Free petrol? Could be worth a Punto.

Or maybe not. Browsing the sports section of the DT yesterday, I discovered I'd been reading the body copy of a Fiat ad. Evidently the unaccustomed words "Even fuel is free for a year*" had woken me up. Suddenly alert, my next task was to track down the matching asterisk. 

In the process, I realised that actually it mentioned free petrol in the headline, too - just that the headline was made out of fancy slanting coloured graphics, press-ganged into the visual and obviously not intended to be read.

Soldiering on, I worked my way through the small(ish) print at the bottom of the ad... but nothing about free fuel there. On the verge of giving up, just in time I spotted some VERY small print at the top of the page. (Starch was right: messages placed above visuals get significantly less readership than those placed below.)

Straining at the VERY small print, now I discover that the car pictured (£11860 OTR) is not the car being advertised (£8560 OTR)... why do they do that in automotive?  Could it be to undermine the credibility of their sales messages?

They may as well go on to say the petrol deal has strings attached: "*Free fuel will be paid up to a value of £1000" ... something like that, anyway.

It's a Green and White world

I'm sure this headline will make sense when you read the post (at least that's the point I'm hoping to reach), but any possible connection to the Celts' impending title-snatch is purely coincidental.

I think it was Hercule Poirot who said (so to speak) 'Once is a coincidence, twice is a connection' and so I can't help noticing that all of a sudden I'm surrounded by promotions and ads that have taken on a sheepishly green hue (if there's such a thing).

The 'greenness' in each case is a hasty affection for all things British. Nationwide and Tesco are giving away Great Days Out; Walkers have billions of Brit Trips up for grabs; Bulmers, with great British production values, exhort us to soak in (sic) the British summer; and even little old Belvoir Fruit Farms (that's 'Beaver', apparently) are bestowing trips to British Sporting Classics. Just where these days can you find a Maldive when you want one?

The cynic in me can't help suspecting there's some sort of bandwagon rolling here. Isn't it amazing how quickly brands will jump aboard when the latest politically correct charabanc begins to gather momentum?

I hate to use the generally pretentious phrase 'joined up thinking', but when it comes to greenness - and carbon footprints and food miles and all that - as a nation and an industry within it we're about as joined up as my four-year-old's first attempts at writing. (Second thoughts, less so.)

I suppose the fattening-food and booze manufacturers are glad at least to divert the spotlight away from their own inherent problems, and to maroon centre-stage something that can instead be blamed on 'the powers that be'. But I feel - as they say where I come from - we're all over the 'ockey on this one... at a time when tens of thousands of Man U and Chelsea fans are burning up the jetoil, when we've just had the blue half of Glasgow empty itself down the M6 and pour into Manchester (where some clearly felt at home), I really wonder if average Joe consumer will feel the slightest obligation or desire to buy into the idea of 'Stay at Home Britain'.

Top of the Pops? Large pinch of salt required

Marketing's annual survey into brand popularity is taking plenty of hits, but my confidence in its fidelity was somewhat shaken when I spotted the 'fact' that Wigan Athletic are apparently England's fourth-most unpopular footie brand...

When I delved a little deeper into the methodology, some light at least shone upon the conundrum - online respondents are provided with lists from which to click their most-loved and most-hated brands. Maybe that's how 40 people managed to come up with unfashionably sounding Wigan as the team to loathe? One wonders where the respondents came from, and whether they knew before the survey that the round-ball game is alive and kicking in this quarter of darkest Lancashire.

Not surprisingly, nevertheless, Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal pipped the Pie Eaters to the post, but it was refreshing at least to see the plucky northern upstarts breaking into the dominance of the usual big four suspects.

Their performance, however, cast a bit of a shadow over my conviction that the rest of the survey could be taken seriously, a feeling not alleviated by Mothercare coming in as second-most disliked High St store, and Lewis Hamilton just missing pole as most-loved man.

The real flaw in the survey - or rather the hyperbole surrounding its 'results' - is that brands' individual category scores were rather presumptuously carried forward as if they were overall ratings. Just because McDonald's got a panning in its own little pond ('Eating Out'), and the highest most-hated score in any category of 27.2% (what would you chose, when pressed?), that doesn't mean the chain can be designated top of the flops when it comes to the big briny sea in which all British brands hopefully bob. Hence my warning at the outset about a pinch of the salty stuff.

Compers know what Ofcom didn't

If you've ever peeked into a sack of competition entries, you can't fail to have been struck by the creativity and effort that compers put into their submissions - all shapes and sizes, colours and hues, whistles and bells... when a simple black-and-white postcard would surely do the same job. So, what beans could compers have spilled that took Ofcom so long to discover?

You'll have heard by now of yesterday's near-£6m fine imposed on ITV for their gameshow blunders.  Reading the judgement on 'Prize Mountain', blunder actually would be a kind description. Some £1.2m worth of SMS entries were ignored by the production team, who instead chose winners who'd sent in voicemails, on the basis of their apparent suitability to appear on TV (their 'liveliness'), and their geographical proximity to one another, so they could be visited more or less simultaneously by Les Dennis and his goodie-packed lorry.

Now, I've only once witnessed such questionable editorial judgement. That was back in the early Eighties: I had cause to observe a bruising Belfast superstore manager selecting an instore-draw-winner to receive a Ford Fiesta. He searched methodically through the box of entries, until he found an address in the poorest nearby neighbourhood. This was an era when to be a Brit visiting the Ardoyne wasn't the wisest of postings, so to conceal my Hinckley accent I maintained the silence I'd been advised to keep by the Sales Rep I was accompanying. (For all I know, the store manager picked his granny, but it seemed an excellent decision at the time).

It was an early induction into the knowledge that not all draws are random, and that some are downright fixed. I don't know how compers know this to be the case - maybe it tells them in their magazines - but know it they do, and they exploit the principle to the full. Mailed entries from compers come at you like those deprived kids who assail you as you leave the airport in a poor country, driven frantic by desperation (which is where the similarity ends, 'greed' being a more appropriate noun for compers), while the plain innocent postcards starve at the bottom of the pile.

Prize draws were never the most effective of SP mechanics - though they had their place - but now I reckon their effectiveness has probably halved, and their place is in question.

Noisy ads banned. What next - noisy packs?

From July 7 you won't have to reach for the remote each time there's a commercial break. New regulations published by BCAP (Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice) rule that ads must be the same volume as their surrounding programmes. Thankfully there's not yet any such thing as SCALP (Spoilsport Committee Against Loud Promotions).

Banning noisy ads is the SP equivalent of being told we can't make pack-flashes stand out. Received wisdom has it that it's our job to violate the pack, wreck the beautifully crafted graphic harmony, disrupt the customer's unblinking trancelike state as they reach for their habitual box of bloggo...

Imagine if all pack-flashes had to conform to SCALP's requirements: brand colours only, same typeface, no moving about of existing design elements, must look part of the imagery as a whole (... wait a minute... this sounds like quite a few briefs I can think of down the years!).  Might as well put the stuff on the back of the pack. Might as well not bother.

I know it's advertising, and the fancy dans deserve all the brickbats that get flung their way, but imagine an industry regulation system where 100 complaints are allowed to wreck a fundamental liberty of the promoter... the person (company) who's paying for the very programmes the protesting pedants sit glued to each evening. It's a sad state of affairs. Let's hope we can keep our heads down and avoid being SCALPed in similar fashion.