Dom Mellin’s Post

Finally someone has validated my smug sense of superiority

☕️ Nik and Lisa wrote a great piece on how advertising is a holistic, national concern which is let down by the 'regions' tag. Then I travelled by donkey to the nearest telephone exchange where a helpful big-city type helped us upload it to the World Wide Web on his Windows 95. It's time to ditch the negative connotations of everything ex-London and see the UK as a connected whole, capable of serving any clients from anywhere! Notorious Communications

After failing to convince them to sponsor Leicester City and get me one step closer to making my debut, it was ace to work with GWM ORA and Cogent to bring this to life!

There's an article on Campaign today about our industry's woeful living wage for entry-level roles. Amongst a lot of platitudes about how bad it is, it feels like very few of the agency leaders who have the power to do anything are actually committing to action. Quite a few talk about 'packages', like hybrid working and free breakfast, like they aren't essentially universal at this stage. But a wave of older-gen adlanders are just thinking about how easy it was to survive on £15k in pre-crash, pre-cozzy-livs, pre-smashed-avo London and Manchester. Exposure doesn't pay artists' bills. Perks don't pay agency juniors' bills. How can we possibly promise clients top-tier work if we're in a race to the bottom to bring people into the industry? During lockdown, the big four all smugly announced record profits for shareholders after asking staff to go on furlough, take voluntary pay cuts and shoulder an immense burden for which they were financially punished. There has never been a bigger gulf between the highest and lowest-paid members of companies. There's a clear route to paying your juniors more - but it's not going to make the board happy. It's not going to make investors happy. But it's going to make your staff and your clients happy.

Finally I am being referred to as 'notorious' without the suffix 'and at large' Very excited about our growth as an agency and the new ground we're breaking with this rebrand. Big things ahead!

Netflix beat Blockbuster's business model by digitising the film/TV experience. Now they've been slowly eroded by studio streaming platforms, IP-rich media owners and general market innovation. Customers can get the Netflix experience anywhere, and in a squeezed market, they're going to choose the platforms which offer the best content. Can experiential save a company who are no longer benefiting from first-mover advantage? Will gimmicks mask a declining product?

Very proud of this one (although all credit for the pun has to go to James Cross) - putting an amazing conservation brand doing world-changing work into the heart of the Manchester landscape. Media and creative working together perfectly! Another super fun activation for our friends at Chester Zoo, Anna Babilinski-Barker, Heidi Budden, Helen Dean and Elinor Trigg alongside the fantastic Meanwhile gang, not to mention all of the Love Sugar Science team who made it happen.

Although it touches on trust by the end, this article cautiously skirts the most important point about newly-branded X - its ad sales experience isn't its main problem; it's that the platform has been proven time and again to not be brand safe. Any media buyer can tell you that the product has always been a bit shaky, without the metrics to justify investment, but a planner will point to the fact that formerly-Twitter's cleaving to barely-policed opinion-sharing makes much of its content problematic at best. Ad sales won't fix a culture problem, and X will continue to struggle to get brands on board if it can't commit to cleaning up its act. Netflix's premium content is the biggest draw for brands, and its ad-funded challenge is a much simpler volume/cost equation in comparison.

Rarely as excited by a new business win as this one - animals are a huge part of my life, from my two horrible cats to the whales, dolphins and snow leopards I support through various conservation schemes already. No small part of this win is down to my spirit animal, the humble warthog, with its tenacious ability to dig for insights and stylish blond quiff (no, seriously, go see it at Chester Zoo in the flesh, we have the same haircut). Cannot wait to build some famous campaigns with the Chester Zoo team! #team #conservation #newbusiness #pitch #media #advertising