Being Blonde

Before the summer party posts start to go up, this is to mark the occasion of the 100th post to the Blonde blog.

There’s a new version of blonde.net on the way, which will integrate blog content into the main body of the site. Meanwhile it’s worth highlighting that 20% of our posts to date have been about T-shirts, 9% have featured Nick, 44% have officially been categorised as one form of trivia or another, whereas only 35% have been about the stuff that we do. That will change on the new site.

Here’s the first picture that’s served up (today) when you search for “100″ on Flickr.

It’s from aknacer’s photostream. I hope he doesn’t mind.

The Edinburgh International Festival for 2008 officially closed last night with the Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert.

The weather, which had been dismal and damp all day long, mercifully took a turn for the better just before the gates to Princes Street Gardens opened.

The sychronisation of music to explosions was amazing.

Apparently they expended about 100,000 fireworks in about 50 minutes. At times it was the pyrotechnic equivalent of ramming a whole 200g bar of chocolate into your mouth at once.

Only it didn’t make you feel sick afterwards.

Now its my turn for an injury, not quite as bad as Nicks…

Nuggets

Nick has a booboo, and a railway on his leg!!

Nuggets!

Josh showed me this great Flickr set – Always being up for a bit of experimentation we thought we’d have a crack ourselves – Here are the results kids! Enjoy.

Edinburgh

London

I spent two days at Turnberry last week for the annual A G Barr management conference. This covered a review of the past twelve months and plans for the year ahead. It’s a good opportunity to catch up with what’s happening on brands other than IRN-BRU and Strathmore and to mingle with Barr people from beyond the marketing department.

This year the conference also included interesting presentations from Sir Matthew Pinsent on winning (something he’s done a lot of in his time) and The Prince’s Trust as well as after dinner entertainment by The Proclaimers - un-be-liev-able.

An interesting point of view from our friends at Face Group the other week. How likely is it, they ask, that someone who knows enough to inform opinions about the latest mobile phones will also be out there informing opinions about mortgage interest rates or hand cream? Answer - not very. There is a definite tendency to talk about opinion formers as a single, amorphous, universally targetable group, regardless of product category. It doesn’t make sense when you think about it.

Face is a youth marketing agency that believes in “audience first, discipline second”. They specialise insight, co-creation and advocacy. Through their Headbox online community, we’ve also had some interesting conversations with them about campaign amplification and seeding.

We had a night out at the Revolution Awards yesterday. Grolsch Coincidence had been shortlisted in the fmcg and creative categories. Competition was fierce and we didn’t manage to come back with a gong this time, but the work was “highly commended” in the fmcg category.

Then it all went pear-shaped…

We lost a Blonde friend

Will be so hard to replace (but cheap £1.49!)