Archives – Tom  
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Mais Non!
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Johnny Halliday to change nationality.
Where will the cheap jokes about French rock come from now? Can we expect a New Beat album?[…]

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Only Begun To Fight!
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This is the first in an irregular series of posts looking at issues of FANTASTIC FOUR, “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine”. There are several reasons I picked this title:
– It’s sometimes been very good and sometimes […]

Brandwatch: Menace To The Max
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Next week, DC Thomson are launching Beano MAX, not a low-sugar version of the popular kids’ comic but instead a giant size, kind-of-monthly publication with longer stories “designed to give these well-known characters more depth”.
T[…]

I Was A Top Hat
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From Marketing magazine (the source of 75% of my posts) comes news that Hasbro are doing some aggressive promotion of Monopoly. We can expect, in increasing order of futility: (more…)[…]

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Non-Thrillers For Kids: The Ring-O-Bells Mystery
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Most of Enid Blyton’s books are either fantasies or thrillers, of a sort: a gang of kids, formalised or not, in a run-in with adult crooks. I don’t know if she came up with the formula herself, but commercially speaking she is its definit[…]

The Comics Money Pit
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Browsing for information on the nineties comics boom I came across a fascinating series of articles by Chuck Rozanski of Mile High Comics, one of America’s most famous comics retailers, offering a behind-the-scenes look at some of the financia[…]

In A Stew
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Has “Marketing expert” Jonathan Harwood really got nothing better to do than campaign for the government’s Beefy And Lamby meat promotion site to be reprieved?
Have the BBC really got nothing better to do than report on it?
Have Ian[…]

Brandwatch: When Ads Go Bads
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The world of marketing reacts to the slow post-Christmas season like all the rest of us – by wallowing in lists. Marketing magazine has been making particular play over the last couple of weeks of its “Most Irritating TV Ads of 2006&#8221[…]

Dad Baffled By Modern Marketing Part N
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I just received – maybe you did too – a spam email from amazon.co.uk entitled “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pre-Order Your Copy Now!”.
I can understand what Amazon gains from this, but really, why would anybody bother[…]

This Is The Dawning Of A New Era
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Hardened chart nerds – and as you might imagine the FT staff includes a few of them – are in a mighty froth over this week’s Top 40 revolution, with download-only tracks (i.e. with no physical presence in, or planned to be in, the s[…]

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