts and so on. The v/o artists include Sue Perkins, Steve Punt, Danny Wallace and others.

Amex Apparel

Amex Petrol

]]> http://www.kevinmillscopy.com/?feed=rss2&p=685 http://www.kevinmillscopy.com/?p=680 http://www.kevinmillscopy.com/?p=680#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:25:24 +0000 kevinmills http://www.kevinmillscopy.com/?p=680 I wrote the copy for HP’s ’state of the art’ website in which they showcase their latest notebooks for business. Visit the website why don’t you?

Some time in the 1980s, I had to come up with a few ideas to help sell phones for BT. The phone market had just been deregulated, and suddenly people were able to buy new-fangled phones as opposed to the old-fangled phones that had been the norm for decades. BT wanted to capitalise on this and were running a Christmas campaign with outdoor as the chosen medium.

One of the 48-sheet poster ideas I came up with featured a boring old brown phone on the left, accompanied by the line ‘Christmas past’, and a shiny new push-button one on the right with the line - and I know you’re ahead of me here - ‘Christmas present’. I never knowingly rip-off or recycle other people’s ideas, so I must honestly have believed that this was the first time anyone had ever used this idea for an ad.

The following year’s crop of Christmas ads disabused me of this notion. And the following year’s.

Advertising Annuals

It’s clear now that in 1988 or whenever it simply became my turn to use the Christmas Past Christmas Present line. Once it had worked its festive magic it went back in the box along with all the other Christmassy lines, only to be dusted off again the following November. They’re like Xmas decorations.

Newspapers do it too, of course. The Daily Mirror was ahead of the game this year with a front page ‘CHRISTMAS CRACKERS’ headline on 15th October (above). The story was about a town that had put its decorations up earlier than the paper deemed appropriate

Now it’s in full swing. In a Costa Coffee the other day I noticed from a take-one that they had ‘Christmas All Wrapped Up’. In what massively disappointing way would that be? Well, they have Brie & Cranberry Paninis, Mince Tarts and Chocolate Cookie Lattes. That’s Christmas Day sorted, then!

Elsewhere we can expect a plethora of annual stalwarts such as ‘Stuff the Turkey!’, ‘Jingle Change this Xmas!’ and variations on the Wise Men riff. Incidentally, my ‘Avoid Turkeys this Christmas’ headline, for a new movie channel, was rejected by my then creative director on the grounds that ‘turkeys’ was an industry expression that no one outside the movie business would understand what it meant.

The ideal Christmas gift

Another perennial treat lies in seeing which dull, everyday products get to be re-packaged as ‘the ideal Christmas Gift’. A couple of examples I’ve seen so far this year have included a garden water butt and laser eye surgery. Feel free to post any others as well as any Christmas headlines I can steal admire.