Bull shot (intensely beefy stock, vodka and chilli) with chorizo foam.

Venison scotch egg (with duck’s egg) and duck ham.

Ox tongue and bone marrow

Lamb’s heart stuffed with liver

Roast forerib of beef and triple cooked chips

Cheese (Stichelton, Montgomery, Waterloo)

Chocolate covered bacon

Bread and butter pudding (including black pudding, I think)

http://99delights.com/

Our friends at Zenith/Meridian Outdoor did a magnificent deal with Forrest Media which means that we’ve got our Slapometer running on big digital screens in Manchester and Glasgow. And this afternoon I met the lovely Julie Lomax to take some shots. Fingers crossed a newspaper will pick them up...

The 2010 general election will very much be the first digital election the UK has seen. But not in the way the main parties think.

By digital election we really mean one where online communities, commentary and tools play a significant role in the democratic process. In the last US presidential election that happened because online tools were used (famously MyBarackObama.com) to help organise real world communities, and to solicit and manage small donations given against specific issues.

The main political parties in the UK seem to be just trying to lazily copy the US formula – and it doesn’t seem to be working. Perhaps that’s because the UK isn’t the US. It’s a different society, a different culture, a different political process, even just a different year (there’s been a recession after all). Or perhaps it’s because the online tools didn’t win the election for Obama; Obama won the election for Obama. He was a new, fresh, positive, charismatic, substantial candidate with a clearly defined campaign platform that had unifying cultural relevance.

UK 2010 isn’t going to be that kind of election. There isn’t anything new, or fresh, or positive going on – despite the public’s appetite for it, after expensesgate. No, it’s the same old political class, peddling the same old policies, with a veneer of PR difference between them. And it feels tired and negative. This election won’t be won, it will be lost. In the absence of any real policies or characters, cultural awareness and poise will be the measure by which capability is judged. The election will be won by the party or leader who makes the fewest gaffs, who looks least ridiculous.

Digital media will provide a crucible for the analysis, and satirisation of every move the leading characters make. It’s started already, with the mumsnet community dismantling Gordon Brown for dodging a question about biscuits. Or with MyDavidCameron.com pillorying Cameron’s overtly airbrushed photo on a campaign poster, and providing tools for people to easily ‘remix’ their own parodies of it. Twitter, then Facebook, then email will be the tools by which these memes spread. This is guerrilla, viral politics.

Is this an overly dark view? Maybe. There are more positive and interesting politics, and political uses of digital media, happening at the fringes. Green candidates have made good use of single issue social media campaigns. And I’m hopeful that, next time around, there’ll be candidates to believe in, and that digital tools can then play a more constructive and positive role.

But for this election, candidates need to be learning their digital media lessons not from Obama’s election campaign, but from how Rage Against The Machine beat the X-Factor to Christmas No. 1.

Chatroulette is the latest internet phenomenon to be given extra juice by the mainstream press. And, as with any new media, it wasn’t long before brands started using it to promote their services. But is that sensible?

Chatroulette is like the original, pre-Internet Explorer web. It’s a place where the 'free spirits' of the world can be free to express themselves with limited restrictions. Use it, and you’re going to see a lot of odd people doing odd things.

These people aren’t a conventional target audience for brands, and the things they do aren’t things that brands conventionally want t be associated with. But maybe for some brands, who want to position themselves at the cutting edge, involvement with Chatroulette could be a good thing.

We recently used Chatroulette to promote new ‘people powered’ mobile network giffgaff. Now, our claim to be using it to convert people was clearly tongue-in-cheek - It’s a 1:1 medium, so that’s a pretty inefficient way to do business! What we’re really hoping for is that the film of ‘Pierre the Caricature Artist’ drawing people on the service goes viral, in the way that Ben Folds’ ‘Piano Improv Man’ clip did.

So Chatroulette can do a brand positioning job, for the few brands for whom being associated with an outrageously open internet platform is useful. But it holds great dangers for marketeers who dabble with it without really understanding what it is. Your brand could be associated with some pretty out-there behaviour. Worse, you could look like your brand is jumping on a bandwagon that it doesn't culturally suit or in fact understand (ref: Habitat and Twitter, the Tories and #cashgordon).

But Chatroulette clearly isn’t a ready-to-go advertising platform. It doesn’t carry any commercial messages around the content. It doesn’t have any packages to sell advertisers. Hell, it doesn’t even have any staff, beyond 17 year old founder Andrey Ternovskiy.

But this is just the most well known of a new wave of video chat services. Something huge is going to happen in this space. And Chatroulette is making moves to shape up for a more commercial future. It’s just introduced a feature that can potentially limit the kind of stuff you’ll see. And Ternovskiy is currently in Silicon Valley talking to investors. And advertising-supported (along with freemium) is one of the proven business models for internet media companies.

So, it’s a long odds bet, but Chatroulette could yet be the cool name to drop onto your media plan in 2011.

I can’t believe no-one’s written about the Halifax ‘High Five’ ad in AdWatch yet. What a soft target!

The commenters on broadsheet’s websites, the Twitterati, and people in the media bubble in general almost universally hate it. It’s “excruciating”, “cheesy”, “cringey”. It doesn’t fit the industry’s definition of what’s good: It’s not edgy. There’s no social media component. It doesn’t offer branded utility. The agency haven’t done a royalty deal based on shared IP.

But I quite like it, and suspect it’s got real mainstream appeal. It’s cheerful, it’s fun, it’s ker-azy. Creatively, it’s not cool, but I bet it bloody works as broadcast advertising.

More than that, I think it’s got some dastardly thinking behind it. People hate banks at the moment. More accurately, spurred on by the media, they hate massive corporate banks, and their investment bankers who played fast and loose with our deposits, lost their gambles, and so have plunged us into a near depression, and an unprecedented level of national debt that will take years of collective sacrifice to repay – all the while taking profligate bonuses. But they don’t hate their friends and family who happen to be customer service agents in high street retail banks.

Halifax have a history of featuring their staff in ads. But in the past they were always used symbolically – almost as puppets (sorry Howard), literally singing the policies of their paymasters upstairs. Now, faced with sheer hatred of the ‘corporate’ face of banking (still being peddled by Lloyds, HSBC etc), they’ve really amped up that strategy. In this spot, it seems like the regular staff have taken over – that they’re driving the desk, running the show. That Halifax is no more than a bunch of regular folk, having a laugh at work with hilarious foam hands, and doling out fivers to customers willy-nilly. What a magnificent distraction from the fact that these days Halifax is no more that a retail brand of the beleaguered Lloyds behemoth.

Of course what would have been really smart is to have spent the media money on some R&D instead: To actually try to innovate their way out of the crisis, rather than temporarily distract from it. The destruction of trust in the banking system is bigger and more permanent than anybody working in that industry thinks. They can’t advertise their way out of this pickle. Sooner or later, they’re going to actually have to fundamentally change their business model. If they were really smart they’d be looking at new-wave financial services businesses like Zopa, and exploring non-institutional ways to engender trust.

http://www.ipa.co.uk/DisplayContent.aspx?id=6375

It was a fun format. But I wasn’t sure what we were meant to be voting for: paper, brand or presenter.

In the end I voted for O2 because it seemed like a vote for modernity. David Golding played the ‘integration’ card in the third round, and after that I had trouble treating relating to PG Tips or Stella.  (This despite the fact I’ve often ranted about how mobile networks have spent billions on marketing and still not created brands, with 40%-ish churn still rife across in the industry.)

Tesco was knocked out early, probably on the admission that its advertising, while very effective, was one of the minor contributors to their success.

For me this raises the question of what exactly IPA Effectiveness papers of the future should be measuring / rewarding. It’s now quite possible to build a strong brand and valuable business with no advertising at all. But I’d argue it’s not possible without an innate understanding of culture / consumers / behaviour. But this how can this ‘total marketing’ input be quantified and its effectiveness proved?

Today, the Albion planning team narrowly avoided visiting the ‘IT HAS TO BE HEINZ’ pop-up café, on Shoreditch High Street.

It looks very good though. Just a 50p donation for a plate of beans on toast. And all proceeds going to Help A London Child.

Props to Cow PR (I think)