Our speaker for this week was Perry Merkley, who worked for Ogilvy on their famous American Express advertisements before starting his own agency in North Carolina. Much of his talk was spent showing us clips of his work for different clients such as Amex, BMW motorcycles, OXO, Champion, Bell South, Mercedes and Citigroup. In one of the Bell South commercials, Merkley pointed out that Britney Spears is playing a little girl on a swing.
Overall, the two messages that I got from Perry Merkley were:
The creative idea and the strategic idea must be the same idea. Work that is creative but not strategic is usually indulgent.
The best clients have both vision and clout.
