Publicity Works

Airline pilots do it for two minutes!

fiona — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:11:00 +0000

Here’s an addictive little game for you. http://members.iinet.net.au/~pontipak/redsquare.html

Our top score is 23.312 secs but apparently airline pilots get scores of upwards of two minutes.

Mother’s Garden Olive Oil

fiona — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:46:10 +0000

When the Kirby family moved from North Norfolk to the Spanish hinterland (Priorat in Southern Catalonia, if that helps) they were featured in Channel 4’s No Going Back series.

It’s been a hard learning curve, God bless them, but they’ve never looked back and have carved out a wonderful lifestyle. (Well, it looks wonderful. To be fair, Martin’s articles give the warts and all picture).

We’ve been buying their olive oil for a few years - it’s mainly been available via the Kirby’s somewhat eccentric Mill Run (check it out on the Mother’s Garden site).

Until now, that is. Since Delia has included it in her new book, you can buy it at selected delis and fine food stores across the UK.

Try it if you see it - it’s top class.

Guerilla punctuation

david — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:11:04 +0000

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location.

I love today’s New York Times article about a fussy copywriter who introduced a colon where no one expected it. In punctuation there is both style and substance.

The trouble is that once you start talking about punctuation, someone is bound to find flaws and pick holes in your work.

The canonical work on punctuation is Eats Shoots and Leaves. The New Yorker review of the book begins:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there.

By Grand Central Station I stood still and gaped

david — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:49:56 +0000

What a simple, ~~clever~~ brilliant idea: Get a couple of hundred people in a busy public space to stop motionless for a couple of minutes, and you are suddenly in a 3D live still picture.

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Eerie. Extraordinary.

HOTELYMPIA MADNESS

david — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:50:59 +0000

We’re all hard at work in the office with Hotelympia approaching fast, so no time for our usual witty posts!

Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Jaw-dropping ocean animals

david — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 11:58:21 +0000

Many word are misused in the PR world. Words like unique, stunning or jaw-dropping. We use them sparingly, if at all.

However, they are reasonable words to describe this 5min talk from oceanographer David Gallo, filmed last year at the TED conference in Monterey, California.

Skull-A-Day

david — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:01:03 +0000

We’re great fans of Skull-A-Day, a blog that does what it says on the tin. A skull every day, whether drawn on a bathroom mirror wall in lipstick, created out of origami, or - as bizarrely here - carved out of a butternut squash:

Wonderful!

World Mashed Potato Wrestling Championships

david — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:30:12 +0000

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Put on hold?

fiona — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:00:31 +0000

When’s the last time you rang a company and didn’t have to go through touch-tone hell to talk to a person? Or what’s the longest you’ve been on hold listening to dire music?

Why don’t real people answer the phone any more?

We do!

Tell us what you think.

Sorry to talk so long

david — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:24:28 +0000

Brilliant blog post here by Seth Godin:

I was at a gala a few weeks ago (featuring no less than ten speakers). At least 80% of them began their talk by saying, “I know you’re hungry, but…” or “I know it’s late, but…” or “I know you want to go home, but…” and then apologized for giving a speech.

If your speech needs to be prefaced by an apology…

don’t give it.

But he doesn’t say what to do if people are expecting you to give the speech. If you have prepared one, but it’s clearly going to be greeted with a groan, what do you do?

Perhaps you can print it out as an article in advance, read out your apologetic preamble, wave a bunch of copies of the speech in the air and say “come and geddit!”, and sit down.

And you could include a bunch of promotional material for your own business in the bundle.