Ad Legends Workshop

Great teams know and practice the fundamentals. This is true in sports, as it is in business.

To gain credibility as an industry and make better work—work that performs for our clients—we need to adopt stronger creative standards. To recognize and then consistently rely on these timeless standards, we need to know our industry’s history, where we’ve been and how we got here.

If your team isn’t sure what “1984” means, or why it matters in an advertising context, I will help you fix that.

Last year, I made a new live workshop with a focus on some of the legendary people who created timeless campaigns, fundamental concepts, and structures that ad pros continue to rely on today.

This new Ad Legends Workshop (first delivered in Dec. 2019) is an interactive walkthrough where I deconstruct famous ads from the legends. From Ogilvy’s “Hathaway Man” to Burnett’s “Jolly Green Giant,” to Mary Wells’ “End of the Plain Plane,” the workshop covers a lot of important ground.

Last December, with John January’s support, I presented this new live half-day workshop to the teams at Signal Theory in Kansas City and then again the next day in Wichita.

When you’re ready to build your team’s creative muscles, give me a head’s up and I will adapt the workshop to your specific needs.

Here I am rehearsing a piece of the three-hour workshop:

I Also Provide A “Fundamentals of Business Writing” Workshop

In 2017, XPLANE in Portland asked me to spend an hour presenting the fundamentals of business writing to their entire team. It was a fun interactive presentation and a helpful overview of the fundamentals of clear, concise communications.

Whether you write an email or a white paper, there’s the right way to do it and a sloppy ineffective way. In this workshop, I outline the basics of clear business writing and I help participants connect the dots between their own writing and the actions they hope to make happen.