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January 15th, 2010 by Louise Mackintosh

Jesus in my pint

Anyone who has ever worked with me will now groan (or cheer) with recognition of my pet subject, but I personally cannot believe I have only ever made passing reference to this in previous blogs:

The faces of famous people appearing in inanimate objects.

I am quite obsessed.

Really. Ask me’colleagues – old and new – and they will tell you how I brief them to hunt examples down for my ever-growing collection of what I consider to be coverage nirvana.  This week, to give you a recent example, an old colleague of mine tweeted me about the appearance of Jesus in a naan bread in Monday’s Express. I was actually off sick that day but made damn sure I hunted the paper out in our office the following day. And low, it was well worth the effort:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/150952/Jesus-of-Naan-zareth/

Just genius.

Why such stories delight me so much I am unsure, but suffice to say that I would retire on the spot if ever a client were to let me produce one for PR purposes.  I have had a couple of very near misses. In my first job I was privy to a colleague suggesting ‘Jesus in my pint’ to the Guinness client and later I very nearly swung ‘David Beckham in my ready meal’… but both were a case of close, but no cigar.

Gutted.

Over the years I have collected all manner of examples: Osama Bin Laden in my cloud, The Madonna and Child in my water stain, Mother Teresa in my bath bun, God in my cat fur… I could go on.  And do you know what – if ever a subject was guaranteed to appear in the paper, this is it. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it is universally appealing… and fun. Maybe we could learn from this in terms of story development, particularly for the tabloids – keep it simple and make people smile. Not a bad rule to follow if you ask me.

As for my collection, I am planning to use it to create a montage for my downstairs loo… in case you were wondering.

June 25th, 2009 by admin

We are family

The Speed team have been working round the clock over the last couple of weeks on a really exciting report for the Tesco Baby and Toddler Club. The research amongst real mums was used to create a picture of parenting in the present day – and revealed some startling changes which really caught the imagination of the national media including the Mirror, Metro and Daily Express.

Tesco Expectant Parent Index cover

Tesco Expectant Parent Index cover

Of particular interest was the finding that the number of stay at home dads in the UK has risen by more than 80 per cent in just under a year. Now whether that is due to the number of redundancies or the fact that fathers are shunning the stress of office life for the moderately less stressful nappy changes and toddler tantrums, it seems that mums are welcoming the news with open arms with more than three quarters of parents believing being a house husband is viable full time job.

The experts back up the facts with child psychologist Dr Richard Woolfson stating: “Today’s parents have a much better grasp of the work/life balance than previous generations. I see parents not going for promotions, and not going back to work full time, so that they have more time to spend with their kids.”

So come on, drop your laptop, trade in your Blackberry and grab a nappy and some wet wipes, the times they are a changing!

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