Extra Salt & Sauce

In the short period between the ink drying on the sponsorship contract and the start of the season, Leith and Blonde have been working on materials to promote IRN-BRU's sponsorship of the Scottish Football League.

So far this has involved the development of a season calendar in which football is given the IRN-BRU poster treatment, and a new PHENOMENAL FOOTY website.

The site is effectively a template to hold some really interesting interactive and User-Generated content that will be added as the season progresses. It has been soft-launched, with very little active promotion so far, but is already generating significant traffic as links are posted on the official club websites and on various fan forums.

And Leith content is already being adopted to add colour to some of these places. Click on the thumbnail to read the first line of copy that this fan has written about Arbroath's first game of the season.

So Tuesday saw us pitching up to Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh in our dry-cleaned finery for the 2007 IPA Effectiveness Awards.

A brief chat with Hamish Pringle (during which I mostly babbled nonsense as I'm easily star-struck) revealed that they deliberately chose Scotland as the venue for this year's awards as the IPA are trying hard to raise the profile of the organisation within this (apparently soon to be independent) land.

Being UK-wide meant that the venue was full of unfamiliar faces, sadly unlike the ad awards a couple of weeks ago which has a feeling closer to a giant and extended family wedding. But the venue was impressive and the tea was tasty.

And far more important than all of this, we won an award. We put together a campaign a couple of years ago for the Scottish Executive / Government, designed to encourage the public in areas particularly affected by the problems associated with drug dealing, to come forward to the police (via Crimestoppers) with any intelligence about dealers local to them.

And for telling this story, we collected a fine silver award at Tuesday's ceremony. Mr Marsham, our esteemed MD, and master of the planning department, David Amers, were largely responsible for the creation of the case study. I scurried around fact-finding. So seized the excuse to dart up behind them onto the stage when the award was announced.

There's a terrible photo of us all clutching the award and looking slightly uncomfortable on the IPA website. I shan't give you the link.

I was moaning a couple of weeks ago about Someone defacing our posters with graffiti.

Seems things could be a whole lot worse.

And I’m not talking eye candy either!

As part of our commitment to the local Leith community, where we are based on The Shore, we’ve just started a joint initiative with The Leither Magazine to promote and give voice to the local creative community in Leith.

It’s all about “spotting” creative talent of any kind and giving local artists a more prominent platform for their work in front of a wider audience – something they might struggle to do on their own.

So, whether you are, for example, a jewellery or fashion designer, artist, writer, sculptor, photographer or film-maker, you can submit work to be critiqued by a panel from The Leith Agency and the artist or piece deemed most original is featured in the magazine the following month.

If you’d like to send us an example of your work, then e-mail e.brooke@leith.co.uk

Our parclife homes have been doing exceptionally well. (I say ours and you know, technically they were built by the EDI Group but having worked with them for 3 years now, I feel some small degree of ownership.)

The weekend appointments saw all but two of the properties being reserved. The remaining two were snapped up in the two days following. All down to superb branding, I say.

An absolutely storming write-up of the new BRU ad from the Guardian. And a couple of very complimentary comments. HFizzy orange days.