When I first heard of the new ‘cycle super highways’ that run into central London from the suburbs, my first reaction was to compare and contrast the achievements of our newt loving former mayor Ken Livingstone with those of the incumbent Boris Johnson.

In the red corner we have Ken. A bit foul-mouthed, a bit bossy. But he introduced the first major stand against the hegemony of the automobile by any major city in the world: The Congestion  Charge. It needed sharp political instincts to bulldoze it through, a commitment of hundreds of millions of pounds in new technology and the willingness to upset large swathes of the electorate.

There was another world first in the Oyster card, a ground-breaking automated transport ticket with the potential to become an electronic currency holder.

In the blue corner we have Boris. And what is his big achievement to date? Well he got some paint and coloured long stretches of London’s roads an azurey sort of blue. Why blue? “For high levels of visibility, to provide a consistent look and feel, and to distinguish them from the green lanes of the London Cycling Network,” says Transport for London.

But then I realised that I had completely missed the point. The correct name for these cycle lanes is ‘Barclays Cycle Superhighways’. And no, they are not a revolution in transport. They are a revolution in branding. They are a marketing putsch, an extraordinary corporate coup d’etat staged by Barclays.

That may sound a little rich for what is just a cycle lane, but consider this. The hundreds of miles of proposed cycle super highways wont be painted in any old blue. They will be in near 100 per cent cyan. It’s a colour otherwise known as Barclays blue. In other words, large stretches of one of the world’s greatest cities will be swathed in corporate livery. Barclay’s corporate livery.

Barclay’s has branded the very ground beneath our feet, it has turned our streets into an advertisement, albeit one that measures 225 kilometres (the combined length of the 15 proposed cycle routes) by 1.5 metres (the width of the routes). It has turned the landscape into a brandscape.

The idea that the streets of London should be coloured Barclay blue may not to be everybody’s taste, but you have to admire their daring, their imagination and the scale of their ambition .

Its officially 2 years to go until the London Olympics. The Panini Sticker Company is launching an Olympic and Paralympic collection, for the first time. Engaging kids in the old school hobby of swapping stickers and building a sticker album. Hopefully, we can have the success from my childhood when legends like Daley Thompson, Fatima Whitbread and Sebastian Coe achieved greatness.

A big thank you to everyone who entered the Shine Awards 2010. Once again, the standard has been very high. We had a lot of fun looking through the many entries submitted and now have a short list of finalists.

Very well done to those who’ve made it this far (you know who you are). We look forward to meeting you and seeing some more of your inspiring work.

Coley Porter Bell has helped location-based business Inish Turk Beg enter the fmcg brand arena by developing a range of premium, artisan-made fish and meat products.

The agency has created the brand and produced packaging designs for smoked tuna, mackerel and salmon as well as back and streaky bacon. As part of a ‘top-down’ distribution strategy they’ll be sold initially only in the most exclusive outlets such as Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Selfridges. The new products will be rolled out to other outlets during 2010.

Pack designs emphasise Inish Turk Beg’s unique positioning by sidestepping category conventions. Instead of showing the product through windows in a plastic pack, which is the norm in packaged fish and bacon, cardboard wallets open to reveal the vacuum packed product.

Quality signals come from minimalist typography, the colour palette and striking photography. The bacon packs feature the island’s two pet Kune Kune pigs, Bubble and Squeak as models. (Neither Bubble nor Squeak was hurt in the making of Inish Turk Beg’s bacon.)

Detail is key to the success of the Inish Turk Beg brand. Enormous pains were taken with both products and design to develop a unique character. Throughout the range Coley Porter Bell created a bespoke visual language of icons which position Inish Turk Beg as unique and slightly quirky. A spit-roast boar appears on the front of the bacon packaging, while the fish products depict a boar fishing.

At the same time Coley Porter Bell created branded punctuation for the pack copy. A sea horse is used for a comma, a pair of sea gulls are quotation marks and a fish is used for hyphens.

“These are extremely sophisticated designs for a sophisticated brand aimed at a sophisticated clientele. It has been a fascinating process discovering what are the design triggers that will help Inish Turk Beg command a premium of several hundred percent in quite every day sectors,” said Vicky Bullen, CEO of Coley Porter Bell.

Inish Turk Beg is an island off County Mayo, owned by entrepreneur Nadim Sadek who was founder and head of market research company Sadek Wynberg Research. He sold it to WPP and then became Worldwide Commercial & Strategy Director for Research International.

With funds from the sale of the company he bought Inish Turk Beg and turned it into a luxury holiday destination for film stars, musicians and businessmen who can hire the Island from £13,000 a night.

The brand was conceived as an authentic antidote to the processed nature of much of modern daily life. Now using his strategic marketing skills, Nadim Sadek wants to turn Inish Turk Beg into a brand DNA business. As well as fish and meat, whiskey and a line of beauty products are planned for the near future.

Nadim Sadek, President and Chief Islander, Inish Turk Beg said: “Without a huge marketing budget to support the brand, design is our main channel of communication. So it is crucial to get it absolutely right. Coley Porter Bell has managed to convey that these are exceptional quality products without using any of the conventions or clichés of premium markets or packaged food.”

Last week ad agency BBH announced that it had resigned the Levis account it has held since 1982. You could tell it was a significant moment because it was so widely reported, not least in the FT which described the split as ‘End of an era in Levi’s advertising’. For nearly three decades BBH’s work for Levi’s has been without rival, equal or parallel. Other campaigns have lasted longer. Think Andrex puppies, think Tony the Tiger.

Other campaigns have perhaps sparkled nearly as brightly for a moment or two -think of all those great ads for Tango and its different flavours, or Fallon’s work for Sony and Cadbury’s.

But no other campaign has even come close to the sustained creative brilliance and cultural significance managed by Levi’s -not just once, not twice but dozens of times over the past three decades.

Launderette, Drug Store, the Ansel Adams-inspired film with the young girls leching over the naked man in the pond and that one with the trannie in the back of a New York cab are my particular favourites.

They were big, bold ideas that entertained and engaged and became significant cultural events in their own right. Until at least the mid nineteen nineties they maintained Levi’s position as guardian of the zeitgeist.

But the Levis’ ads weren’t just beautiful, they flogged kit like it was going out of fashion. They transformed Levi’s business in the UK.

And they didn’t sell just jeans. Launderette which saw a young Elvis-alike drop his kegs to reveal a pair of boxer shorts, was said to be single-handedly responsible for bringing men’s underwear out of the closet in the nineteen eighties.

And then there was the music. Levi’s campaigns spawned at least seven number one singles. They also changed the relationship between music and advertising. Previously music was just a sound track for an ad -and an uncool one at that.

But the Levi’s campaign made it quite acceptable to use advertising as shareware or a trailer for the rest of a musician’s oeuvre.

Now it seems that the relationship between BBH and Levi’s has petered out in a welter of indifference. Levi’s is still an edgy brand but it is no longer in a class of its own. BBH hasn’t done any significant work for a couple of years and Levi’s doesn’t seem to have missed it.

It seems that the big block buster ad using mass media has had its day. Instead, marketing communication has become a series of fragmented private dialogues.

While advertising will obviously continue as a business, it feels that as a marketing tool and cultural form, it has been slipping down the ‘hot’ charts for a few years now. BBH’s split with Levi’s feels like the moment when it finally ceased to be chart material.

Perhaps ‘the end of the era of advertising’ would have been more accurate. In years to come will this be the moment that defined advertising’s fall from grace? The moment when it finally ceased to have cultural currency and when it even lost its primacy as the marketers’ favourite communication tool?

Last week when the French were knocked out of the world cup, there was murmuring amongst French intellectuals that the players, many of whom have worked in England, had caught the Anglo-Saxon bug of the cult of the individual. That explained why they were apparently unable to play as a team.

Another area where Anglo-Saxons excel is brands and branding. The French are also-rans in this discipline. Or so I thought until I visited Paris a couple of weeks ago.

So there we were, strolling down the Champs Elysee, en famille, when my eye was caught by some elegant blue neon lettering. ‘200 Ans et plus’ it read. Intrigued I investigated the shop which turned out to be Peugeot’s flagship showroom and brand show case.

Then on the next window I saw this.

It’s an airfix style display of a new Peugeot cycle. But the thing that really amazed me was that it isn’t just the cycle, there are also a pepper grinder, sewing machine, food mixer, iron and several other artefacts. They told a story. They were in fact visual and design references to the modernist cycle.

In other words this wasn’t just a clever but arbitrary display. It was a mood board. And the shop wasn’t just a shop. It was in our parlance, a brand world.

It wasn’t simply about selling cars and finance packages. It also shows concept vehicles and the best of Peugeot design. It was content. It engaged. And in so-doing it has taken what is one of the most remorselessly transactional activities known to man -the buying and selling of cars, and turned it into a branded experience.

I was just contemplating that perhaps these French have a thing or two to teach us about bringing brands to life when a little further up the road I happened upon what I took at first to be a surrealist art gallery. There were fantastic origami animals in the windows. Hippos, rhinos and storks, set against pictures of a monkey.

On closer inspection, the monkeys were wearing glasses. The shop was not an art-gallery but an optician’s. But the quality of the origami in the window display was such that I was intrigued, engaged and completely convinced of the integrity of the shop and its contents.

Spot the product placement

I don’t know about you but I’ve always felt that there is something sneaky about product placement. Ads declare themselves. They say ‘I am trying to sell you something’ and the viewer is able decode, delete and generally deal with the message in whatever way they see fit.

The problem with product placement however is that it doesn’t declare itself. It pretends to be something else. It says “I’m an innocent prop in this film/tv programme/news broadcast and I have no commercial agenda. Dramatic resonance is all I seek.” Which of course is just not true.

TV is a passive medium. I for one watch to disengage with the world and engage with what is being screened. I really don’t want to have to watch television with my bullshit detectors on full-power the whole time, trying to decode the commercial agenda of every artefact that appears on screen.

Then there is the potentially disastrous effect on programme quality. Again, I really don’t want cheesy plot lines and branded shots shoe-horned into my tv viewing. The theory is that brand managers won’t lean on programming too hard, they wont insist on their brands being too intrusive, because if they do, they’ll undermine the trust that makes product placement work in the first place.

But we’ve seen product placement in films for years and we know the reality is that no brand manager ever shied away from ‘making the logo bigger’. While long-term arguments support the idea of ‘light touch’ placement, there are always short term benefits for brand managers who can push the production company to feature their products in certain ways or pressure an editor to include slightly longer shots of the product.

So at first I was pleased at the news that Ofcom has proposed that broadcasters should be made to display a special symbol at the start and end of shows containing product placement. They are suggesting that a P or PP in a red, white or yellow circle, will appear in the corner of the screen for between three and seven seconds to alert viewers that product placement will be used during a show.

Great news for viewers. But not so great, I fear for broadcasters and brand -owners. Product placement was a response to the twin problems of the long-term decline in TV ad revenues and the long-term increase in ad avoidance.

But product placement works best when no-one knows it is happening. When viewers know it is happening, without knowing when or which brand it relates to, they’ll simply have their b/s detectors turned up to 11 throughout the programme. Placement will become less effective, making it less attractive to brands, thus reducing revenue for the TV stations.

I can only hope that brand-owners will listen to the advice of ad agency Mother which sneers at the idea of product placement as clunky, dishonest and ineffective. Instead it favours the idea of ‘emotional placement’ -that is using content to explore themes, and sets of values -rather than simply plonking your crisps on the bar of the Rover’s Return.

In the Times supplement today, Heston Blumenthal talks about naming his new restaurant.  He says it’s as fraught as naming your first child.  He has a point – with his profile, anyone with even a passing interest will be sure to have an opinion on the name. Good or bad.

Imagine being in that position. It must be agonising to know if you’ve got it right. Will people like it? What does it say about your business? What does it say about you?

Recently, quite a few of my friends have become parents for the first time. Many have kept their shortlist of names a closely guarded secret until the birth is announced.  On the whole I think this is probably a wise move.  I have heard numerous stories of parents revealing their preferred baby names, only to have them critiqued and sometimes even shot down on the basis of someone’s prior experience of the name – the school bully, the scaredy cat at school etc etc!

The main problem for Heston and parents-to-be, is that a name on paper or thrown into a conversation has no emotional connection to anything and has no context. It is just a word, and therefore people feel able to comment or criticise. And some people will do just that.

The reality however is this.  As soon as the restaurant is launched or the baby is born, it is suddenly a real life, living thing. It is multi-dimensional. It is loved. The name is not up for debate and it comes with a whole host of new (hopefully positive) associations.

I’m sure I can’t be the first person to have made judgements about friends’ choice of baby name, although I would never dream of telling them of course!  And I’m very glad I haven’t said anything because those names are now so much more than just names. They are little people – sweet, funny and cute kids. Characters in their own right. Their names are part and parcel of who they are.

Naming brands is similar in so many ways but the key difference is that brand owners seem to welcome criticism and comment with open arms. Of course, if a brand name has to span numerous markets and numerous languages, checks have to be done to make sure a faux pas is not committed.  Vauxhall Nova is a notable example – no va meaning ‘doesn’t go’ in Spanish. Equally, from a legal perspective it is imperative that you have done your research. The consequences of not doing so could be dire and very costly.

My beef is with researching names before the brand has been born (so to speak). Think about some of the more unusual names of recent years – I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Dave, Gu and Fat Face for example. What would consumers have had to say about them?  Without the luxury of knowing the brands and having an appreciation of what they stand for, their personalities and their values, I’m sure opinions would have been split. Yet now these brands are out there living and breathing, does anyone even think twice about their names?

In case you’re wondering, Heston’s new restaurant is called Dinner. Please feel free to comment. I did, and an eyebrow was raised. Then I considered that once it’s launched in December, I like many others will no doubt be desperate for a table and will embrace the Dinner brand wholeheartedly. By then Dinner will be so much more than just a word.

Two years ago in our ‘Visual Futures’ presentation called The New Optimism, we noticed that the colour yellow was beginning to appear in all forms of design from furniture to fashion, graphics and interiors. This coincided with the beginning of the global recession and global misery. Injecting the colour yellow into our lives seemed to be a deliberate way to cheer us up…..after all yellow is perhaps the most optimistic colour. It reminds us of sunshine, citrus fruits, golden harvests, spring flowers, warmth, brilliance, luminosity. All good stuff!

Well it seems like yellow is here to stay a while longer - which is probably just as well as we are about to have one of the most severe budgets on record. The image above shows just some of the things that we have observed in fashion, interior and design magazines in the last few months. Last week some of us attended a trends presentation by Li Edelkoort (one of the worlds leading design and trend forecasters) and she declared that ‘yellow is here to stay’……and also that (and this is one of my favourite quotes) ’yellow is the new pink’. Li also said that we need to learn how to use it successfully as it is not an easy colour to work with. Hopefully, practice will make us perfect and happy.