Well done Lucy, everyone else – keep your eyes peeled for more questions in the coming days!

They have produced a series of children’s books – the most recent one a Christmas special, The Magic of Christmas, – using ‘augmented reality’ to make the books virtually 3-dimensional, using your computer’s webcam. The book comes with software and features encoded sections, which the webcam scans and uses to create a live animation effect on the screen, as if the action were coming straight out of the pages of the book.

Nifty.

The range was launched to rave reviews in June with two titles, Dinosaurs Alive and Fairyland Magic, and comes complete with its own and a TV ad.

Carlton is selling these books of course, so this is not just a PR exercise, but it does speak volumes about the company’s level of innovation and creativity and will inevitably effect how kids interact with the brand in future.

Owning the url www.bookscomealive.co.uk also means that Carlton has the ideal platform not only for further book launches, but also for some great integrated campaigns encouraging kids to interact and great and share their own books.  Whether they make the most of it or not, is only for time to tell.

And it seems that augmented reality is all the rage this Yuletide, with this dude from Germany doing the rounds earlier in the month.

None of this bodes well for my childish side…  I still get excited by old fashioned pop up books. This kind of stuff is enough to have me quite giddy with joy!  Weird to think that my children aren’t going to bat an eyelid of this stuff in five years time…

Congratulations to Nikki Parker (@salsachicknik) who correctly named Margaret Mountford as the lady who made a comeback in last night’s episode of The Apprentice.

Nikki wins a glorious set of six Christmas crackers.

Rebecca Wheeler (@BeccaJW) is our winner today! She correctly identified that Rihanna is the umbrella-loving pop star who shared the stage with X Factor winner Matt Cardle at the weekend. As nobody answered yesterday’s question correctly, Rebecca wins two prizes – a luxury Christmas pudding and a stocking.

Congratulations Rebecca from all the team at Speed!

But do not fear. The good news is that we’ll be giving away two prizes today!

Follow @speedcomms and keep an eye out at midday for your chance to win.

Page 3 of the Metro made me smile this morning. And feel a pang of nostalgia. The odd thing is that it was nostalgia for something that was the daily norm only a couple of years ago. And I hadn’t noticed it had gone.

I shall explain…

This morning’s paper featured a story of the old order – a news creation piece, themed around Christmas and based on the results of an Index. In this case, the wonderfully simple, and undeniably genius, cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Issued by an American company, PNC Wealth Management, and described by the paper as ‘whimsical’, the index has been calculated for the last 27 years and tracks the cost of living via the gifts listed in the iconic Christmas song.

Reading it made me feel nostalgic because here we had a straight piece of news creation (thinking about it, who uses that term any more??), which delivered what it aimed to do – brand checks in the paper and communicate the more human side of a financial organisation. It had everything; universal appeal, seasonal relevance, personality and topicality. All that you could hope for and more. And five years ago, maybe less, it would have been enough – this was the bread and butter of consumer PR. But the media landscape, and PR’s response to it, is so complex now that this is no longer enough. And so this story stood out for me because of its gloriously one-dimensional simplicity.

So imagine my disappointment (teamed with conflicting utter delight) when I discovered that in fact this was not the throw-back story I thought it was but actually accompanied by a beautifully crafted and highly engaging microsite. With the inevitable links to follow PNC on Facebook and twitter.

Sigh.

Of course. Of course it would be multi-platform campaign with a social media element. How could it not be? Nothing wrong with that. It is the way of things now – PR has evolved and continues to do so week by week – so why do I feel cheated?

Why? Because I when I read it this morning I was briefly transported back to simpler times and that made me smile. And simple is, frankly, what I want sometimes when sat on the tube at 8am. Sadly I think the days of simple might be over and I am just going to have to go with multi-platform as the norm for my morning commute.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to engage with that microsite again, because it’s just so bloody clever!

Speed has begun the planning process for 2011 with earnest, this week. With clients – and indeed, about our plans and ambitions as an agency, next year.

As Speed launched in 2009, at this point in time, last year, we had very little reference from the past year to guide in developing our 2010 strategy.  Put simply, we’ve been working hard and doing our best, but largely entering the unknown. So, it felt like a real luxury, this year, to be able to audit our development, identify our strengths and more importantly – our weaknesses.

I won’t go into all the areas we’ve scrutinised, but for any agency, I would say that taking time out to examine the following will allow for the development of a good strategy for growth.

- Client audit; what do your clients think about your strengths and areas that you could improve?
- How many new clients have you won
- Where did the referrals for the opportunities come from?
- What was the average amount of each new contract secured?
- Where is your organically generated additional revenue coming from?
- What is your pitch : new business win ratio?
- What is your opportunity : pitch ratio?
- Who are your real competitors in the eyes of your prospects?

Finally, once you have all the answers to the above, the crucial question that must be answered honestly, is whether the facts match up to the agency’s current expectations for the year ahead.  And if they don’t, what strategy needs to be implemented to close this gap?

I’ve found that I’m not alone in this obsession with these turkey based delights, in fact what I’ve discovered is a raging debate between which festive feast is the more delicious.

I decided to set myself the arduous task of eating both sandwiches over the course of my lunch break and taking tasting notes and scoring both. The results and winner (can there be one?) are below.

Merry Christmas (can I say that yet?)

M&S

Price: £3.25

Texture: firm and satisfyingly chewy – 5/5

Bacon quality: sweet cured, tasty but could perhaps do with a little trim – 3/5

Turkey quality: delicious. A rich turkey taste – 5/5

Condiments: Good mix of sweet and sour with the chutney, not too soggy as a result of sauce – 5/5

Stuffing: Good taste to the stuffing, quite herby but not overpowering – 5/5

Size: a hearty sandwich – 5/5

Distribution of ingredients: excellent, a bit of everything in each bite – 5/5

Overall taste: There is a Christmas party in my mouth and everyone is invited – 5/5

TOTAL SCORE:  38/40

Pret

Price: £3.25

Texture: firm, with a good bounce – 5/5

Bacon quality: a little bland – needs to be either smokier or sweeter – 3/5

Turkey quality: not bad however quite bland, gets lost in the taste – 3/5

Condiments: heavy on the mayo, cranberry sauce is a little light on the sour side – 4/5

Stuffing: good size but surprisingly bland– 4/5

Size: a hearty sandwich (but smaller than the M&S one) – 5/5

Distribution of ingredients: again excellent 5/5

Overall taste: There is a Christmas party in my mouth except this time it’s got a few dull people there– 4/5

TOTAL SCORE:  33/40

AND THE WINNER IS: The M&S Christmas sandwich! It had more flavour to the Pret one.  All the ingredients tasted better and married well, with each unique flavour coming through. And it’s bigger.

Sea, Christmas and Sun

Selfridges is getting ready to celebrate Christmas – and is encouraging us to do the same – by launching its Christmas season next Monday, its earliest ever opening.

To justify kicking off the festivities 145 days before the actual day, the store used the well-known pretext of ‘responding to consumer demand’.

Yes previous sales had shown that some customers, especially overseas tourists, started thinking about Christmas during August which obviously represents a great opportunity for the store to increase its profits but what about the Christmas spirit?

Isn’t Christmas so special and still so popular because it is fleeting?

By spreading Christmas over four months, it will not only dilute its meaning (even more than it already is) but will also make people tired of it before the annoying Christmas ads have even started.

Even more worrying, given the fierce competition amongst retailers, it is also an invitation for the others to raise the bar and start their Christmas season sooner next year.”

Christmas is coming earlier each year” says a spokesperson from Selfridges.  Well, I don’t know for you, but my calendar hasn’t changed and Christmas is still on 25 December.

Instead, how about making some Christmas must-haves available throughout the year for the fanatics and launching the Christmas season at an acceptable time, i.e. when people aren’t thinking about barbecues and sun cream?

In the meantime, I will try to explain to my niece in vain, that yes Santa Claus will bring her a Barbie but she’ll need to be patient, very patient.

“I’m writing a piece for the Financial Times about the current trend for brightly coloured shoes for men… It would be someone who is a shoe fan but thinks that gold, bright blue or shocking pink footwear is just too much and that guys will never go for them. “

The truth of the matter that innovation and the male shoe have never made comfortable bedfellows. In fact, time was that your choice of shoe made a very definite statement about what you did in bed. Wearing suede shoes, for example, was a signal that when it came to love, you preferred the kind “that dare not speak its name”. And so rebellious was the act of wearing leather’s furrier cousin on your feet, that it used to get you expelled from Oxford or Cambridge universities.

Sexual politics may have moved on since then, but men’s footwear has stayed conservative, sloughing off numerous false dawns, including: -

• The platform shoe  – rendered forever unacceptable by Rodney Bewes wearing them in repeats of The Likely Lads
• The mandal (male sandal) – for every Russell Crowe in Gladiator there have been 100 beard-wearing real ale enthusiasts called Geoff
• The Croc – wearing a colander on your feet is not – and never will be – a hot look
• The medge (male wedge) – a stillborn innovation. Let us never speak of it again

So while it’s possible to get temporarily excited about Kurt Geiger’s range of rainbow driving shoes, metallic oxford lace-ups (though Hedi Slimane was doing this for Dior Homme in 2003, so it’s not that current) and the ruby slipper-inspired pointy dress shoe that Office sells EVERY Christmas, let’s not call an end to conservatism just yet.

For one thing, colourful shoes can have a dampening effect on the rest of your wardrobe. They often compel you to tone the rest of your outfit down for fear that those sky-blue loafers will make you look like you’ve joined the Circus of Cuban Pimps. Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross might be able to get away with them, but they’ve made a living from dressing up like Christmas trees with a Y chromosome, and most of us haven’t. Catwalk aside, men’s fashion still lives in mortal fear of trying too hard, and looking too different.

It’s therefore no surprise that fashion brands try to foist these things on male shoppers every couple of years and they overwhelmingly end up in the sale racks, snapped up for a song by Christmas partygoers, off-duty drag queens and low-rent cabaret performers (myself included). The novelty shoe is the opposite of a puppy. It’s not for life, but it might do for Christmas.