Bhoyrul making sense? Say it isn't so!

Yes, you read that right - Anil Bhoyrul, sometime enfant-terrible of ITP, is talking sense!

Specifically, he has a witty dig at the utter crap estate agents here are spouting, trying to convince people to BUY BUY BUY.

Even in the way of estate agent lies, there are some doozies:

“I shouldn’t be telling you this, but my boss's cousin works at HSBC. And they have been told that the market has already bottomed out, and in fact, prices in some parts of Dubai rose 12 percent in the past two weeks. This is triple A confidential. You really need to buy a property before the weekend or you will miss out.”

Ahahaha.

Enjoy.

Oh... hi!

Hello everyone.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently - seems the blog sort of fell by the wayside with some of the exciting things that have been happening.

And also the Lynx.

Anyway, I'll be keeping the updates coming with a bit more frequency, going forward in our new out-of-box blog synergising paradigms.

So you think we have it bad...?

For the last few weeks, it's been cuts, cuts, cuts - and it's all pretty bad.

But we should remember, we could be worse off - we could be in the UK:

"ITV has announced it is cutting 600 jobs across its business, and plans to make other "significant" savings," reports the BBC, adding that the broadcaster made a £2.7 loss in 2008.

Ouch.

How insensitive can you get?

Last week we had junk food ads next to health stories - but this autoserving ad on The Guardian's website takes the biscuit when it comes to deeply inappropriate ads (keep watching all the way for the full effect):



Oh dear.

Automation's a wonderful thing, but only in moderation...

McIrony

Hello again everybody. Been a bit busy here, so apologies for the lack of updates.

Starting the catch-up, we have that old favourite: unfortunate ad placement.

Exhibit A: Sunday's 7Days. Splash - too much junk food for kids. Ads (both of them) - McDonald's.

Nice one, guys.

(Thanks to Nitin Mathew)

Quack stats say Belgians care about branding. Perhaps.

"Shoppers vote with feet after Belgian supermarket removes Unilever products" says the headline in Marketing Magazine - apparently almost a third of supermarket chain Delhaize's shoppers will head off to where they can get their hands on lovely Unilever bits.

Er, or will they?

As of the survey taking place, Delhaize hadn't actually taken ANYTHING off its shelves - that only happens this week. So the survey only looked at intentions, rather than reality.

Judging from the article, it looks like the question might have been slightly loaded as well: "... 31% of Delhaize shoppers had decided to shop elsewhere for Unilever goods..." (emphasis mine). If the survery was asking specifically about Unilever goods, how many people actually know what they're buying is Unilever? I don't, much of the time, and I would class myself as more interested than most.

A commenter on the article makes similar points - and also raises the suggestion that almost 70% of shoppers really DON'T care about Unilever going AWOL.

Gotta love them surveys...

Pepsi: really IS the centre of the universe

Covering the marketing and advertising sector, I have come to terms with the fact that the "bullshit quotient" of much of what I write about will be higher than the global average.

But then there's the Pepsi rebrand.

Oh sweet lord.

So apparently Pepsi actually is the centre of the universe, a fact hitherto suspected only by senior Pepsi execs, and possibly an eight-year-old.

But the internal briefing document [PDF] detailing the genesis of Pepsi's new logo - basically just like the old logo, but wonkier - tells us that, in fact, most of the history of the universe, planet Earth, and humanity's art and culture and science, has been leading to the moment of sheer joy and epiphany that is the Pepsi logo - including gravity.



More highlights on Gawker, if you can't be bothered with the whole, hillarious, briefing document.

How NOT to brand, ladies and gents.