Craig McNamara writes

Target has been around since 1959, when its first store opened in the Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb just north of St. Paul.  And for much of next four decades, its advertising was practical, safe, and largely forgotten as soon as the ad ended.     But during the mid-90s, things started changing. It began with the chain's very conscious positioning of itself as a “discounter unlike other discounters,” typified by the theme, "Expect more. Pay less." And when Target broke into the East Coast market, opening a store in Menlo Park, New Jersey,  in  1996, they turned to New York agency Kirchenbaum and Bond, who gave them a striking campaign that married household products to fashion, and helped make Target a favorite of fashionistas.   So the stage was set for Minneapolis agency, Peterson Milla Hooks, to make Target's next leap. Dubbed the “ Sign of the Times ” campaign, it turned their red bullseye logo into a design element in all of their advertising, combini...

A casual apology during coffee between friends leads a series of surprising confessions. That's my 10-minute play, The Besting of Friends , inspired by an occurrence in my life.  (Yes, I inadvertently lost a childhood friend's action figure. Yes, he had totally forgotten the incident when I replaced the figure decades later. No, nothing else that follows actually happened.) Over the last two years I've racked up a lot of rejections for plays I've submitted to various short-play festivals. (Part of the process, and a career in advertising has given me lots of experience in having ideas rejected.) So, at best, I was hoping that The Besting of Friends would at least make it into one of the many competitions in which it was entered. I was pleasantly surprised that it was produced  by two different theatre companies in the same month, February 2025.  The Rainy Day Artistic Collective, based in Seattle, included my play in their New Works New Writers 2025 showcase that was s...

Not just a vivid poster here. A vivid lesson in the impact of good cropping. I was reading an article on the movie-poster art of Al Kallis for American International Pictures. AIP was, per Wikipedia ,  "the first company to use focus groups, polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. … a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955 to 1973 to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.” Kallis had the pedigree. Along with his previous work as a poster layout artist for the influential Saul Bass, Kallis was the son of Maurice Kallis, a famed movie poster artist himself.   Perusing the work of Kallis the younger, I have to assume that his posters were likely more effective at evoking terror and dread than the movies themselves....

When I first came across it, I (wrongly) assumed it was the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, using a very minimalist layout to catch attention and evoke emotion, sort of like they did with the Polaroid ads in the ‘60s . No logo, just a simple headline, and an intriguing illustration that tells you nothing about the product, only the elation it will inspire in the woman in the your life. What an incredible way to portray a woman leaping into the arms of her man, I thought, showing only what’s necessary to imply the situation, spurring the reader to imagine the embrace, the eyes, the kiss.   Brilliant, I thought. Then I read the headline.    “Wear an Arrow Shirt and you'll simply sweep her off her feet!”   No.   No, I don’t believe this ad, even for a minute.    The only way to sell this scenario is if the emotion implied feels true. Even in 1949, it’s hard to imagine anyone got this excited about a dress shirt. Unless he just got home from the service and t...

Yes, yes, I know, print advertising is dead, especially newspaper advertising – but ads still use space in other mediums, so apply these observations as you will.   Make the height of the ad part of the concept Look how this 1966 Mobil ad really sells the comparison of car collision at 80 mph with the impact of a car dropped from a ten-story building. You could have used a rooftop shot of the car going over; you could have shown a tighter shot of a car falling past a row of windows; you could have shown the crushed car at the base of the building; but Len Sirowitz of Doyle Dane Bernbach used the height of the newspaper space to show the full size of building, inviting us the imagine the long fall of the automobile and what happens when it hits the ground. And making a static photo feel as dramatic as the same demonstration in the accompanying TV commercial .    (The layout is even more brilliant when you consider that the ad was likely encountered by people reading the ne...

Authentic. Genuine. Truthful. These are the qualities above all that modern advertising aspires to – or claims to aspire to. Consumers today are too savvy, too cynical, the thinking goes, to be beguiled by unrealistic depictions and unattainable expectations. Yet despite this emphasis on realism, advertising largely remains an aspirational medium. Even the earthiest, unadorned people you see in ads still tend to be stylishly photographed and romanticized, still appealing to how we wish to see ourselves, even if that wish is a bit less lofty.  So unlike the scrubbed, idealized images Madison Avenue sold us during the ‘50s and ‘60s. And that’s largely true – but when it comes to authenticity, nothing I’ve seen in recent years comes close to this mid-1960s campaign for Sony’s new concept of “portable” televisions. Created by the celebrated “Think small”/”When you’re number two, you try harder” ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach , these 1965 ads present something that's largely vanished fr...

"How can outdoor advertising avoid clutter and visual pollution in public spaces?"  asked LinkedIn for a recent  collaborative article on their site. "Be creative and context-aware," they advised. "Find ways to integrate your ads with the environment, the culture, and the audience … make your ads more engaging, memorable, and respectful, while avoiding the risk of being intrusive or offensive. As one of the "select group of experts" who were invited to contribute, I added this to the discussion: By definition, you want your ad to be noticed; disrupting the environment is pretty much how it happens. Merging into the background means you’re not being seen. Yes, engaging viewers with a clever idea or visual can make the intrusiveness sting less.    But maybe the question we should be asking is how much the potential for attracting eyes justifies the potential for distracting drivers.    I was once tasked by a highway safety group to write outdoor messag...

One of the goals of an effective ad campaign is a consistent, identifiable look that’s distinctive of the advertiser and can unify the campaign across different mediums and messages. And that can apply to movie posters, too. (And not just for series like Star Wars  and  Indiana Jones .) While reading Mel Brooks' recent autobiography ,   All About Me , which is illustrated with posters of many of his movies, I realized something that I hadn’t, back when the movies came out years apart. Several of the posters for first half-dozen or so movies had a kind of “house-style” to them. In fact, the poster for 1974’s  Blazing Saddles  was the first for designer John Alvin, who would go on to create posters for more than 135 films, including  Blade Runner ,  The Color Purple ,  Beauty and the Beast , and  The Lion King . Alvin di ed in 2008; today, he’s remembered as a “master of the tease,” the image that sells the movie without the hyperbole and hucks...