Extra Salt & Sauce

Pete Burns (MD of Blonde) and I had a Top Gear style race between the Leith and Blonde offices yesterday. Over what Multimap says is a 2 mile (3.2km) course my push-bike beat his Lexus by a good three minutes, even allowing for the time taken to lock the bike to railings outside Blonde.

Last week we held another Marketing Clinic.

On the list were two very different, small local businesses each needing advice on marketing and PR issues and help formulating a marketing plan.

Cue The Leith Agency team of Ed, Barbara and Sarah.

First up was Nomi from Little Vegas. Check out http://www.little-vegas.com to see the coolest American Airstream trailer which can be hired for a variety of reasons from private parties to corporate events.

Nomi got some advice on how best to raise the profile of Little Vegas and branding of promotional literature. We got a great idea for our summer party!

Moving on …..next on the agenda for the evening was short4time.

Enter Sylvie Escalone, a lovely French lady with an idea to start her own concierge business called short4time. Sylvie can organise a large number of services to save her clients the hassle of organising cleaning, tradesmen, pet-sitting, etc. She can save precious time by shopping for gifts or forgotten groceries, booking theatre tickets and making restaurant reservations or even picking up dry cleaning. In effect, a 27/7 personal assistant.

We mulled over the most likely targets for Sylvie’s business for a nano-second before we realised that it was, well, us – sitting in the office at 8pm that evening, wishing that we didn’t need to stop off and buy groceries on the way home……..

Forget all those gadgets designed to make your life easier – Sylvie is the only time saver you’ll need.

She launches her company and website at the end of the month so watch out for it. Some of us Leithers may actually be her first clients.

We work with more drinks brands than you can shake a stick at but, aside from Golden Wonder, we're sadly lacking when it comes to solids. This is scandalous given the breadth and depth of food experience in the agency.

So yesterday Ed and I went to IFE07, the international food and drink event, at the ExCel London exhibition centre. It's a monster - well over a thousand exhibitors representing just about every foodstuff under the sun. They were all there to sell their wares to the food retail and catering industries. We were there to sell to them.

As well as established players such as Innocent with their grassy van, there were dozens of interesting young brands with the marketing director often present on the stand. This morning we've started the process of following up the warmest contacts and deciding whether to lead with our advertising, brand consultancy, promotional marketing, PR or digital hats on.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating (metaphor glorious food metaphor) in terms of whether this initiative turns into any business, but it felt worthwhile yesterday. Watch this space.