Serendipity Book

The Naked barcode delusion

This is a clip from my favourite film of all time: Mike Leigh's 'Naked'. I tried to describe this scene to a colleague the other day. It wasn't easy to do it justice, so here's the clip itself.

I gather the script was largely improvised during rehearsals. Sadly there are still no plans to release 'Naked' on DVD in the UK but I managed to import a Region 1 copy from the U.S. where it is pretty easy to get hold of.

The Conran G550: a present for big kids of all ages

The Conran Shop are offering their customers something a little bit special this Christmas.

They have teamed up with G Club to create a limited edition replica of the spectacularly gorgeous 1950s Porsche Spyder (pictured).

G Club is one of those dime-a-dozen motorsports clubs (like Damon Hill's P1 and Ecurie 25) who offer the foolishly rich the opportunity to rent time in a variety of supercars for an eyewatering sum of money rather than committing to buying one or two themselves.

The replica is being sold for c. £35k as the "Conran G550". They are only making 55 of them and have placed a red one in their Brompton Cross window display and teased us with a silver one on the street today.

It seems that Terence Conran has always been a bit of a Porsche lover having had 13 Porsches since 1960.

Celebrating curiosity

A snippet of the wisdom of Petworth's finest former exec creative director, Paul Arden, courtesy of the wonderfully obsessive image hunters of fffound.com and the type-obsessed graphic design blog AceJet170:

UK retail advertising spend up 41% in the three years to 2006

The FT reports today that seasonal retail advertising is booming in the UK.

"The combined advertising expenditure by the top 50 UK retailers in the last three months of 2006 was £530m, a 41 per cent rise since the same period in 2003, estimated Thomson Intermedia, the media measurement group. Most of that amount was spent in the six weeks before Christmas."

"Analysts believe the success of commercials by M&S, historically not a big television advertiser, has spurred others to follow suit. M&S was the second- biggest retail TV advertiser during the fourth quarter of 2006."

The consumer does not

This quote from David Ogilvy currently has pride of place on my office wall:

Keep it simple, keep it visual: 1/3rd of adults struggle with reading and writing

Crikey. In the UK there are an estimated 12 million people who have a reading and writing age of between 9 and 14 despite speaking English as their first language. This represents almost a third of the adult population.

I was introduced to this little factoid by Jon Cohen, MD of quallie agency Rosenblatt and a one-time Leo Burnett grad trainee, in a paper he wrote for the Market Research Society Annual Conference last year. Those of you who have a subscription to the indispensable WARC can read it in full here.

In his paper, Jon reported that "almost all self-define themselves as 'visual' people. They like to see visual representations of things. They are often far more keen to 'watch' a story, than to read about it."

Picture credit: cormac70 taken at the Bluewater shopping Centre in Kent