NeilMattingley.com

A few weeks ago, the Cat Haven, were holding a sausage sizzle outside my local Bunnings (the major hardware conglomerate in Australia). I know because I bought two sausages (one for me and one for my 7  year-old son) while we were out doing “manly” things… Anyway, I got to talking to one of the [...]

A couple of days in hospital makes you very aware of who is looking after you. As I lay on my hospital bed during a brief stint last week, I was reminded of an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 work, Blink, in which he poses the question: “Why are some Doctors more likely to get sued than are others?” Gladwell, [...]

They say a picture tells a 1000 words. And it does. But according to advertising legend, David Ogilvy, some pictures are more powerful than others. As a case in point, in his 1963 work, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy cited an example of a campaign his firm had been asked to create for the Dutch [...]

Last week, I watched a documentary called the Secrets of the Great Plague. Even though I didn’t quite see the start of the programme, it really sucked me in… Especially the part when the narrator posed a question: “Why did the Great Plague of the 1660s kill one third of the population of London, but [...]

I was watching TV last night when an ad got my attention. It was about the new LG Borderless TV, a television which, as the name suggests, has no border lining the screen. Ordinarily, I probably wouldn’t have taken much notice of this ad. But because I’ve just finished reading Purple Cow, the landmark work [...]

Postcards as an advertising medium are not used a lot in Australia. But there are a lot of American marketers who swear by them. Dean Rieck (one of my favourite bloggers because of his willingness to share his vast knowledge of the direct mail game) has just written an excellent post on what makes a postcard [...]

I read with interest that the decision to pay Tiger Woods his appearance fee of $3.25 million Australian dollars had proved a windfall for the Directors of the Australian Masters Golf Tournament. For the first time ever, all four days of the tournament were sold out before Tiger ever set a foot on the green. [...]

One of my favourite copywriters is Ben Settle. I get an email alert from him about four or five days a week. Now Ben’s one of a number of copywriters I get email alerts from. And even though time doesn’t allow me to open every email he sends me, I do open the majority of [...]

I’m a dog person. I’ve got a little Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Bess. Now Bess is the friendliest dog you could meet. She loves people, she’s got a permanent wag of her tail, and she has a “smile” on her face that still stops people in the street, even though she’s now 10 years old. [...]

How do you entice someone to buy an orange? Make it the most delicious, juiciest, textured orange you can imagine. Describe the pulp fibres in detail – their thickness and fluid retaining properties. Go into the science behind growing those oranges… How they’re harvested at a specific time to enhance the taste. And then deep [...]