Being Blonde

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!)

Got rid of the biscuit tin…

…and now have a computer that runs…quickly!!

Woo look how pretty it is!!

The Blonde homepage given the Lolinator treatment. Full size version on which you can fully appreciate the Lolcat lingo can be seen here.

Here’s our Lolcat logo in all its glory. We’re a kick-ass dog agency.

This was the label on my pack of Lurpack Spreadable. Nice

“I saw that Supersize Me last night and I really fancy a MacDonalds now.”

“I never knew how many songs I knew by ELO.”

Watch this space

……the wee, but very important, two little words at the end make it all worth while :o)

Mark Wong joined us recently as a developer in our London office (aka Blondon).

Talking of aka, it’s Mark, aka “Wonky”, aka “Wonkenstein”, aka “the Wonkenator”.

In a previous post Fraser talked about developers being machines that turn coffee into code.

Wonky is clearly a machine that turns beef flavour Hula Hoops into code.

(Plus the occasional banana).