Brands - My Universal Palliative

Saw an article today in Retail Week announcing Lloyds’ online Tamiflu offer, which genuinely made me relieved. Why?

Because I’m a sad product of my (and other marketers’) own making and I actually trust that Lloyds won’t put rat poison, phenol or roofies in my anti-virals! I also know that I’m mad and that probably 90% of the online stores already selling Tamiflu (variants or genuine) are legit. Let’s face it, the most likely ill effect of buying from the lesser known etailers would be a severe credit card fleecing at the hands of some Eastern European hacking house.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that I have a casual addiction to Nurofen, casual because I’m not actually addicted, but do harbour the belief that Ibuprofen can’t rid pain - but Nurofen can.

In true White Noise style, the complex marketing campaign mechanism ‘within’ these special Nurofen pills not only cures the headache before it physically, actually could - it also renders other drugs useless, irrespective of the fact that they have the same levels of active Ibuprofen ingredient.

The fact that the architect of the Nurofen marketing strategy probably possesses a similar scientific grasp of the facts to myself perhaps explains why I suffer this anti-placebo effect with unbranded Ibuprofen.

I have it on ‘good authority’ that Ibuprofen (Nurofen to me) combined with bed rest, Paracetamol and fluids is an adequate treatment for Swine Flu. So if I get it, I won’t be bothering with Tamiflu, and will opt for my universal palliative.

Someone out there wants you to buy from Lloyds and the NHS, and they probably look something like me. Given the hysteria, I reckon they’d have been better off just saying that offshore ‘Tamiflu’ gives you Swine Flu, which would have been just about as credible.

You can't shop - they've already dropped

From the age of about 13 onwards, shopping in the Silver Arcade in Leicester and in and around Hockley etc. in Nottingham was a luxury Saturday pastime. Limitless were the joys of Gridiron, Rollersnakes and Gforce in Nottingham and Black Cat Books, Wardrobe and Well Gosh in Leicester.

These have now all gone in favour of bullshit empty boutiques, arcades full of high street clones and faux teen hangouts. In fact the only one left to my knowledge is Backlash in Nottingham, which is still a pleasure to shop at the grand old age of 35.

There are many folk fighting for Independent retailers (Karl McKeever for one), but help really needs to come from city councils as they have the allotted budgets to assist these retailers. The authorities must do something with the money - they just don't do it very well, thus the empty unit effigies to my former favourite places. Nottingham and Leicester are forever harping on about supporting culture and creativity, well this is where it's born - in their own back yards. It's certainly not derived from a bunch of bottom feeding creatives, living off the reduced rents of the latest 'creatively themed' subsidised workspaces.

In the early 90's a man much cleverer than I wrote about Bohemian Centre's - places where youth culture is born. Madchester and Happy Valley may be meaningless marketing tags, but they were originally spawned by the very real youth cultures that erupted around specific geographic scenes -cool shops being a part of this. You don't need a shop to start a scene, but it helps by creating a collective shared identity - experienced in real time not through online social networking.

So because Mr. Ican'tsellanycars has omitted PR from his strategy in a bid to do something differently to save his neck - my industry is doomed.



SM and SEO may be the buzzwords for many pr agencies, but we have been addressing these issues since 2002 - and arguably earlier.



http://www.prweek.com/uk/search/article/903849/Media-agencies-muscle/



What crap, I doubt that

Clever virus? Nah, just tabloid.

Being a PR man, I'm obviously interested in the mechanics displayed by big news stories as they develop across all channels. And today I have a found a great example of the use of language to mislead and sensationalise.

In the 'My View' column, the expert suggests that a virus must 'adapt' and move between hosts to survive. Nothing wrong here in principle - other than the fact that a virus cannot 'think' and that it changes due to evolutionary accident as opposed to intent. The word 'adapt' suggests that this microspopic organism has an awareness and that it's intentionally trying to move between hosts to survive.

Nothing evil (favoured Sun adj, which again has no real substance) here, probably just some odd nature accident born a result of us pumping pigs with steroids and making them live in disgustingly vile conditions so we can buy cheap meat.

Think that Swine Flu needs a re-brand to get us all panicking a little more.

Let's face it, Mexico for all it's gun-totingness of new and old isn't really that sinister. Most disasters / events are defined by a good iconic image and I think I may have the answer. We need a man in a Sombrero with plastic bio hazard sheeting tacked around the edges of it, hanging down around the person in a sinister 'end of ET' type way.

Failing this, perhaps we could persuade North Korea's cartoon villain dictator to host the next outbreak - as he is losing scariness headline column inches to swines despite his best efforts.

curtain twitching folk

I do not have a wife but my neighbour does. His wife has a parking space on the road outside their house, which nobody else on the steet has, because in fairness - she doesn't have one either.

But she would really love to have a space - and so they both guard it as if she owned it anyay. They do this by parking the husband's car across the pavement and part on their enormous driveway beside their house. This ensures that nobody would mistake the parking space as one they could use on a public highway for which they pay road tax.

I would like to take this opporuntity to draw the neighbours' attention to the parable of 'the man across the road', who in line with West Bridgford suburban values, also likes to park his car outside his house (and in fact waits at the window for long periods for opportunities to do so, if he hasn't secured a spot).

Problem is that despite his best efforts, his car had two windows kicked in at night whilst parked outside his home, which makes me feel very slightly religous. One can only hope that the first neighbour is unlucky enough to also fall victim of the same irony - but then there is the danger that myself and my immediate next door neighbour may once again nearly choke to death with laughter whilst the damage is surveyed.

pandemic

Pandemic. Reminds me of the time my housemate decided that the route through the 'petrol crisis' lay in the panic purchase of 120 bog rolls. Not for him tinned food or medical supplies.

He promptly locked them in his room. The tissue paper may be a little useful this time round, so he's probably buying tinned food.

Age shall not weary them - not in England anyway.

This Government has always flayed around like a drunken moron when it comes to immigration policy. I'm sure that most dead British soldiers would be very proud of its decision to continue to deny Gurkhas unconditional rights to live in this country if they have served for any length of time in its army. Perhaps Gurkhas would have a better chance of citizenship as one of our enemies?