The Swinton Mystery Tipper campaign began in March 2008 with the objective of generating insurance leads for Swinton Taxi Division.  Not only did it smash this objective out of the park, but it also won several marketing awards including a DMA Gold in the Financial Services category.  So when we were tasked earlier this year with improving upon it we were a little apprehensive, but netherless we accepted the challenge withgusto and started to devise a bigger and better Mystery Tipper campaign….  but would the awards follow!?

A brief overview

For those of you who are not familiar.  The Mystery Tipper is a mysterious blonde decked out in a mac and trilby who travels across towns and cities in the UK, handing a £1,000 tip to a cabbie who has a ‘Mystery Tipper’ sticker in their cab. Cabbies get a sticker after requesting a taxi insurance quote from Swinton Taxi Division. Easy, effective and successful, The Mystery Tipper’s appeal is its simplicity. that and the lure of a big tip.

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Last night I was looking forward to settling down in front of the TV to watch a rather interesting debate on the subject of direct mail.  I was expecting a well balanced argument from respected Panorama reporter Tom Heap looking at the pros and cons of the industry.  What I got was anything but balanced.  I haven’t seen such a one-sided fight since, well it was Saturday night actually….  broken toe?  Come off it David Haye, you can do better than that.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised given the title “Why hate junk mail?” but Mr Heap’s argument was not only unbalanced but incredibly naive, not to mention inaccurate.  I also found it incredibly distasteful and dis-respectful to the direct mail industry to tackle the subject of ‘Scam mail’ in the same programme.

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50+ women would like to have fun with fashion again. That’s what JD Williams discovered when they conducted a research panel with prospects and customers of their That’s My Style brand. So when it came to creating the DRTV ad for the Spring/Summer 2011 collection, making customers feel confident with fashion again was something they were keen to push.

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A few years ago at Red C we had some fabulous TV scripts that sadly never went into full production. Despite never seeing the light of day, the animation tests that were done for the adverts always made everyone here smile with how incredibly cute and well-executed they were. The guys behind the animation tests were a couple of fellas named Tom & Rory and their colleagues at Once Were Farmers… and thanks to the great experience we had with working with them, we knew that one day it would happen again.

Fast forward a few years and the opportunity to engage the fabulous skills of Once Were Farmers came by when we decided to try some new thinking on our latest Marisota DRTV Advert. The script was simple and charming and required something memorable and cute… so who better to get our Production Company, The Gate, to hire than Tom, Rory and the guys at Once Were Farmers.

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about Spain’s sophisticated brand of ‘tip tappy’ football.  But, let’s be honest, it’s not proper football is it!  Last night’s game was all about just that; ‘proper football’.

Prior to the match Account Handling held their first ever tactical team chat where Adrian outlined his three point plan to defeat the ‘evil’ creative department.  Leigh and I actually thought this would consist of taking Lee, Stuart and Keithy P out of the game, but in actual fact they were rather sensible strategic suggestions.  I won’t give too much away but point 3 was asking Leigh not to “shoot at the goal”, but instead to pass the ball to the more “skilled” members of the team.   Classic!

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Ok, I’ll be honest with you. Spending an evening in a bar surrounded by ad-industry types while some bloke dressed as a kitten gives a talk is pretty much not high on my ‘fun things to do on a Tuesday evening list’. But the promise of meeting some advertising-types who have a passion for the web kind peaked my interest when Rubber Republic invited me to attend the first KittenCamp in Manchester.

KittenCamp is a monthly meet-up for web-loving ad industry type people to chat memes and drink beer. Why is it called KittenCamp? Well I made the guess that because meme rhymes with creme that’s how the name came about. Sadly after chatting with Chris Quigley, from KittenCamp organisers Rubber Republic, I found out that actually KittenCamp is just the result of a brainstorm in a pub over a few beers.

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Over the course of the last two years I have been involved in several conversations regarding what we should do with dormant or unresponsive email subscribers.  These conversations have always been rather enjoyable due to the complex nature of the issue.

One side of the argument has always been that once an email address has been dormant or unresponsive for 6 to 12 months then it is quite right to remove the address from the email file but I tend to sit on the opposite side of the fence.

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Like all good Finance Directors, Mark Dowds loves to keep a tight grip on any money that comes his way. So it’s good to hear that this weekend he’ll be doing his best to give some cash to some other people… by walking the three peaks of Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Scafell.

Together with eleven other people, he will be spending the weekend up in the hills trying to raise £5000 in aid of Christie’s Hospital.

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Our recent farce of a general election, where the bottom half of the UK turned blue and the top half red and yellow with some orange dotted around in between, brought it home to me how different the UK is and how we have gone back more to being four separate countries more than any time in our recent past. This has implications for us as marketers I believe that we need to take into account more.

Having spent the run up to, and the actual election, in Scotland it proved a very interesting experience. Travelling up through the country from Cambridgeshire – true blue agricultural East Anglia – into Yorkshire, Cumbria and then most of the length of Scotland, the blue conservative banners disappeared and the yellow banners (not of the Lib Dems) but of the SNP, started to appear everywhere.  Talking to Scottish friends, they feel very nationalistic and have no interest at all about what goes on in Westminster, identifying very strongly with the SNP and indeed that was borne out in the actual election result.

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Last night I caught the back end of Russell Howard’s BBC show ‘Good News’ where after some quite amusing attempts at humor, he introduced viewers of his show to Post Pals. After watching a short film he showed at the end of the show, I thought that as well as posting something to one of the children on the site, I’d also write a ‘We Like’ article about it in the hope that someone reading this might also be compelled to ‘post a smile on a sick child’s face’.

Post Pals is the brainchild of Vikki, who for the past seven years has been bed bound with severe ME. Like so many people with chronic illnesses all her friends lost touch and she became isolated. When she first became bed bound she was sent  many cards which soon became her reason to wake up every day.

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