Zeusblog

Saw this piece of communication in the window of the Washeteria Laundrette near Finchley Central tube station and it made me smile. Good advertising doesn’t have to be expensive, it just needs to have a good idea. Not that I’m suggesting our clients do their advertising themselves, you understand…

Shopping in a Spanish supermarket while on holiday recently, I saw some packaging that made me buy the product. It also made me think that this product heralds a big change. Not the beer, the bottle. Specifically the top.

Show anyone under twenty a can-opener and they wonder what it is, what’s it for, and how do you use it. That’s because cans have had ring-pull tops on for years now. Similarly, if you tell a kid that you used to flick ring-pulls like little flying saucers after you’d opened your can of pop, they will look at you like you are mad – firstly what on earth is ‘pop’ and secondly ring-pulls stay attached to the can when you’ve opened it, and have done for many years.

This product is going to have the same effect for bottle-openers. It’s a ring-pull for bottles. Like all great ideas, it’s so simple that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. No more hunting around for bottle-openers, no more idiots showing off by opening bottles with their teeth at parties, (I once saw a Thai lady open a bottle with a different part of her anatomy, but that’s another story), no more indentations where you crack a bottle open on the edge of a table, and no more novelty bottle-opener keyrings. Within fifteen years, no-one will know what a bottle-opener is for. If you’re in the bottle-opener industry, get out now.

Beer – it makes you think. Cheers!

The idea is colour-coded running tops.  And like all ideas, it’s a combination of two existing things brought together in a new way. For example, Edison’s invention of the light bulb (the iconic symbol of a new idea) was a combination of the fact that wire heats up and becomes bright when an electric current is passed through it and the fact that nothing burns in a vacuum – put them together and Eureka! you have invented the light bulb.

At xempo.co.uk they’ve brought together the idea of runners being obsessed with their personal best (PB) times and how coloured belts are awarded for different levels of proficiency in martial arts to create colour coded running tops based on PBs. (They also have the time category printed on the shirts so you can also impress those who aren’t in the know.)

When you buy the kit, xempo verify your claimed time to check that you are entitled to wear the colour you’ve ordered. They currently apply to marathon and half marathon times. If you have completed either distance, you qualify for the white top, and then the other colours depend on which category your PB falls into.

There is, I think, only one flaw in their idea, because although I could order an orange marathon one or a green half marathon one now, I might delay purchase until I can get a better colour. I’m even looking for a half marathon to enter so I can get a blue one (I’ve hit the necessary time once before, but before 2008, which is xempo’s starting point).

But then I suppose more people will buy a top and then buy another one if they improve. If it’s caught other runners’ imaginations in the same way that it has caught mine, then they’re onto a winner.

Saw this bus ad in East Finchley on Saturday and thought it was great – very intelligent advertising…

We’ve been a bit busy to be blogging recently. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, But in the meantime, for your delight and delectation, please enjoy this video of some of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen anybody do on a bicycle…

If you haven’t got time to watch the whole 5:38, don’t miss what he does with the tree at around 3:04…

As a creative, the test of whether an ad is really good is if you wish you’d written it yourself.

Well I wish I’d written this Lynx ad I’ve just seen on the tube…

Chalky

The Dunwich Dynamo is a magnificently eccentric event. Every year, on a pre-arranged date (this year it’s July 4th), hundreds of cyclists turn up at London Fields. They pay £1 for photocopied directions (handily avoiding dangerous A-roads once you’re out of London) or just follow the long line of blinking red LED lights. Then they all ride off through the night to Dunwich on the Suffolk coast about 120 miles away. About halfway into the ride there’s a village that opens up its (warm and dry) village hall in the middle of the night and sells pasta salad, flapjacks and tea to refuel the weary cyclists. Other than that, you’re on your own – there’s no backup or rescue service. 

When you get to Dunwich you’re supposed to jump in the sea, but most people get breakfast at the beach cafe and fall asleep. To get back to London, you can book a slot for your bike in a furniture van and a seat for you on a coach. Some people catch the train back and some nutters ride back. People do it on all sorts of bikes; race bikes, touring bikes, commuting bikes, fixed wheelers, recumbents, folding bikes, and even tandems. I say even tandems because my cousin and I did it on a tandem a couple of years ago – quite the stupidest endurance endeavour I’ve ever undertaken. We thought it would be fun on a tandem and we might even be quite fast. But it was a tandem with soft mountain bike tyres – it was like pedalling through treacle, and in the rain; the torrential, unremitting, cold, wet, wet rain. We did have a lot of good laughs in the face of adversity though. Which is why we’re doing it again – but not on a tandem! If you’d like to join in, click here for details from the organisers.

You can get an idea what it’s like from this (quite long) video of the 2007 event, which was the one we did on a tandem…

Chalky

Apart from the disinterested staff at IKEA Brent Park (although to be fair they’re not Swedish), what’s not to like about Sweden and the Swedes?

There’s Abba, Olof Mellberg, my new Peak Performance Air Down Jacket, stunning blondes, the Scandinavian Kitchen on Great Titchfield Street, Smorgesbord, the Swedish Chefs from the Muppets, herring, gravadlax, meatballs, rally drivers called Stig, lots of crazily-named and odd-tasting confectionery such as Plop chocolate, Spunk liquorice, Skum bananas, Bumlingerer sweets, and of course, the reason why I’m writing this… Saab.

Ever since I went to the Motor Show at the NEC as a schoolboy and stroked the spoiler of a black Saab 900 turbo… well, no, it started before that – when the Saab Viggen was the only plane worthy of two airfix models hanging from cotton on my bedroom ceiling – all the rest, even the awesome MCDonnell Douglas Phantom F4 and the fantastic Catalina seaplane were limited to one. The Saab Viggen had not one but TWO sets of delta wings – an extra tiny set at the front that set it apart as something esoteric, exotic, and exciting to a Birmingham schoolboy who dreamt of becoming a pilot (a plan which fell by the wayside once I grew past six foot two, and became too tall for ejector seats).

So when the time came to get a sensible and safe family car, there was only one choice: a Saab 9-3S – silver with the coolest 5-spoke alloy wheels – happy days.

Happy days, anyway, until last week when the steering creak on my nearly nine year old Saab was diagnosed as the steering rack becoming detached from the bulkhead. The thought of the best part of a grand to make it roadworthy again put me right off my herrings I can tell you.

And then the service manager at Ballards of Finchley rang to say “Saab have agreed to fix it for you.”  Now that’s what I call customer service. I might even have express my appreciation by sending some Plop to head office.

And when I dropped it off this morning (after a very satisfactory Saab moment of driving effortlessly up the extremely icy hill that I live at the bottom of past an abandoned Merc and a stationary but wheel-spinning jag) I was given a complimentary cab to the tube station! Saab and the Swedish nation rocks!

Chalky