Extra Salt & Sauce

Our Christmas tree still hasn't been put away, although it is back in its box now.

This is partly because we're very busy, but probably also because we so-called communication experts have spectacularly failed to communicate. Dozens of people see this tree every day and assume that someone else will mention it to the right person to get it moved. It's a symptom of the same disease that makes agencies rubbish at their own marketing.

This is David, our planning director, blessing us with his latest thinking before a meeting gets properly under way.

The two main items he's holding court about are 1) Getting a pet hamster for planning, 2) Getting himself a Lord of the Flies style conch shell that he can blow into to summon all planners back from anywhere in the agency to help him solve strategic problems.

Clients will be relieved to note that he saves his best stuff for them.

I was in Amsterdam on Friday and it was freezing. Much colder than it has been here of late. I lost the feeling in my right hand having taken my glove off to answer the phone.

By contrast I enjoyed very warm welcomes at both of my meetings. We're in the process of developing a proper international new business strategy, and I was visiting 180 and Strawberry Frog to pick their brains. This was very generous of them given that they were effectively helping out a competitor. So thanks to Guy at 180 and to Mark and Alessandro at Strawberry Frog. The warmth and generosity felt very "Edinburgh" and we owe you.

As I was in the area I met up with Lee Hempstock for lunch. Lee is one half of a creative team that used to work here at Leith. He's now at 180 working on adidas and global Sony pitches. This is him pretending to do some work.

Last year we merged our London office with an agency called Farm and rebranded the merged operation under the Farm name.

This means that the Leith "brand" is a wholly Edinburgh (EH6) thing again, which makes it much easier to manage. It means that we can really work the Leith connection in our marketing in ways that we just couldn't when there was a thing called Leith in London as well. This is evident in the design of our website, but it runs deeper than that.

We've started to do more things with the local Leith community. This includes an involvement with the Leith Festival during which we ran a couple of events last year.

It also includes free marketing clinics for small local businesses. These businesses send us a one page summary of what they do, what they're looking to achieve and what marketing issues they face. We then run an hour long consultancy session on a weekday evening.

Last night we talked to Jason Baxter who is a photographer specialising in the panoramic format.

We also spoke to Jenifer Paterson about her All or Nothing aerial dance company. Jenifer is looking to grow her corporate events business.

Both are nice, passionate people and it was a pleasure to be able to help them, if only in a small way. It's also good experience for us to talk to businesses of all shapes and sizes about their commercial issues.

Doing the talking from Leith last night were Babs (marketing), Claire W (planning), Gail L (account management), Gerry (creative director), John S (creative) and myself.

Finally made it to one of Mike Coulter's digital coffee mornings today. Based on this morning's very pleasant experience it will be the first time of many. So thanks Mike for getting these off the ground.

We talked about all sorts of stuff but the funniest thing was Mark Gorman talking about a promotional viral that he made in the pre-broadband era whilst at 1576. I'm a bit hazy on the full detail of the script but it featured an actor dressed up in an 8 foot penis outfit, the basic idea being that you'd be a prick not to work with 1576.

So they shot this film and pinged it our to the great and the good in the marketing community. It was about 12MB in size, took about half an hour to download, completely clogged up your inbox and then called you a prick when you finally opened it.

Mark is no longer with 1576.

Window display by those nice people at Flux round the corner from here.

A few weeks ago when I was snowed in, I thought to myself, how can I spend my time more productively? So, knowing that the new Irn-Bru brief was due in at any time, I realised, it’s time to bury the ghosts of Christmas past. Sure, Mikey and I have enjoyed all the kind words and pats on the back for our Irn-Bru snowman ad, but enough is enough. It’s time to move on. So here’s what I did.