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About Me

Philip W. Sawyer is an independent advertising-effectiveness consultant, who – based on more than 20 years of conducting advertising research and analyzing advertising in all of the primary media – works with clients to help them create the most powerful ads in their industry. Previously he was a Senior Vice President, Solutions Consultant, for Harris Interactive, speicializing in communications effectiveness. Mr. Sawyer is a frequent speaker on advertising topics and has been featured in conferences sponsored by DTC Perspectives, the Association of National Advertisers, the Ad Club of New York, the Magazine Publishers of America, the Advertising Research Foundation, the American Marketing Association, the Market Research Council, and Media Networks Incorporated, among many others. He has also worked both in the U.S. and internationally with major advertisers to elevate awareness of the principles of effective advertising and to incorporate those principles to bolster the power of advertising efforts, particularly in pharmaceutical advertising. His presentation, The 10 Principles of Effective Advertising has been delivered at conferences throughout the country.
He has been cited at length in numerous articles that have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Adweek, Advertising Age, and PharmaVOICE to name a few.
Prior to joining Harris Interactive, Mr. Sawyer was a Senior Vice President and Director of the Starch Advertising Research division of GfK Custom Research North America. He was the editor of Starch Tested Copy, a newsletter on advertising effectiveness. Prior to leading the Starch division, he also functioned as Director of Communications for Roper Starch Worldwide (prior to its acquisition by GfK). In that capacity he was responsible for the firm's advertising, marketing, and public relations functions.
From 1985 to 1987, Mr. Sawyer was the Director of Research for Peter Small & Associates, a public relations firm in New York.
Before that he was: a media advisor in the 1984 congressional campaign in the 8th district of Pennsylvania; a writer/researcher in Washington, D.C., employed both by the Commerce Department and the Executive Office of the President (during the Carter Administration); and, for five years, a university instructor of writing, literature, and film.
Mr. Sawyer earned his Bachelor's Degree from Ohio Wesleyan University and his Master's from the University of Florida. A native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, he now lives in Natick, Massachusetts.

Location:
United States, Natick, MA
Gender:
Male
Areas of expertise:
Advertising & Branding, Public Relations, Grammar and Syntax of English, Presentation Skills Coach, Advertising Research
Universities:
Ohio Wesleyan University, University of Florida, New York University
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More About Me

I'm passionate about

Advertising effectiveness, literature, movies, aesthetic/critical theory of literature and the movies, wine, baseball, politics and government, and great comedy and comedians.

Talk to me about

Advertising effectiveness, politics, poetry, great literature, and innovative and exciting ideas.

People don't know that I'm good at

Doing impressions.

Comments

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  • +1

    A comment on Conversation: Has the time come for the U.S Second Amendment to be repealed or amended?

    Dec 30 2012: I could not agree more. And I'm serious when I say, If only the rest of the country could be more like Vermont. . .
  • +1

    A comment on Conversation: Has the time come for the U.S Second Amendment to be repealed or amended?

    Dec 30 2012: I think it is fair to say that the decision to place restrictions on assault weapons isn't just arbitrary -- it is based on the fact that a schoolroom of children, a theater full of people, and a college campus, were all assaulted by people with those weapons. Combine those recent events with the fact that the U.S., which has the loosest gun laws in the industrialized world, leads the industrialized world in gun death -- and by a great margin. And I don't think that enacting any restrictions on assault weapons will be an easy excercise. So . . . to my mind it goes far beyond feelings about their being "unnecessary." What we're seeing is that many American now believe that assault weapons represent a considerable threat to themselves and their loved ones, which I do not see as arbitrary. As for interpreting the Second Amendment (what it might mean) -- what else do we have? Interpreting the constitution (what it might mean) is what our legal system is based on.
  • +1

    A comment on Conversation: Has the time come for the U.S Second Amendment to be repealed or amended?

    Dec 30 2012: Thank you, Colleen. And I agree with your point. My feeling is that we don't need to amend. I believe it's about interpretation. If we had five justices who interpreted the Amendment with an emphasis on the premise -- well regulated militia, etc. -- then it seems to me that we could feel fairly free to say, We have the right to regulate firearms, and we give you the right to defend yourselves and to hunt and to keep guns in your home and to register them as you do your cars ("well regulated") but you don't have the right to own a weapon that can kill 30 people in seven seconds. . . . I think that this is a point that Warren Burger arrived at . . . and he was appointed by a Republican. . . so his point can't be THAT antithetical to conservatives, right? . . .
  • +1

    A comment on Conversation: Has the time come for the U.S Second Amendment to be repealed or amended?

    Dec 29 2012: Two things are of interest to me in your message: As mentioned, the Second Amendment makes very clear that it is talking about the use of arms for military purposes -- hence the "well-regulated militia." I mentioned in my previous comment that firearms advocates, when discussing the Amendment rarely bring that up -- and it is absent in your comment as well. I would be interested to hear your response to that. About that Fourth Amendment, it has always struck me that it is dealing with the protection of the indvidual against governmental intrusion . "To be secure" does not necessarily mean that the individual has the right to take any specific action. If its focus was on the absolute right of the individual to protect his property, why doesn't it also mention a right to bear arms as a means to prevent that intrusion? So, it seems to me that the Amendment spells out restrictions on government, not rights of individual to "secure" anything. These are honest questions, and there is ample room for honest debate, but these points you make are not "self-evident" or absolute, at least not in the way that I read them. If they were, Warren Burger would not have labeled as "fraud" the assertion that the Second Amendment gives the right of the individual to bear arms.
  • +2

    A comment on Conversation: Has the time come for the U.S Second Amendment to be repealed or amended?

    Dec 29 2012: It strikes me that the resistance to any gun-control laws rests on the single-minded focus on the main clause in the Amendment: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." But that clause is placed on the foundation of the introduction: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state . . ." We do not have militias in the same sense that that the founders viewed them; we now rely on a national army. (We might argue that the National Guard constitutes a kind of militia, and while we may say that the National Guard is highly useful, would we argue that the National Guard is necessary to our security?) But the term that gun advocates seem always to overlook is "well-regulated," which, it seems to me, introduces the prospect that the constitution does accept the possibility of regulation of arms. At this point, relatively few people I know have advocated an outright ban of guns. Most would allow Mr. Taylor his shotgun to protect himself in his home or to hunt. But for the rest of us the issue is all about assault weapons, which, as the name implies, provide a function that goes considerably beyond defense.

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