When I was growing up in a quiet little town in the south of England, I was always jealous of people with accents. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful” I thought, “to be able to ask for jellied eels, or a sausage barm, without sounding like a ponce. Wouldn’t it be bloody brilliant if the sound of my voice alone communicated a deep-rooted link to the precise location of my upbringing.”

I do, of course, have vocal indicators that identify me as southern English. Many people are even able to place my accent in the south east. But am I from Basildon or from Basingstoke; from Berkshire or from Kent? My part-BBC part-Estuary English style of speech gives few pointers to a precise location. The fact is, millions of people across a large chunk of the country speak in much the same boring way as I do. My voice is a poor compass. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I dreamt of having a real accent.

And I wasn’t the only one. Quite a few of my schoolmates, acutely aware of our shared non-accent, tried to adopt alternatives – with varying degrees of success. Out of my best friends, Mark went Cockney, Dave became Brummie and Pete plumped for Pakistani: a particularly   ill-considered move that did little for his reputation among the local Asian community.

Now in our mid-twenties, I think we’ve all accepted we’ll never have real accents. We’ll always be simply ‘southern’. Yet I remain absolutely fascinated by cities or small regions with a unique style of speech. So when I was given the opportunity to move to Manchester in mid-2008 there was just a single thought that crossed my mind. Mint. Read more…

I have a love-hate relationship with blogs. There are several I enjoy – travel blog Going Local is an absolute delight, for example, and James and The Blue Cat is consistently chucklesome – but there are many more that incense me. Like spite-filled celeb rumour mill Perez Hilton, an ever-present reminder of humankind’s inexorable retreat into idiocy. Though it’s the ‘personal diaries’ that have traditionally acquired the majority of my goat.

“Come on”, I thought. “Wake up and smell the narcissism. How can you be so arrogant as to expect total strangers to give a flying fig about the mundane happenings of your mundane life? It’s the 21st century equivalent of popping round the neighbours’ to show off snaps from your latest break in Bognor.”

So when an old friend of mine started her own online diary in 2006, I was predictably blasé. I took a courteous glance but quickly dismissed it. Then, at the end of 2007, events conspired to turn her world upside down. Her blog took on another dimension, reporting every twist and turn of a tumultuous life. Before I knew it I was captivated – and I have been ever since. Over the last 24 months, her blog has changed my opinion of personal diaries forever… Read more…

I like words. They happify me. In fact, they make me tripudiate with joy. I’m one of those people who take far more pleasure in hearing about a crepuscular splodge than actually seeing one; and would much rather read about a spelunking scrimshanker than go and cheer him on. I get a kick out of the English language and, at the risk of being philodoxical, I think everybody should. Language may be fundamentally a means of communication, in the way that food is fundamentally a means of nutrition, but both offer pleasure far beyond their function. Words should be savoured like a sumptuous steak.

Of course, when I try to convince my chums about the myriad delights of mellifluous language, they call me a ponce. Well, until a few weeks back. All of a sudden, they’re casually dropping obscure words into every conversation. It’s frippet this and proprioception that. And while I love to think it’s down to my strategic nagging, I’m afraid it isn’t. They still think I’m a ponce. But they’ve become huge fans of this website called Wordle. Read more…

Have you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four? It’s about an everyman living under an oppressive totalitarian regime. The ‘proles’ are kept in a controlled state of poverty, living under almost constant surveillance and being ‘educated’ on a daily basis to believe in the inherent good of their government and the inherent evil of others. All in all, it’s a terrifying fiction. Well, if you can call it that. In fact, the regime in the novel closely resembles many real-life regimes of the twentieth century. And, much like the citizens of George Orwell’s dystopian world, the billions of human beings living under these govenments were mostly genuine and wholehearted believers. Their corrupt leaders successfully brainwashed  them into thinking they were living the good life, even while terrible things (war, poverty, oppression) happened all around them. There’s no denying it’s an impressive feat. Yet you can’t help but wonder: how on earth did they do it?

Consider Adolf Hitler for a second. Just how did a small man with a silly moustache convince a nation of perfectly ordinary people to revere his Nationalsozialist Party, to give erstwhile chums up to concentration camps and to greet the promise of aggressive war with arms wide open?

Through manipulative, powerful advertising campaigns – that’s how. He may have been a cold-hearted, hate-filled Nazi git, but Hitler was an undisputed master of propaganda.

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Do you like music? Okay, stupid question: I might as well ask if you like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, or Christmas Dinner. Everyone loves a good tune – with the possible exception of Andrew Lloyd Webber – and there’s nothing better than getting it for nothing. Remember how the holy grail of free music lured an entire generation into the open paws of that creepy Napster cat? Until the Recording Industry Association tied the bugger up in a burlap sack and chucked it in the Mississippi, of course.

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Here’s a question: how do you feel about Paris Hilton? Personally I have nothing against the pointless, insipid, spoilt, undernourished, narcissistic, empty-headed, fame-hungry little brat… but I know others feel differently.

When Ms. Hilton was found guilty of drink driving in 2006, her PR team decided to harness the power of public outcry in a campaign to request her pardon. The Free Paris Hilton petition – which includes the incredible declaration “Paris provides beauty and excitement to our otherwise mundane lives” – received an impressive 33,000 signatures. Unfortunately, a counter petition requesting that the socialite serve her full sentence was signed by over 91,000 people and featured on several major news channels in the US. Proof, if it were needed, that not everybody shares my innate capacity for forgiveness.

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If you have ever commented on a blog post, web news article or Facebook group, you will probably have come into contact with trolls. They are the thoroughly irksome, pedantic and occasionally downright unsavoury individuals who post irrelevant, inflammatory and/or abusive remarks in message boards, often with the sole intent of disrupting on-topic conversation or undermining other forum users.

For the most part, trolls are accepted as just one of those irritations that happen online – like receiving those persistent emails about enlarging your penis, or unwittingly helping to prolong Rick Astley’s career – but for us marketing types trolls are more than just an annoyance. The truth is that these cyber-tosspots cost advertising agencies in the UK alone millions of pounds every year. Read more…

Really, what’s the point of celebrity endorsement? Does anyone actually care what kind of natural yoghurt tickles the tastebuds of a vacuous reality star, or which department store has flip-flops to fit a has-been pop singer? Perhaps, or perhaps not… it really depends who the celebrity is, and whether they appeal to the product’s target market. I, for one, am happy to believe that Peter Kay really does enjoy a cheeky pint of John Smith’s, and that Stephen Fry genuinely relishes “the soothing taste of Twinings”. And I’m also thoroughly convinced that Kerry Katona does – or did – her big shop at Iceland.

Good celebrity endorsements rely on a careful marriage between product and ‘star’. If the collaboration works then both brand and celebrity could reap the rewards, but if the two are utterly mismatched then the association could have a severely damaging effect on product sales, profits and worse – reputations. Read more…

Dark marketing may not be a popular topic of conversation down the pub, or a subject of family debate over a sunday roast, but last year the increasingly popular advertising technique got some important exposure through its use by that most cuddly behemoth of unquenchable consumerism… McDonald’s. The fast food giant, more normally associated with in-your-face mass-media advertising and sports event sponsorship, was found to be the quiet and unassuming creator of a popular online computer game.

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On 10th March 2009, the BBC’s Today current affairs radio programme ventured into the world of viral marketing by uploading a video to YouTube. The ‘viral’ – a video that rapidly gains popularity by being distributed and shared on the internet – was created as an experiment to see how widely the three-minute ad could spread in a short amount of time.

As of 31st March 2009, three weeks after being uploaded, Inside Today has been viewed nearly 55,000 times and has been emailed, instant messaged and blog linked across the planet. So far, so good. But the experiment has had its critics, with many questioning whether the Today promotional video can really be defined as viral.

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