This has to be one of the most ingenious sponsorship ideas I've seen this year (or any other year, for that matter).

HP sauce is a brown sauce which for me has all the culinary appeal of a tactical nuclear warhead, and much the same effect on whatever food it's applied to. That's by the by. What is important is that makers HP Foods this year decided to sponsor snooker legend Jimmy White for the UK Masters Tournament.

What transformed this from being just another sponsorship deal was that HP also sponsored the brown ball, and persuaded Mr White to change his name to Mr Brown by deed poll.

In a failed attempt to prevent comparison with the Godfather of Soul, Mr Brown asked that people continued to call him Jimmy, rather than the more formal James. However, in a move that served only to fuel the fire, the BBC refused to call him a Brown of any sort, saying it would contravene their editorial policy.

Looking at the raft of witty headlines that resulted, HP's saucy sponsorship put a smile on the faces of millions the day the deal was announced. Priceless.

Link

Back from the Easter holidays, during which I saw a clever idea for a car advertisement. Full page in a national newspaper. One simple line in the middle of the page, followed by explanatory copy beneath:

"£1000 says you'll read this advertisement"

I lost.

The car in question was a Volkswagen Passat. Will I buy one? I'll certainly think about it.

Agency Brazil must be pleased with their result in the Daily Mail this morning for client www.nethouseprices.com

They analysed Land Registry data of properties sold over the last five years, and discovered that Rose Cottage was the most popular house name in the UK, followed by Woodlands, Sunnyside, Orchard House, Hillside, Hillcrest, Orchard Cottage, Meadow View, Wayside and Holly Cottage.

The most popular quirky house name was Flobadob, followed by Secret Squirrels, Cosey Kot and Rorty Crankle (the mind boggles).

Intrigued, I visited nethouseprices.com. Dead pleased to see that my house fetched more than the others sold on my street this year.

I doff my hat to Patrick Muir, the marketing director for the Morgan Stanley credit card, for today's coup on page 7 of the Daily Mail, headline: Sold On Shopping.

A great idea this one ... a survey which found that a woman will spend the greatest length of time shopping when in the company of their best girlfriend (3hrs:18mins), and the least (2hrs:15 minutes) when on their own. The most amount of money (£71) is spent by thirty-something women in the company of their partner; the least by women on their own, or with their mothers (£42).

There's a lesson here for the more tightfisted of us men: trawling round the shops proclaiming: "no, we can't afford that" clearly doesn't work. You'll be better off saying: "OK dear, why don't you go and have a nice day's shopping on your own."

As a PR story, it's a good example of getting something as prosaic as a credit card into the news.

Link

If I had to think of 50 things I'd rather not be doing today, blogging would be right there in first place, ahead of being tied by my testicles to the back of a car and dragged naked around a field of broken glass, or having lunch with Simon Cowell.

I mean, it's all very well and good publishing your daily thoughts if you're someone who really matters. A President or Prime Minister, for example. Or if you do something that everyone's interested in, like an astronaut. But for anyone else to blog, myself included, seems a uniquely pointless activity.

So, why am I doing it? Well, the idea for http://www.consulttheguru.com/ was mine. I think it's a good one. The concept is simple: complete an online marketing brief about your product or business, and within 48 hours, our award-winning creative team will come up with an attention-grabbing way you can market it using public relations, direct mail, the Internet or with an event. For this, we'll charge you a fraction of the fee that you'd normally be charged the moment you put so much as a little toe inside the offices of an offline agency. In short, tailor-made marketing advice for a fraction of the price.

Problem is, search engines, through which most website traffic originates, have no way of deciding whether or not that is a good idea. All they can do is count the number of times various words are used on a webpage, and use that to work out what it must be about. With good search engine optimisation, we might hope to get to 50th place for the sort of search terms you might use to find us. But that's not good enough. We might as well be shouting at you from the moon.

So we take things a step further, and try and encourage other websites to link to us. When Google finds a link, it thinks: "Aha .. consulttheguru must be a vaguely good idea, because another site has linked to it". Maybe that pushes us up another 20 places (we have yet to see). But 20th is still not good enough. Like coming 4th in a Grand Prix.

And that's the point of this blog. Search engines like to see changing content as an indication that a website is alive, well and up-to-date. If they push our site even a few places up the rankings as a result, it will have been worth the effort. We'll see.

Meantime, it's an interesting experiment, this blogging thing. Will I do it well? Will I come to enjoy it? Will anyone read it? Will it make anyone more, or less likely to use our services? Time will tell.