Extra Salt & Sauce

The son of a friend of mine bet his father two Canadian dollars and a bicycle tyre that I wouldn't use the word bollocks in The Leith Agency blog.

What are friends for?

Late on at the Marketing Excellence Awards in Glasgow I was confronted by a somewhat worse for wear person from another agency (who shall remain nameless) who clearly had things that he or she wanted to get off their chest.

Amongst various beefs was their view that this blog is shit.

The main reason behind this view was that no-one had posted for ages. That's actually a good point. In fact we posted nothing for the whole of April. So I'm putting a few up this morning.

It would be good if a few other Leithers got into the blogging habit. It's not like there's nothing going on.

At last Friday's Marketing Excellence Awards we won the award for Marketing Services Agency of the Year for 2007.

That's the second time in three years which, as the title of this post suggests, ain't bad.

On the way we also picked up the Media Excellence award for Grolsch Green Light District and the Advertising Excellence award for the Scottish Executive smoking ban work. We also had three other nominations - two for IRN-BRU 32 and another one for the smoking ban.

There was the usual descent into mayhem later on and the pictures I really wanted to illustrate this post with would all have come from the bus trip back to Edinburgh. Unfortunately no-one had a camera.

There was David Amers asleep and slack-jawed on Claire Wood's shoulder (he claims he was pretending). And there was Sarah Gilmore belting out a fantastic rendition of American Pie.

A good night and a very good event.

Your Armani suited adman would struggle to pitch in an Irish pub.

The lack of technology projecting his favourite powerpoint chart “the brand spider” on which he can muse for a good 40 minutes would leave him in a sweat of Kouros.

In fact, pitching in a pub is an anathema. How often do you sit across from your mates and really sell that pint or those peanuts or-god forbid – the pickled egg:

“It’s a fine organic egg, hardboiled by a Yorskshireman named Stan from a family of famous egg boilers and then left to absorb the pungent juices of a Perugian pickle”

Not often.

So why did we choose a pub called Delaney’s in Tallaght, a suburb of Dublin, to pitch to a couple of fellas from Paddy Power.

Perhaps it was because these guys are different. They’re extremely maverick and to prove the point recently ran a poster campaign in Ireland that featured the famous painting of the last supper but instead of fine dining, Christ and co were playing poker. In Ireland. B’Jaysus.

The pitch brief they gave us was pure gold, brilliantly written. It made it clear that they wanted work which would have blokes in pubs talking about them. All good signposts to a pitch venue, hence, Will and Nick pictured outside the very pink Delaney’s

And studying the form card before the fellas from Paddy Power arrived.

I’ve no idea whether we’ll ever end up working together but the process of pitching in a pub was enjoyable. It was less us v them, polished presentation and brand spiders, it was more banter, laughter and well told stories.

As the person tasked to manage the blog from behind the scenes, while setting up Mr. Brooke with rights to post his entry on the Irish pub, I was horrified to see that there were over 2,900 comments to be checked for publication.

99.8233% recurring, were from spammers not content simply to fill the mail boxes of innocent members of staff with rubbish, they wanted to hi-jack our blog as well. Some of the more repeatable offers still boggle the mind; female viagra, Sony turntables, lubricants, horse blankets (!) and of course lashings of porn catering to every possible niche perversion.

Gentle reader, we have spared you from this torrent of filth, as comments have to be approved before they appear. So if you are a real person and wish to pass comment, please bear with us as it takes us a short while to sift the gems from the dross.