Extra Salt & Sauce

I've been half demented. I'm not nearly clever enough to know exactly what's been going on but there's been some kind of technical hiccup hitchy thing which has meant that I've been unable to blog here for 9 whole days. This coupled with 6 days of holiday and I've been a whole 15 (working) days without posting. I've been suffering from terrible withdrawal symptoms.

As with anything that you know you're not able / not allowed to do, I have of course been obsessively checking a couple of times a day to see whether the site is back up and running again. And this morning, a panicky last-ditch hope check, and hurrah! We're back.

So you can look forward to more mindless observations about ketchup now, thank goodness.

Oh and we've just launched a storming new IRN-BRU ad. Enjoy.

5,500 whole chickens are thrown away every day in the UK according to this WRAP report on our slovenly shopping / eating habits. As are 7 million slices of bread. Every day.

Shop wisely this weekend.

The other thing I should say - in my rediscovered love affair with this blog - is that we did astonishingly (obviously deservedly) well at the Roses last week, scooping up the following:

GOLD
Best Television Campaign - Strathmore
Best Commercial of 21-30 seconds - Strathmore, Double Dutch
Best Commercial of 21-30 seconds - Strathmore, Ribbons
Best Cinema Campaign or Commercial - Strathmore, Double Dutch Skipping & Ribbons
Best Use of Animation - s1 Jobs
Best Low Budget - Leith Short film Festival

SILVER
Best Television Campaign - s1 Jobs
Best Use of Illustration - Ocean Terminal
Best Use of Photography - Strathmore
Best Integrated Campaign - Strathmore

Relive the glory of the now award-winning Strathmore ads here.

And huge congratulations to Mikey and Mark, Phil and Guy and Chris and David as well as the ever patient Les and Kate.

This time at the Marketing Execllence Awards in Edinburgh on Friday. We scooped a glass star in the Advertising Excellence category for our IRN-BRU paper: How the Snowman took on Father Christmas and won.

Here we are grinning in double-chinned befuddlement:

Cracking article in the March issue (I know, I'm lagging behind) of Fast Company on the 50 most innovative companies in the US. Be sure to click through to the main feature on Google - snapshots of the roles of key people within the company. You will yearn to work there. But it's also a really interesting overview of the most imaginative thinking in American industry today. Nice little lunchbreak article.

Courtesy of Farm. Enjoy.

Russell Davies, guru of the planning world, blogger extraordinaire and generally genuinely interesting man, writes amongst other things, a blog about his favourite cafes. Which a few years ago was turned into a book.

I shall say only if you haven't got it, get one. A friend sent me a copy in the post yesterday. It's a cracking (geddit?) little book full of pretty pictures of greasy eggs, reviews of cafes with their quintessentially British "air of peeling miserabilism" (almost worth buying simply for being the only time other than a self-indulgent Pet Shop Boys track that I have seen the world 'miserabilism' in print) and various musings on the role of cafes in today's lazy fat society. All self-respecting advertising households should have a copy.

Two things pleased me today.

One of my friends (primary school teacher in Derby so sufficiently far removed from adland for it to mean something) sent me the lastminute 'unexpected performance' video on facebook. Knowing that I'm a theatre geek but not knowing that it was anything at all to do with my place of work. Truly viral. I like that.

(On the subject of theatre geekdom, I'm in Dangerous Liaisons in a couple of weeks. Do buy a ticket even if you don't intend to come as we need to sell loads to cover our exorbitant costs!)

The other thing that pleased me was the remarkable discovery that baby American goats are drinking IRN-BRU. Phil pointed me to Google Alert (several years later than most normal people got there) so I get daily bulletins about who's doing what where with our favourite orange pop. And today's surprise use was baby goat nutrition. A new market niche, perhaps.

Sir Alan read this - a eulogy to Dorset Cereals - and thought of me. Touching.

But he's right in that I do love the brand to the extent of paying ludicrously over the odds for a colourful cardboard box containing oats and a few nuts. About to tuck into their really nutty muesli now, in fact. So they must be doing something right.

How can this possibly be....???

Free handgun promotion sees car sales quadruple
Brand Republic 23-May-08

NEW YORK - A Missouri car dealer has said that sales have quadrupled since it launched a promotional deal giving away a free handgun with every vehicle sold.

The alternative to a handgun is $250 worth of credit to spend on petrol -- but the owner of Max Motors, Mark Muller, told the BBC that most people "except one guy from Canada and one old guy" had gone for the handgun.

I was careless enough to coincide with Britain's Got Talent last night. The girls up here have all been chattering about it and the early dregs of it were on in the gym so I sought it out when I got home as ironing fodder.

I spent the first 40 minutes in a state of disgust. Giant-breasted women flinging themselves up against each other in elaborate costumes maskerading as gypsies. (Cue lecherous Cowell: "I'd like to see those puppies again in the final". Surely hardly appropriate for effectively kids' TV??) A precocious child singing a terrible song written "by a friend of my dad's" so he gets the pity vote. An army of bewigged children skipping around in eye-searingly pink dresses pretending to be Shirley Temple. A weird gothic couple whose act consisted of him magicing candles from thin air and slapping her rump to spice things up a bit. You can tell I enjoyed it. I was pacing around ranting to myself in outrage (what has British culture come to? These shows should be banned. Waste of advertisers' revenue. Rant rant rant) when Hoop La La appeared, a slightly quirkier so almost charming 3 sturdy students wriggling around in hula hoops to a hi-energy dance track.

But then suddenly from nowhere, the perfect underdog story. An inner-city Billy Elliott who had risen from the gutter to teach himself to dance. And he did an absolutely magic break-dancing rendition of the VW Singing in the Rain ad. And immediately I was hooked. Check him out of for yourself here - though skip through the numerous shots of Amanda sobbing sobbing at his miraculous stoicism. Drench's next ad waiting to happen.