I think, therefore IP

I've just read 'Magic and Logic', the report prepared by the IPA, ISBA and the Chartered Institute of Procuring & Supply - and I love the fact it dares to think big. Understanding how agencies create value is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to achieving a mutually rewarding client agency relationship. They note that the way forward is not the tired fee-based arrangement of yore, but a more radical re-think on IP. Some agencies have succeeded in negotiating the IP rights in their work, and licence ideas to clients for a fee on the basis of a tariff for the use of the idea based on geographic usage and media usage and time. Agencies are beginning to own rights to music, characters, brand names, properties, brand entertainment, content, games and brand creation. In other words, owning more of the output. What creative agencies do every day is surrender original thought - names for new products and promotional themes, etc - as part of a fee. Traditionally, the idea has given them the permission to charge a fee, produce the work or take part the media commission. But as the fee becomes the sole form of remuneration (and even that's getting squeezed), where does the value get recognised? As one agency said 'we know our IP has value. Nobody makes us give our IP away - it's our choice. We've decided to sell it. We charge a different amount depending on whether we keep the IP or not; we ask clients to decide if they want to pay less and licence the idea from us, or pay more and keep the IP rights'. And it's far easier to wrap up all the diversion, distraction and contemplation needed to arrive at an original thought within the IP rights. Jeremy Bullmore has described the current agency business model as 'insane'. 'Agencies', he writes, 'are not only members of a cottage industry, but they also work on a sale-or-return basis. Everything they make has to be different so there are no economies of scale. If clients don't like the first product they're offered, their agencies have to make another one for free. And maybe another. They can spend three months producing nothing of value - or can make a client rich on the back of an idea that took less than a minute to flower. Accepted definitions of efficiency are at best irrelevant and at worst destructive.' And so say all of us. So isn't it time to reflect true creative value based on the rather more familiar parameters of intellectual property?

Christian Aid Poverty Over - been there, done that, got the T-shirt

I really love the beautiful simplicity of the new Christian Aid campaign theme to eliminate global poverty - "Poverty over", with the word 'over' embedded in the word 'Poverty'. So much so that I actually had a hand in creating it seven years ago at DP&A - a fully integrated cause-led campaign for our charity client global NGO World Vision. 'Poverty over' with the word 'over' embedded in the word 'Poverty'. Outdoor, TV, DM - even the T-shirt, which still sits on my desk as a source of pride and a memento of what could have been if 'Make Poverty history' hadn't launched soon afterwards and consigned our campaign to history. So I'm grateful to Christian Aid for giving it another outing. And I hope it will succeed. To which end, and as a footnote, they may want to contact World Vision for a few campaign learnings.

The 99p culture. Rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated.

So The Grocer believes the 99p culture is dead - killed off by pound shops and more sophisticated shoppers who can spot a 99p deal coming a mile off - and automatically round off in their heads. The penny is of no interest to them whatsoever, say the analysts - a cynical ruse to conceal the real rounded price whose virtue is its honesty.

The round pound is here to stay, they say - and products now sport '£1' or '£2' in big, bright, colourful packaging as a badge of honour. But I'd say its death is greatly exaggerated. Try telling MacDonald's that a penny short of the pound is a moribund sales technique. Or, for that matter, British Airways, who practice the technique on a more elevated scale for a higher net worth customer.

British Airways sale prices all end with an naughty nine, as if £299 to Dubai is a vastly better deal than the £300 plus it once was. In fact, one glance at today's offers and you'll clock Eurostar's £59 return to Paris and Harry Potter DVD's at £4.99 in Sainsbury's.

We're all still rather fond of our end nines. Could it be that, with the new sobriety and the age of the frugal shopper, 99p takes on an added symbolism, meaning and nostalgia that the round pound simply can't achieve? The '99 with a flake in it' type of nostalgia that we all crave after this economic hammering we've all taken? By the way, a chicken breast sub is a very tasty £2.99 at Subway. Reassuring to know, isn't it.

Ad agencies. Don't be Canutes. Go with the tide of a 'Digital Britain'.

Last Week, Campaign’s editorial stance echoed the views of its columnist Russell Davies: ‘The Digital Revolution is over and done’. The battle’s finished. ‘Digital won’. End of’. Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report, published today, is further reinforcement if any were needed, that it's not just the battle but the war that's over and done. 'Digital Britain' shows clear intent and total commitment to a digital future. For Gordon Brown, The Report will stand as one of the rare visionary successes on his watch (to rank alongside his G8 leading record on the millennium goals and his international leadership of the financial crisis). It will herald a sea-change in the way Britons consume digital media. For too long there has been a disparity between online access (60% of UK households) and the relative lack of interest (42% of adults have no use or desire for broadband). Currently only 6% of online users watch television on the web. And yet video clips, mainly from YouTube and i-player programmes, account for more than a third of all broadband traffic. So now the coast is clear. As satellite broadband reaches 100% of the UK population, as costs go down and speeds increase, and as Lord Carter forces public services broadcasters to share their assets to make quality content more widely available online, so the sheer ubiquity, ease of use and convenience of the web will make it the medium of choice for mainstream consumers of programming and advertising. And, most significantly, that includes the offline majority – that army of digital immigrants and refuseniks who have up until now rejected any stake in a digital future. This is the way the tide is flowing for consumers, agencies and clients. And that tide is moving fast. To pretend otherwise is to behave like a Canute.

IDM LAUDS RECESSION-PROOF MARKETING AS SALLY GUNNEL PRAISES CHOCOLATE SOUFFLE

Last night, I went along to the IDM Business Performance Awards. It was really heartening to see an industry which, far from broken, appears robust and optimistic.

For me, having worked through three recessions, it reaffirmed one overriding truth. In those sectors most vulnerable to recession - service industries, travel and leisure, retail and charity - good insight-based creative marketing is one of the few guarantors of stability and growth.

Waterstone's led the way by netting the Diamond Award with a loyalty programme that resulted in significant increases in basket value, transactions and sales. Acquiring 2.8 million cardholders is no mean feat in a difficult trading environment.

Silver went to Visit Scotland who have succeeded in bringing in £18 million of incremental spend by increasing frequency and value of visits through their 'Keep Discovering' loyalty programme (and no doubt capitalising on the recessionary trend for 'staycations').

By activating dormant users, free restaurant booking service Toptable.com has used e-CRM to drive up bookings by 76% in a year. And Radisson Edwardian have used highly targeted paid search which highlights the USP's of each hotel to drive growth in food and drink and occupancy rates. The mood was definitely up at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington.

In keeping with the evening's theme of resilience, even awards host Sally Gunnel appears to be surviving the recession in rude health as she held forth on the subject of winning. Apparently, the night after her gold medal run in Barcelona thirteen years ago (an achievement which entailed years of self-denial), she succumbed to a yearning for a Big Mac. Walking in through the golden arches of MacDonalds in the Olympic Village (don't ask), she was greeted by a Spanish burger flipper who'd recognised the star athlete from her triumph of the night before.

The girl, clearly in awe, led Gunnel to a table where she proceeded to lay a table cloth, set a place with real cutlery and bring a groaning tray of everything supersize - Big Mac, large fries, shake, apple pie, the works. Forget the instant adoration, the Michelin-star rezzies or the chauffeur -driven lifestyle that comes with winning a Olympic Gold and achieving overnight celebrity. For Gunnel, this - the silver service Big Mac and fries - was what winning was all about.

She then went on to praise the chocolate souffle.

Digital is an ideas-rich, sales-generating medium and I can prove it to Steve Harrison

It's okay to put forward a provocative argument provided that the reverse of your argument could also be true.

So how many times do we have to listen to Steve Harrison saying the blindingly obvious - that offline or online, it's all about the idea. I haven't read his new book 'How to do better creative work' - it's out this week and I look forward to it - but I have ingested his piece in Campaign ('Advertising is not dead, and I can prove it to you', 5 June 2009) and it's left me with heartburn.

In it, Steve suggests that both on and offline clients and agency people have been taken for a ride by digital's pundits telling us advertising is on its knees. I'm with Steve up to that point.

But why doesn't he stop there? It's when he goes on to do a total hatchet job on digital that his argument enters the realms of dogma. First off, he marginalises the whole online world by telling us it's populated by indifferent and bored (mainly young) people with no time on their hands and even less money.

The majority, he concludes, continue to operate much as they ever have, in a supine relationship with brands and consuming 'push' messages - mainly offline - and mainly of patchy quality.

Steve opines: 'having grown up with a passive relationship with media, the shift to becoming an active consumer of ideas is neither likely nor desirable. Are smart clients going to wait patiently for the 'groundswell' to eventually envelope these potential customers? And then will they accept a new status quo wherein the customer dictates the flow of marketing communications? Clients will be expecting you to proactively attract and convert new prospects, persuade competitors' customers to defect and encourage existing customers to spend more'.

When he talks about sales-generating, interruptive ideas and digital, it's as if he's talking about two mutually exclusive principles. You can't help thinking that Steve is taking as narrow and patrician a view of the world as the digital pundits he so roundly condemns.

Isn't the truth somewhere in the middle? That, within three years, all these distinctions - advertising, DM and digital - will be redundant. It will be about what works.

So here's my response to Steve's 'Advertising is not dead, and I can prove it to you'. Digital is an ideas-rich, sales-generating medium and I can prove it to you.

Argos's Giant Jar competition online was so popular that it was one of the five most viewed videos on You Tube. It attracted 479,000 unique page impressions and video views in a little over 9 weeks, generated 100,000 competition entries and, crucially, captured over 16,000 unique new customers, resulting in over £700,000 worth of incremental sales with an overall ROI of 4.38:1. It was dramatic and relevant, used a massively interruptive creative idea, deployed film and an immersive interactive game allied to a traditional sales promotion technique - the prize draw.

In his article, Steve trashes the prize draw as a technique which attracts an audience with a Readers Digest mentality. People who go for that sort of thing, argues Steve, are who are only interested in free pens and prize draws, not brands or products - somehow not real transactional consumers, just freebie-seeking tyre-kickers.

Would those be the very same tyre-kickers who are capable of contributing hundreds of thousands of incremental smackers to the bottom line for Argos? The Argos experience (and I invite you to add yours) proves Steve Harrison well wide of the mark.

And by the way, Steve, in relation to blogging, it may be that of the UK's online consumers, 'just (sic) 2.8 per cent bother to blog, only (sic) 8.8 per cent read them and 3.7 per cent comment', but that's like saying only 14 per cent of UK consumers shop at Tesco or only 1 per cent of UK consumers read The Times.

That's still one mother load of consumers interacting with each other.

Danny Boyle, I salute you

It would be easy to classify 'Slumdog Millionaire' Director Danny Boyle and Producer Christian Colson's visit to Mumbai this week as self-publicity. But that would do them a massive disservice. In a world where inaction and disconnection are now the norm, Boyle and Colson have reached out and made a difference. The makers of 'Slumdog Millionaire' are in India to visit Azharuddin Ismail and other child actors whose families were made homeless after the authorites moved in to destroy their shanty town. Ismail now has a new home, thanks to Boyle, Colson and the Jai Ho Trust,( so named after the movie's soundtrack) which will pay for the education and living costs of both Ismail and his child co-star Rubina Ali until they turn eighteen. What's inspiring about this is that Boyle's and Colson's deeds have matched their words and intentions. Not just in the creative enterprise of the movie itself but in the follow-up to it. If only our political representatives and the world's governments were capable of making the same contract with themselves and the people they represent. Their collective lack of will has become more than a talking point. It's now a rallying point for the dispossessed and the disaffected, for NGO's and pressure groups, for minor celebrities and campaigners. Amnesty International today urges governments to set a 'new global deal' on human rights which must reject a 'pick and choose' approach. They cite a human toll of conflict from the DRC to Sri Lanka 'and the lukewarm response of the international community'. In addition to Amnesty's global push, this year expect NGO's to re-double their efforts to force governments to deliver on their Millennium Development Goal promises which are looking more empty as the clock ticks down. At Gleneagles in 2000, the G8 promised to cut the mortality rate of under-5's by two thirds before 2015. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the figure stands at a woeful 15%. Across Africa, progress is glacial. And that's shameful. At this time, those agency planners and creatives who work with developing world charities will be all too familiar with the dilemma we face as communicators, both in the fundraising and advocacy arenas. How do we stimulate real action? How do we break this cycle of inertia and indifference in a meaningful way that prompts real seismic change? Is it the sudden, shrill, disruptive alarm call that will wake governments out of their slumber ? Or a gentle whisper in the ear, something altogether more cajoling and persuasive? How do we get them to do a Boyle and Colson and engage with the issue of needless child deaths on a macro scale in the same way these guys have engaged with these two slum kids in Mumbai? An appeal to emotion isn't enough. It simply washes over a NIMBY populace and its political representatives. Is there a solution? Well, there may be. And it may lie in philosophy - and the empirical rational argument of an Australian philosopher called Peter Singer, set out in his new book 'The Life you can save'. In a nutshell, this is it. To quote "If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally to do it'. The example he gives is pitch perfect. "If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of a child would presumably be a very bad thing" At first, you note the casual, understated rationality of his words. But, as he goes on to say "the uncontroversial appearance of this argument is deceptive". Considerations of distance, or how many potential rescuers there might be, are irrelevant: the child you see dying of malnutrition or a preventable disease on the foreign news has as much of a claim on you as the child in the pond. Spending your surplus income on consumer treats rather than efforts to end extreme poverty, he concludes, isn't greatly different morally from leaving the toddler to drown. If you scale up Singer's argument, then the same is true of Governments. It is in their power to prevent something very bad from happening, they do not have to sacrifice anything morally significant to do it. Therefore they ought, morally, to do it. The creative community gets it. That's why celebrities gain more traction than politicians. And our moral duty to intervene could prove the most compelling argument for those people (i.e. most of us) who have lost faith with the ability of a discredited political class to bring about change. Danny Boyle - I salute you.

Do you take sugar with your copy?

Last week, 'Campaign' devoted its 'Close Up' section and editorial to the demise of copy. It started by mourning long copy and then went on to toll the bell for 'all copy'. This on the basis of awards - or lack of them.

There were some brave writers ready to take Robin Wight's copy-test on the relative merits of Mars and Snickers. Some of it, well, sweet, sugary and indulgent, like the product. But the point was lost. Long-copy or short-copy, overwritten or spare, what really matters is that the best copy is where the prose isn't prosaic, where the narrative voice is actually that of the brand or product, not the copywriter.

As Hemingway proved, long copy can contain very few words. Long copy continues in the mind of the reader, who takes up the story and is cpapable of embellishing it.When asked by a friend whether he could write a story in one sentence, Hemingway gave him a story in six words: 'For sale:baby shoes:never worn.'. And at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln's words enshrined the vision of the Founding Fathers and sold the future of the nation to 30 million Americans in under 270 words - an address that lasted just two minutes.

The main event that day was a famous orator called Edward Everett, scheduled to speak before Lincoln. As President of Harvard, Everett had the credentials - he was learned, respected and wise. He took two hours to dedicate a part of the Gettysburg battlefield as a consecrated burial ground by cataloguing practically every incident within every skirmish of the War, from Bull Run on.

Yet what do we remember? 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people'. A concept that couldn't be bettered with a hundred thousand words. Good copy sells. Nations. Books. Product. Period.

Take Courage, ASA

So that poster showing a nervous man on a sofa with a pint in his hand looking anxiously at a woman trying on a figure hugging dress - next to the line 'Take Courage, my friend' - has been banned by the ASA for suggesting the beer could increase confidence.

This ban is in response to a 'flood' of complaints (three, to be precise) received by the Advertising Standards Authority from people who said the poster implied the beer would give the man confidence to either make negative comments about the woman or try to take advantage of her.

Let's deal with the sexist question first. Is it just me? Doesn't the Art Direction give it away? The way the woman is shown from the waist down and the guy looks somewhat confused and lost? Isn't it obvious that the guy is bracing himself for the inevitable question 'Does my bum look big in this?'. Far from a rush of blood to the head, the guy is actually contemplating how to navigate his way through a situation strewn with bear-traps. Whether or not to go where no man has gone before by actually responding with a truthful answer to a rhetorical question.

In 'The Fast Show', Arabella Weir made a living out of this trademark catchphrase. The joke therefore has female provenance, which surely renders it acceptable in the eyes of the sisterhood. As for alcohol increasing confidence, doesn't all alcohol advertising do this in one way, shape or form. Trading laddish bragging rights is its stock in trade. Confidence is behind the claim that it makes you more surefooted socially ('You know who your friends are') or just smarter ('Pure Genius'). And don't get me started on that cheeky chappy Hoffmeister bear in the wide-boy titfer I was told to follow through my session-drinking years.

Here are a few others that show confidence is in the industry's blood. Man nicks chair from pub (WKD). Doesn't that take confidence? Man performs Peter Crouch robot dance with live power drill (WKD again). It's a confident man who can do that with a lethal tool. Small insignificant man with pint in hand proves to be an irresistible draw to tall blonde although he uses her as shade to keep the amber nectar cool (Fosters). Now there's a man who's confident in his own skin. Small South American village stages a big domino effect stunt with dangerous machinery, fire, live chickens (Guinness).

You not only have to be confident to plan it, but to pull it off, a bit like that audacious opening goal for Liverpool by Sergio Aurelio in The Champion's League second leg encounter with Chelsea Tuesday night (just thought I'd get that reference in for the lads). Man performs body-splitting belly-flop from high diving board (John Smiths). Now that takes courage. Men encounter dream flat-mates who they probably have every intention of bedding judging by the self-satisfied smirks of contentment on their impish faces (Carlsberg). Cocksure, I'd call it. In fact, isn't most alcohol advertising all about confidence and front in a way? So why single out Courage for special treatment?

After all, they have more justification than most for their approach. They've been using the 'Take Courage' line since the 1950's without complaint. About as long, in fact, as alcohol advertisers have been trading confidence as a positive attribute of consuming the product. So shouldn't the ASA heed the brewer's advice, let the incandescent vocal minority self-combust and let the rest of us enjoy a fine and funny campaign?

Google Street View - opt in or opt out?

What does Bill look out for when he’s casing a house in readiness for a spot of breaking and entering? Windows that are hidden by landscaping, tall bushes and shrubs, perhaps? More than one way out? A side passage or side door? Detailed alarm signs on the exterior wall that gives him the necessary information to disable it? An attached garage that affords cover, another way in, or even a stash of valuables? Nearby A -roads or motorways for a quick getaway? A house on a thoroughfare rather than a dead-end street or cul-de-sac? A gaff near a park or wooded area that's easy to disappear into? Or does he just look out for the nearest internet café and Google Street View where he can case the joint virtually in eye-boggling detail? He could yesterday. Maybe he can’t today. Because Google have had to black out areas of London and blank out dozens of images. Not as a security risk, but in response to a number of complaints about invasion of privacy. But for the millions of homes now open to the view of credit -crunched ex-cons, shouldn't this be a clear-cut case of opt in to Google Street View, not opt out?

Is there a name for this mental disorder?

Has Facebook inadvertently exposed the flaw at its heart? An application that allows people to tag fellow users with a joke gift such as anorexia, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder has been roundly condemned by mental health charities. But this joke gift viral says more about Facebook users than it does about Facebook itself, who make it a policy not to monitor applications created by individual members. What this reveals in the Facebook member who’s created this application is a worrying pathology - and probably not untypical of those who lose a grip on reality by mistaking social grazing for meaningful relationships . It’s not that making a gift of mental illness is ‘tasteless’. It really wouldn’t offend me if someone sent me a bumper fun-pack of dementia, bulimia and agoraphobia all tied up with a ribbon and bow– it would just complete the set. But playing with mental illness isn’t that funny, shocking or subversive either. Just a bit sad. Which demonstrates just how severely out of touch with human beings some Facebook users have become. Whilst this user has managed to catalogue most mental illnesses, they’ve crucially left one out – call it Dissociative Facebook Abuse Disorder.

Abso-friggin-lutely unbe-eco-lievable

‘Tmesis’, I learn, is the only word in the English language that starts with the letters Tm and it means a word split by another word – such as ‘absofrigginlutley’. I haven’t yet spotted it in Obamaspeak – I don’t think it’s an Aristotelian oratorical technique, but I could be mistaken. I’ll keep listening to Barack’s speeches. Meanwhile a piece of news today that would attract a bout of tmesitis. A 330 ml can of Coke embodies the equivalent of 170g of carbon dioxide whilst Innocent, which helped the Carbon Trust pioneer its footprinting, has a 250ml bottle of mango and passion fruit smoothie with a carbon footprint of 209g. ‘Abso-friggin-lutely unbe-eco-lieveable’.

Love the ad. Who's it for?

Fewer than one in 5 conventional ad campaigns now has any effect on brands or sales. Unsurprisingly. As John Naish writes in 'Enough' , 'we are bombarded with up to 3,500 sales shots each day, or one every 15 seconds of our waking lives... And more new information has been produced within the past 30 years than in the previous 5,000'. So we planners and creatives are not just about promoting our brands, but mitigating communication fatigue. Given this responsibility, please tell me why it is that, in the vast majority of cases, you can recall the campaign creative but not the brand? Scenario one: Man pulls up on a road in his car, gets out, pulls down (or pulls up?) a new backdrop and drives on into a new horizon. Scenario two: Man explains the birds and the bees to his son as he drives along - we can't hear what he's saying but his body language is pretty direct. The gag? When his son asked him where he's come from, he's talking geography not biology. Scenario three. Buildings anthropomorphize, trying to swat and block the passage of a car through the city. But the car is so agile that it evades all the obstacles put in its way. Can you actually recall the brand in any of these scenarios - all of which involve sizable production budgets, hefty production values multi-locations and mega peak-time media spend? If, like me, the answer is 'no', then it's insane. Because it means that agencies are serially failing. Yet I know that a car racing a jet is Saab, I know that a car made as a cake is Skoda, I know that no car and a choir is Honda. I recall the brands because the creative embraces a core brand truth and a strong idea that aids comprehension. And comprehension should be the North Star of any campaign. Message to creatives - aim for the star and you'll reach the moon, aim to deliver comprehension and you'll not only deliver awareness, you'll deliver sales into the bargain.

The 800 pound coiffeured gorilla in the pitch room

Mrs T, aka TINA (There Is No Alternative) to her cabinet colleagues, aka Saint Margaret of Finchley, aka Thatcher the milk-snatcher, aka The Iron Lady. Call her what you will, it’s 30 years this May since she came to power. She broke the unions, she made a virtue of greed and selfishness. She eschewed the principle of collective responsibility and surrounded herself with a supine, venal cabinet. She spawned a neo-liberal Wild West state in which deregulation and free-market lawlessness thrived. And this year, more than any other, the country is reaping the whirlwind of her autocratic tenure. Most of my colleagues are too young to remember the powerful effect she had on the nation’s psyche, but whether we know it or not, we in advertising are all children of her contradictory legacy. She was no friend to the arts, but she was to advertising. She employed Gordon Reece as her style guru – a man who knew nothing about politics and everything about telegenic image-making. He helped her to harness the power of the soundbite and the short-form narrative of advertising by introducing her to the Saatchis and Tim Bell. If Thatcher was still in power, we would all find her demagogic style at odds with our free creative sensibility. But, despite our tendency to demonise the woman and distance ourselves from her unblinking manic stare and cut-glass haranguing voice, we are all of us faced with an unpalatable truth. Margaret Thatcher was the high-priestess of consumerism. And consumerism is a language we’ve all profited from through the good times. In the midst of this recession, there is a stonking great 800 pound gorilla with a coiffeured hair-do in the pitch room. We’ve helped to blow this bubble up. We’ve helped to carpet bomb consumers with loan offers. We’ve helped to create the very idea of free money. We’ve brought the language of FMCG to the trading floor. We’ve turned money markets into shopping aisles. We’ve introduced the illusion of choice and control. And we’ve made plastic valuable. All under the guise of grand strategising and breakthrough thinking. So the big question is this - who’s to say we aren’t as culpable for the state we’re in as Mrs T and the bankers?

Lego bricks are safer than houses

Edging the great cumulus of negative financial news massing over our heads, I've spied one tiny sliver of silver. Last week, Lego reported a healthy rise in profits for 2008 - $232 million, up from $177 million in 2007. Analysts put it down to a number of things - innovation (the launch of an Indiana Jones edition and the strength of the Star Wars edition), comfort (people turn to tried and trusted brands at times like these), quality (Danish solidity, design integrity and dependability), service and heritage (born in a carpenter's workshop in 1932, Lego are fiercely protective of copyright, famously litigious and remain religiously pure to their brand values). All of which is entirely feasible and consistent with success. But here's a more psychologically-geared theory which could be the most potent. This recession is about managing uncertainty. And life itself looks a bit wobbly when the paradigm shifts so unpredictably and the walls of the free market come tumbling down. So maybe, just maybe, there's a whole generation of Dads out there who are thinking about mortality and looking for a little kit of permanence and solidity to bequeath to their offspring. Leaving them Lego bricks which they can be constructive with is the next best thing to giving them real ones which, let's face it, is the biggest single possession we can pass on in our lives. In this current climate, Lego bricks look safer (and a whole lot cheaper) than houses.