We’ve had a great reaction to the launch of our new website.

‘I love it.’
‘Love the feel.’
‘Really like it.’
‘Looks fantastic. A joy to investigate.’

Lots of  ‘looking good’.  Several ‘great’ and even a ‘really simple’ – we take that as a compliment.

But the best one was, ’I like! Molto simple and graphic. Nice copy. Stunning landing shot. Refreshingly different. What more can one ask?’

What more indeed?

It’s been a long time, we have to admit, since we last posted here.

But, it does give us the opportunity to use a gratuitous image of the delectable Eva Herzigova in one of our all time favourite advertising 1994 campaign for the Wonderbra, as a means of announcing our return to the blogosphere.

In the year or so since we last shared our news we’ve been busy winning new work for the likes of Standard Life, AHA training and Gratnells, building the reputation of Cottages and Castles, recruiting everyone from pool attendants to Weight Management Supervisors for Edinburgh Leisure and extending highly successful campaigns for The Scotsman/Scotland on Sunday subscriptions, Altia Solutions, Konica Minolta and Denholm.

We apologise for our absence.

No doubt this has caused you much distress but we promise we’re most committedly back, raring to go and looking to fill your days with satisfying and only very occasionally salacious content.

When once asked why he didn’t use research to find out what people wanted, Steve Jobs famously replied, “Because people don’t have the imagination to know what they really want.”

Which is very similar to the Henry Ford observation that headlines this post.

With those thoughts in mind, 60 Watt is proud to announce our latest venture, the Aha! Training Company. A training company designed, like cars, to get you where you want to go a lot faster than horses.

The name comes from that phenomenon known as the eureka moment, also known as the Aha! effect.

In a nutshell, it’s that moment of insight that changes you forever. For Archimedes, it was triggered by a hot bath. A plummeting apple did it for Newton. While Einstein’s life was transformed by a glimpse of Bern’s clock tower from a speeding tram.

So if your career is facing an impasse or you just need to give it a shot in the arm, maybe an Aha! Training course could be just the lift it needs.

In a car, not on a horse.

If you are a resident of, or have passed through, Edinburgh at any point in the last seven years you’ll have heard this expression countless times.

For some it has become the modern day ‘disgrace of Edinburgh’ as the initial estimate of a £375m construction bill has steadily escalated into a final bill of over £1bn and with a truncated route to boot.

It’s been an issue very close to 60 Watt’s heart as the line passes our front door; literally.

And it’s rather agitated some of our neighbours, not least our immediate street-fellows, Copymade, a print firm that has built up something of a cult following (particularly among the local constabulary) for the homespun charm of their heartfelt marketing.

Their “egg a tram” campaign raised the ire of our city’s Lord Provost (our Mayor to all intent and purpose).

But we have to say the ‘kerning’ of the type leaves a little to be desired and if it’s puns that turn you on you can eschew the charms of 60 Watt and opt instead for Copymade’s ‘Silence of the Trams’ , ‘Tramspotting’, ‘Plans, Trams and Imbeciles’ and this little peach;  ‘Franks for Nowt!!!’ With its over reliance on the humble exclamation mark.

However, Copymade and 60Watt’s agony is now over as the construction work is finally complete.  In fact we are about to be the beneficiaries of a bit of a street-front makeover and the trams are set to trundle silently by sooner than you can say ‘Council tax rise’.

In 1935, the comedian Jimmy Durante, famously parodied by Eric Morecambe with paper cup in mouth singing, “Sittin’ at my pianna the udder day”,  starred on Broadway in the musical, Jumbo.

In it an actor playing a police officer stops Durante as he leads a live elephant and asks him, “What are you doing with that elephant?” Durante’s reply was , “What elephant?”

It’s a humorous precursor to the now well known expressuion  “The elephant in the room” which has become a common idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed.

We used this idiom to bring, dramatically, to life our long term client, Denholm Recruitment’s,  industry challenging offer.

This particular elephant is the one that asks what is the response when, after the all too short probationary period, a newly recruited employee walks.

Typically the answer lies somewhere among the unholy Trinity of “sorry”, “oops” and “unlucky mate”.

For recruiters this is great news.  A new sales opportunity.  An additional windfall fee – so long as they can placate their somewhat disappointed client.

Not for Denholm.

They wanted us to challenge this industry issue head on and position themselves as the good guys.  The ones who wouldn’t profit out of misfortune.

So we posed the question – “What will your recruitment company do if their new recruit leaves at ANY time in the 12 months after appointment.  Replace for free?  Or shrug their shoulders as they surreptitiously slide their rate card back under your nose?”

It’s an issue that Denholm was big enough to deal with.  And it was a gift of a brief for us.

The good news is that it’s led to an elephantine amount of new work for them.

Proving the fact that if there’s an elephant in the room, you need to deal with it.  Or you’re going to have an awful lot of cleaning up to do.

We’ve been doing memorable subscription campaigns for the Scotsman for more years than we care to remember.

That’s not as easy as it sounds; year after year the offer is basically the same: take out a Scotsman subscription and save money on the cover price of your favourite newspaper.

The challenge is keeping the work fresh and interesting.

For the latest iteration, we decided to take our cue from the internet graph and chart memes you see every day across a plethora of social media sites. A great way, we thought, for the Scotsman to get across the subscription proposition in a fresh new way, without taking itself too seriously.

The results have been off the scale.

Arguably the first commercial infographic to be used on a large scale was Harry Beck’s famous 1933 design for the London underground map, which stripped the sprawling Tube network down to a clear, comprehensible chart based on electrical circuit diagrams.

Over 80 years later, 60 Watt has applied a similar principal to financial services advertising in a campaign for Standard Life.

When they asked us to communicate some complex pecuniary concepts to readers of the Sunday Telegraph, we took a leaf out of Beck’s book and broke it down into a series of clear, easy to understand full page infographic advertisements.

You can see the results below.

Most direct mail pieces go straight in the bin, don’t they?  (“Yes they do.” – Ed)

This presents us creative wallahs with a big challenge: how do we delay our target audience long enough to get across the benefits of our clients’ products before the inevitable happens? Even better, how do we avoid the trash monster altogether?

It’s a challenge that’s made all the more difficult when your audience just happens to be Trading Standards officers (overpromises/weasel words/dodgy offers verboten).

And don’t imagine email is an option, it isn’t. These dudes have firewalls the CIA couldn’t get through.

We were aided and abetted in our quest with what we in the trade call a jolly nice brief.

Our client, Altia has developed a wiz bang software product that helps their clients turn a mountain of information (scans, telephone recordings, CCTV and other video files and piles of data) into a molehill.

Or, to use another analogy, condenses something the equivalent of War and Peace down to the size of a postage stamp.

Wait a minute..War and Peace…now there’s a thought.

A box designed to look like Tolstoy’s epic tome, but which actually contains nothing more than a 4 page leaflet extolling the virtues of said software.

Et voila; a memorable solution that has given Altia a pleasing problem. Answering regular requests from their customers for spare boxes to store their office nick nacks in.