Drayton Bird unveils advice service

Industry veteran Drayton Bird has launched an online advice service, enabling marketers to ask for personal guidance, as well giving access to hours of new video content and Bird’s back catalogue of presentations and Q&As.
The site, Askdrayton.com, carries a monthly subscription fee of about £20, and according to Bird, “it’s the stuff I wish I was spoon fed when I was running around like a mad man in my first business – which went broke, by the way – a nightmare it took me seven years to recover from”.
But in typical Bird style, he is keen to stress the advice service will only go so far, adding: “Ask me a reasonable question and I’ll reply in person (let’s not get carried away now, ask me to write a complete marketing plan and I’ll tell you to bugger off).”
Bird, whose publication ‘Commonsense Direct Marketing’ was described as ‘pure gold’ by David Ogilvy, joined forces with John Watson and Glenmore Trenear-Harvey in 1977 to set up one of the UK’s first direct marketing agencies, Trenear-Harvey, Bird & Watson.
This not only paved the way for scores of others, including WWAV (now Rapp), it helped transform DM from a cottage industry into a major marketing force.
In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Bird as one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing industry. Last year he scooped the prestigious Andi Emerson Award at the John Caples ceremony in New York.

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