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I know Dave Trott often writes of the virtues of Londoners in advertising. But, at the risk of disagreement, I would aver that, from a Bayesian standpoint at any rate, Brummies are quite clearly better. It’s true that there are very few people from Birmingham in advertising but what is remarkable is that every single one I have ever come across is spectacularly good. David Watson, Rae Stones, Neil French, Ben Rachel, Trevor obviously, almost everyone from Cogent…. This rule seems to hold true to such an extent I have asked Hamish to create a selective breeding programme for advertising talent on the site of the old Pebble Mill studios near Edgbaston.

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I notice the Government has started to offer stop-smoking kits to people who want to quit. It’s a very good idea. In fact everything that allows people to change their behaviour in gradual steps, rather than expecting a single road-to-Damascus conversion, generally seems to work well. Kits are a very good solution to this, as can be a series of timed SMS messages.

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Surely Tiger’s decision to outsouce sexual services to a range of competing providers is in line with Management Consultancy’s established best practice?

Previously he had been tied to a monopoly Scandianvian supplier – with the cripplingly high social costs this usually entails.  Moreover, given his wife’s age, it is possible that she was on the brink of becoming a depreciating asset who needed to be moved off the balance sheet as soon as possible.

Admittedly he could have off-shored more – to girls from low-wage economies. But the arrangement where he could have anything from nil to three girls on call at any one time allows for better load-balancing, enabling him to handle the peaks and troughs of demand better than under the previous inflexible arrangement. By sourcing girls locally, he was also reducing distribution costs and helping the environment…… while allowing him to adopt a best-of-breed approach to sexual delivery, rather than depending on a single source.

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And do people in the Advertising Industry understand brands?

Everyone is familiar with the experience. You go into a record shop and are treated with disdain because of your drearily mainstream tastes. Or, in the days when they existed, you wandered into a video rental shop and irritated the cinephile staff by renting Titanic.

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About a month ago, BT put on a rather good firework display on top of the BT Tower to mark 1,000 days until the London Olympics. This pleased me on two levels. First because I like fireworks. Second because the economics-nerd in me finds fireworks very interesting.

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One common lament you would commonly hear at the IPA over
the last few years concerned the lack of diversity in advertising agencies.
“The whole industry is still dominated by white Oxbridge graduates”.
 

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 Last week Campaign ran a piece about the decline in scam advertising entered into Cannes this year. In the inset it included a fairly sensible defence of scam work from Neil French which is simply to say “if it’s interesting, who cares?” Just as no-one really cares whether catwalk fashion is wearable or not.

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 ….and, besides, what’s the point of my writing anything new when your time could be just as well spent discussing this.

 It is Mark Wnek on the peculiar, bifurcated job title that is Creative Director – writing in AdAge. I think I agree with everything he says. But, even if you don’t, it is so very worthy of discussion.

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Even if you think Jeremy Clarkson is the spawn of Satan, you will grudgingly find yourself sharing one or two of his opinions as expressed in this review of the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue SE. (I am fairly safe in this belief since my father, who generally regards Clarkson as the embodiment of materialistic vulgarity, sent it to me approvingly the day bit came out.)

What Mr Clarkson is saying is that he is a bit of a Platonist. That, while most categories contain many variants, and very nice they may be too, all are defined by a kind of archetype – a conception of a thing at its most perfect. He lists a few of these: France, the iPhone, Bacon & Eggs. The “Who’s the daddy” campaign for Holsten Pils a few years back played off this same thought. It’s a game you can play with any category: brands (Coke), classical composers(Bach) or Prime Ministers (Churchill).

Now I have to confess something here. While I think originality is a wonderful thing, and while I’m all for stretching envelopes, pushing boundaries, throwing out rule-books, thinking outside boxes, casting off strait-jackets and generally pissing against the wind, I do still believe there is a Platonic archetype for press advertising. In short, I still feel the Full English Breakfast of a press ad involves a big pikkie at the top, a headline (and even a subhead) underneath, with two or three hundred words of intelligent, characterful chit-chat leading smoothly towards a logo or coupon at the end.

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When my grandfather was a doctor in South
Wales, the local hospital proudly unveiled its first X-Ray
machine. At the official opening ceremony, the mayor removed his chain and all other
metallic objects to christen the device as its first ever “patient”. This was
only intended as a publicity stunt. Unfortunately the inaugural X-Ray revealed
a cancer somewhere in the mayor’s chest. They operated almost immediately but
he was dead within a month.

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