Advertising agency folk are known to be a fun bunch of people, who often complain about unreasonable clients and work hard, long, unearthly hours. Either the client is hard to please, the account team didn’t get the brief right, the creatives are burnt out or the deadlines were simply due yesterday.

How do marketing directors get the best out of their agency account teams? We decided to listen to the views of an industry “top dog”. We asked David Tang, president and CEO of DDB Group Singapore, for his opinions. David was named “Marketing Agency Professional of the Year 2009” by Marketing magazine in recognition of his leadership, management and achievements in the industry.

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Giving away information on free graphic or web design templates seems to be counter-intuitive, but we believe that when you come across a useful tip, one should pass it on.

Through the years, we have observed with interest, new websites that popped up offering free logo designs, free layout templates and free packaging designs for example. Most are not of very high quality and are targeted at non-professionals. Today, there are possibly just a handful that would be worth investigating further.

While we have never used any of these services, they can be very useful for non-profit organisations or non-commercial projects. (more…)

Here, we begin a series of blog entries where we list all sorts of free and useful resources for B2B marketing professionals that we managed to source online. Once we started, we were amazed by what we found.

In this post, we provide a directory of free stock photographs. (more…)

Do your brainstorming sessions seem to lack inspiration?

Successfully brainstorming for disruptive and creative ideas requires experience and special skills. Most human beings tend to stick with established patterns of thinking, so thinking out-of-the-box is much easier said than done. But it does not take visionaries to conjure buzz-generating, eye-popping or mind-blowing marketing campaigns that rake in new customers…. (more…)

Search for any random topic on Google these days, and you’ll most likely find at least two videos on the first page.

Optimising videos for the web is essentially the same as SEO. Flash videos can now embed metadata, meaning that interviews with your CEO can contain all of the key search terms within his/her interview.

But how does a marketing director ensure the videos he/she creates will generate the right leads? (more…)