I love Venice. So on a recent trip to Hong Kong I decided I’d check out ‘The Venetian’.
For those non-gamblers amongst you (me included) ‘The Venetian’ is the world’s largest casino, and it’s in the gambling Mecca of the world…. Macau. If you were thinking Vegas, then true, there is a much smaller Venetian there. But America’s gambling Mecca is now being dwarfed by the rise and rise of Macau. (Thanks’ entirely to the Chinese peoples’ obsession with gambling.)
And boy is this place big. So big in fact that it has re-created the floating city, indoors. I’ll repeat that, indoors.
Now to be honest it is as far away from the real Venetian experience as Italy is away from Macau. But it was a fun way to spend the day, and of course a few Macau Patacas…

A couple of months ago an adland friend, Tim Maguire, forwarded me an e-mail from Glasgow Caledonian University. Every year he is invited to talk to the second year students who are studying for their B.A. (Hons) Media and communication degree, about a career in advertising, or warn them off it perhaps (did you know that in the last 20 years Scotland has lost 80% of its clients?).
This time however the head of the course was looking for someone to teach the 3rd year students the Creative Advertising Module, a 12-week course squashed into 12 Fridays. (12 very full Fridays). And since I’ve spent the last 15 years as a C.D. teaching student placements the best way to learn about being creative (and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it) I volunteered to run the course.
So here we are, heading for week 10 and it seems to be going very well. Ian Mowatt, head of the Media and communications course has been fantastically supportive and allowed me to re- structure the module so that it is bang up to date with the industry today. And every week I’ve set the 70 students a creative brief, which they have one week to answer. I have to say I’m very pleased with the results. Considering that this is not a creative advertising degree, quite a number of the students have potential careers in the creative departments of Ad agencies or digital agencies. Though not in Scotland I suspect, if the client exodus continues.
I’ll stick up some of the best ideas at the end of the course and you can judge them for yourself

Like this: Clean; simple; clever; make every word count.
Invading: tick. Resistance: tick. Job done.
Poster as Art.

Whilst doing research on a project I happened upon a whole load of Kennedy election posters. The weird thing is they all used a similar graphic device, a circle around his head.
Is it me or do they all look like he’s seen through the sight of a rifle?