Firetop

I’ve always found Gordon Brown’s strange chin dropping action as he inhales to be quite irritating, even Rory Bremner with his great attention to detail has never been shy of imitating the jaw drop at the start of each sentence. I noticed yesterday that during his first Prime Ministerial speech outside Number Ten, the ‘chin thing’ had gone. I was quite pleased, I’m guessing that Gordon’s had some coaching on that and been told to close his mouth promptly at the end of each statement. Whilst seeking out a picture of the old chin in action, I came across something far more disturbing - a video of Gordon Brown seemingly picking his nose and eating the contents whilst seated in the House of Commons. (more…)

Today is the first birthday of the new look Firetop website complete with blog entries, one year ago I was at Wimbledon spotting celebrities like ‘Nana Moon’ and Rob Brydon, this year it’s far too wet to enjoy the queuing. Furthermore Suzie_Q seems to be displaying early labour symptoms this morning, which could make June 28th a birthday of a different kind next year! So what exactly has the blog achieved in the past year? Surprisingly a few unexpected interactions from those at the centre of a article topics - a celebrity chef, Virgin’s commercial director, the Marketing Manager of Internet World, a developer at Eyewonder, not to mention many unknown people who have solved their Microsoft credit card bill mystery. (more…)

Thanks to MyBlogLog you can now connect with fellow blog readers from Firetop and across the blogoshere. On the right hand side of this site you will see a new Firetop community box showing the most recent MyBlogLog readers of Firetop and, if loaded, their avatar (photo). With Firetop coming up to its one year birthday and having exceeded 10,000 unique visitors each month, I thought I’d install the MyBlogLog widget and see if we can get a Firetop reader community going. All you need to do is register and join the community - then we can start putting faces to names and engage in more regular conversations with each other - give it a try now! (more…)

For as long as I can remember, my mother-in-law plays Gala Bingo in Crawley every Sunday evening. Occasionally my wife has attended too - leaving me free to work or Xbox. Yesterday with Suzie_Q at 39 weeks and getting too large to walk or travel far, play sports, or generally exert herself, I was asked to go to bingo with them too. Since there is little else Sue and I can do together besides watch TV, and I couldn’t have my wife sitting alone in the no-smoking area of the bingo hall (an almost empty area), I put my usual apprehensions to one side and threw caution to the wind. By the end of the night I was no wiser as to what makes so many fat, miserable, old people spend their wages on such a pointless and unenjoyable activity full of moaning, groaning and smoking. They would all be better off betting on sensible and entertaining things like horses and football. (more…)

This morning Suzie_Q and I were up relatively early (for us) and so we headed down to the breakfast café on the corner of West Street. You can always guarantee yourself satisfying full English there (if they’re actually open). Upon arriving in West Street I noticed that there were signs up announcing ‘West Street Festival - Today, 10am to 5pm‘ - “How exciting” I thought “A bit of entertainment for us”. At 10am when we left the cafe with full bellies there was very little sign of a festival; one or two of the ‘always empty’ antiques shops had some coloured bunting adorning their shop fronts, at the end of the street a woman beneath a gazebo selling what looked like straw hand bags - and that was it! (more…)

Well it’s only taken six months… but finally my Google Adsense adverts have reached their $100 payout minimum, and in July I can expect to receive the first cheque for advert clicks from this blog. I have worked with many clients who have assumed that the payout from contextual advertising like Adsense must be very significant; taking the prevalence of units on websites as a sign of their profitability. However, despite the average click through rate being more than triple that of standard graphic banners, publisher earnings per CPM are quite low in comparison - it’s commission on clicks that we Adsense affiliates get (I estimate 10%), and not the entire advertiser click fee. (more…)

Suzie_Q started up a baby blog a few months into her pregnancy, I’ve steered clear of commenting on too many baby matters other than at scan time (and I didn’t even mention the 34 week where baby looked like a Tuscan Raider). As the time nears for Junior’s arrival (due in eleven days) I thought I’d cover the main impacts of pregnancy from the male perspective. Of course it can never be as painful an experience for the man as the woman; I’m not carrying around an extra two stone of weight on my stomach (yet…) and won’t have to give birth - exposing my privates to a room of strangers, but there are implications for us blokes. (more…)

It must be hard to be the Marketer for eggs – they’re not unusual, everybody buys them, almost everything we bake contains them… and then there’s Avian Flu and Salmonella to contend with. When I read today that the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC) has banned a re-run of some old 1950s egg TV commercials on the grounds that ‘the concept of eating eggs every day goes against the principle of eating a varied diet’ I was a little surprised. However, upon watching the old Tony Hancock adverts I was even more surprised at how good they were, and as a new owner of Chickens this week… quite encouraged to eat more. (more…)

Last night Suzie_Q and I went to see the final installment of Pirates of the Caribbean ’At World’s End’ (surprisingly not filmed at the World’s End Inn in Dorset). Dorking Halls cinema charges only £3 each on a Monday night - a reasonable charge compared with Crawley Cineworld where it’s almost cheaper to buy a brand new latest release DVD than two tickets to a film. One of the problems with turning thirty is that (other than evolving into a grumpy old man) you can barely remember films you watched last year, so I had to re-hire both previous films to watch over the weekend to refresh my memory on the plot. Having now completed the trilogy over a number of days I find myself with more unanswered questions than I started out with at the begining of the second film - the most consistent of which is “Why is the little monkey STILL undead?”. (more…)

Discounts as purchase incentives are as old as the Earth, if properly tracked they tell marketers a great deal about the best sources of customer - enabling the optimisation of marketing budgets accordingly. Then along comes the Internet and a website which lists hundreds and thousands of current promotional codes from across the marketing landscape - from print magazines and ‘junk mail’ to online. Now consumers only have to visit ‘Hot UK Deals’ to choose from a number of current retailer offers if they are about to make a purchase; yesterday Suzie_Q saved £20 on a John Lewis web purchase courtesy of an offer from a magazine she never even bought or read. (more…)