Dr. Martens Footwear
This campaign was named one of the top 25 print campaigns of the 1990′s. It’s nice to see that it still holds up today. One of the interesting things about this work is that even though it’s a long copy campaign, and even though the call to action is at the very end of copy, the ads were generating over 50,000 phone calls a month. This proves Howard Gossage’s assertion, once and for all, that people don’t read ads, they read things their interested in.
One of our philosophies about long copy, in fact, is that even though people may not always read copy, consumers appreciate that a company has something to say about their products and their brand. In essence, a long copy ad works much the same as a short copy ad as long as people understand the message. They don’t have to read the whole ad to understand it. This is from David’s time at Cole & Weber, Portland, OR.
This last one is a trade ad for Dr. Marten’s distributor, our client, London Underground.
London Underground Trade ads
This is a trade campaign David did at Cole & Weber for London Underground. At the time they were only one of the distributors of the shoes in the USA and this campaign helped them become the official US distributor.
It’s a good example of our philosophy on Trade advertising. Most companies seem to forget that their audience are human beings when composing messages for their industry or category. They tend to speak in jargon thinking that because it’s the industry’s lingo. Our feeling is that you should always treat your customers and clients like the people they are. They still like to laugh. They still respond to emotion. They don’t cease to be dynamic living human beings when thinking about their jobs.
These ads were part of an effort that propelled LU into becoming the number one US distributor and overwhelmed their offices with phone calls and product requests.
