Advertising is back in vogue.

First, "Mad Men" hit BBC4. Achingly good.
[the "Carousel" scene. My.]

Then, BBC4 also rolled out everything in their advertising archive.
The Saachis getting pregnant.
The crazy eighties.
And an hour devoted to the man himself, David Ogilvy.

Now, it's five years since I read "Ogilvy on Advertising". James Mullen, the marketing brains behind Thomas Pink, told us it was the one book we must read. We were smitten.

Well, inspired by the Ogilvy flashback, I finally read his 1963 classic, "Confessions of an Advertising Man".

He writes beautifully. You must read this. What a salesman.

A few things I picked up for us entrepreneurs:

1. He didn't even start in advertising till he was 41.
   There's still time!
2. Shameless self-publicity works. Ogilvy sent regular updates to 600 influential people (bet it was better than our newsletter). He charmed the best marketing journalists at lunches. He spoke his mind and got noticed. And his autobiography sold a million copies, promoting his firm from the first page.
3. His advice on management is rather nice. Hard to summarise, but work hard, inspire others, give praise (seldom) when due, be a gentleman, and so on. All there in Chapter 1.
   
4. Even he, a "creative" (a word he despises), was meticulously organised. He always delivered work on time. Like the Duke of Wellington, who wouldn't leave work until his desk was clear. (Looking at my desk. Oh dear.)
   

And I had to highlight a few copywriting tips from the master:

1. Sell in the headline - 5 times as many will read the headline as the body
2. Your first paragraph should be no more than 11 words.
3. Certain magic words - "new", "free", "how to", "now", "startling" - get you noticed.
   (though I wonder if we're better at screening them out these days).
4. Avoid superlatives: "make the truth fascinating".
5. Lay-out matters: large initial letters, arrows, columns no more than 40 characters wide (like newsprint) and regular crossheads...

Oh dear, I've just made a riveting book sound like a techie manual.
But the overall impression you get from the book is that all you need to reach the top is good manners, integrity, determination and a touch of flair.
OK, and just a soupcon of arrogance. But we can allow him that.

It's all suddenly gone a bit crazy in the world of "enhanced water" since we launched our Firefly waters.
First, Coke announced they were launching Vitaminwater in the UK "in the summer". They paid $4.1 billion for the brand last year, so that wasn't a surprise.
Then Pepsi raced out and bought V Water for a whopping £10 million (peanuts for Pepsi, but pretty steep for a brand with £1.2m of sales).

And now this week Vitaminwater have appeared all over London. Free bottles in Victoria station. A brightly coloured van driving down our street. The local newsagent has a whole new Vitaminwater section, surrounded by wobblers, shelf strips and every bit of merchandising you could dream up. Wow, these Coke guys know how to sell.

Of course we rushed out and bought one of each.
And it's intriguing to see how they've adapted the drinks for us Brits...
As you probably know, Vitaminwater is huge in the US: you can't miss the big bright bottles with their genius laugh-out-loud copy.
But Coke have introduced a few changes over here.
They've upped the vitamins a lot (the US versions only had about 25% of RDA - these are mostly 100%+). They've found some spring water (rather than purified - Dasani lesson learned.).

We've finally made it. Firefly Waters are not only on the shelves - they've won an award.

But it hasn't been plain sailing. As if.

We started working on them last Spring. The brief was simple: "Like water, just better." i.e., natural, low-calorie, lots of antioxidants.
We put a sketch on the wall and started looking up every ingredient with any antioxidant science behind it.

The development went well: we found some good flavours pretty quickly - in particular, green tea and mint was absolutely spot-on more or less from first mixing, despite the hefty green tea content. We had to search high and low for Yerba Maté - weird as it's all over the shelves in Brazil. The only one we couldn't get right was white tea and pomegranate - we're trying again this summer (don't tell...)

Then there was the designs. The vertical stripes were nice, but they disobey every rule in the Ogilvy book - will people really read vertical text?!
Still, they were simple, distinctive, and seemed to get across the natural message, so we went with them. Thanks to Burocreative for their excellent work.

The real head-ache came when we tried to bottle them. We found five bottlers who could meet our exacting standards (filling into a PET bottle without preservatives) - but one was in Italy, one was in Austria, and the three within 500 miles of London each had their issues, from ugly bottles (we couldn't put our lovely drink in an ugly bottle) to issues with our high tea content.
There was one that ticked every box - and we were all set to bottle with them (better not name names) until they had a massive breakdown weeks before our launch, and put off all new projects for six months. So we had to go into overdrive and find a plan B. Meaning a different bottle, different labels (we couldn't call them organic, because the new bottler didn't have certification. Aaaghh.), and at least six months off our collective lifespans.

But we got there. The first bottles came off the line on 21st March, in time for an Easter launch in Harvey Nichols and a nice reception at the Food & Drink Expo.

We're making a few tweaks - the green tea and mint was a tad dry on the first run, and our lovely eco-friendly paper labels are crinkling a bit in the fridge, so we might have to switch to plastic labels until we can find a crinkle-free paper. And we're still hunting for that organic-friendly bottler

But the nice thing is, people are loving them. Even a few people saying "you know, I'm drinking them more than Firefly", which is, er, good, I guess.
And the awards. Our first big one. I was in Moscow anyway to speak at the Global Soft Drinks congress, but given that every drinks company I'd ever heard of had entered, I never expected to win - I practically leapt onto the stage to collect the trophy. Never need an oscar now...

So Firefly Water - "the antioxidant water". Hope you like.

Our new bottles are hitting the shelves at last.
And we're waiting nervously to hear what people think of what we've done to the back. or rather what we've left out... the nice little scrawls, circles and comments we used to scribble on them.
(Here's the back of a 2003 bottle, in case you missed it.)

We added the handwriting because we hoped it would make the drinks feel a bit more "friendly" and "personal" - we even signed "Harry & Marcus" on the bottles.

So what's not to like?

Firstly, handwriting has become a bit of a cliché - the moment the supermarkets start wading in with own-label drinks covered in handwriting, you begin to think it's time to move on.
Secondly, it feels a bit "false" - clearly, we don't walk round the bottling plant, scribbling on every bottle. So there's something vaguely disingenuous about it - like people who use a GIF signature on their letters. And several people we asked assumed that Harry & Marcus were probably characters invented by a big corporation. (We exist! We breathe, we eat, please believe us!)
And thirdly, whilst the scribbles really stand out and attract attention, we suspect they make the rest of the text harder to read. So is it better for everyone to just read a few scribbles, or hope that a few more people will read a bit more (even if a few then read nothing at all)?
Hmmm.

What do you think?

If there's one thing we've learned over the last year, it's that when you think "perhaps we could just tweak our logo", it's probably time to sit down and have a cup of tea...

Our "old" logo was classic and understated and "cool", in a fashion-label sort of way.
The trouble is, nobody noticed it. Most of the people who knew our drinks used to say "oh yes, the ones in the colourful bottles - what are they called again?" In fact, from my desk I can't even read the logo on the shelf 10 feet away.

So we thought, let's try and make a more distinctive logo that stands out more on the bottle.

Simple.

Except that these things aren't necessarily compatible. You can have standy-outy. Or you can have simple and classy. But you can't really do both. The more that it looks like a "logo", the less it looks classy and cool. The Chanels, Hugo Boss and Space NKs of this world don't really have "logos" - they just use simple text. Because logos, ultimately, aren't cool. Coca-cola, Reebok or Kodak - the logos that if you saw just a corner of them you'd know what they were - they'll never be "cool". Unless they're apple maybe (drat, there goes our theory).

Anyway, we had to do a lot of soul-searching. Ooh, what are we really like? What are our values? What do people think about us? What would we like them to think?

It was exhausting.

But here are a few of the steps along the way.

Hope you like where we ended up.

I've always been rather sceptical about artificial sweeteners.
There have been the rumbling concerns about safety since the 80s - mostly refuted scientifically, but there's always that nagging suspicion about who's doing the studies.
More importantly, you have to ask, is it really good to "fool" your body into thinking it's eating something rich in calories, when it isn't?

Well, this week two studies came out to fan my scepticism...

A team at Purdue University (Indiana) found that rats fed yoghurts sweetened with saccharine gained more weight than those given yoghurt sweetened with glucose. The experimenters reckon that, by breaking the connection between a sweet sensation and a high-calorie food, artificial sweeteners harm the body's ability to regulate its calorie intake.

And meanwhile, over at the University of Minnesota, scientists have been following 9,500 men and women for nine years, and found that "surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome" [obesity, high cholestorol, high blood pressure, diabetes risk] "was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared to those who drank none". In fact, results for Diet soda drinkers were even worse than the bad "Western" diet of lots of refined grains, fried foods and red meats.

So there's a certain irony that drinks like "Diet" Coke could actually be having the opposite effect, and making people put on weight and raising their diabetes risks - just like their sugary predecessors.
Certainly, most of the people I know who have really struggled with their weight are also those who drink the most diet drinks.
With the Minnesota study, there's the chicken/egg question of course - people who struggle with their weight are likely to drink more diet drinks. But the rat study is more compelling - after all, it's not as though the rats knew they were "diet" yoghurts...

Eating and obesity are a minefield, because humans weren't designed to have abundant food available, and we certainly weren't designed to drink lots of sweet liquids. I have no doubt that the world would be a much healthier place if everyone stopped drinking fizzy drinks tomorrow - the correlations between soft-drink consumption per capita and obesity and diabetes rates are so compelling that only a scientific establishment terrified of the sugar and soft drinks industry's power could fail to admit it.

Perhaps one day people will look back at the soft drinks sponsoring "healthy" events like the Olympics with the same irony/ horror that we now look back at those old ads about doctors preferring Camel cigarettes...

P.S. One final prediction. Based on past form, you can expect the sugar/ sweetener industry (it's mostly the same companies) to discredit all the above studies, and their authors, within days. In fact, they're so ruthless in their "quest for truth" about sugar, that few people dare to investigate e.g., the link between sugar and obesity, for fear of having their funding cut and their entire past work trawled for the slightest error. Brave scientists like Lyn Steffen and Susan Swithers are few and far between.
For more on how the Sugar industry works, read this BBC article or track down the brilliant Panorama from a few years back on "The Trouble with sugar".

Sorry for the conspiracist rant - but an industry that could be contributing to millions of diabetes victims, but stifles research about it, deserves more ranters.

This amusing book kept my attention for an entire flight back from Egypt.
It's a pretty compelling blurb - 'I used to slave away for 70-hours a week. Now I work four hours a week and earn 10 times what I used to.'

The main thrust is that we spend so much of our time at work doing relatively unimportant things - answering random emails; looking after small, unprofitable customers; dealing with little distractions... And we end up working long hours in the hope of some vague future happiness - one day I'll retire and write songs and travel the globe barefoot.

Tim jostles us to seize the moment now. Create a "virtual" business that only takes a couple of hours a week to run (there's a handbook on how to do this). Focus on the big stuff- the one thing you're going to achieve by 11am, the 5 big customers, the 20% of your friends that give you 80% of your warm, fuzzy feelings. And start your "mini-retirements" now - learn Mandarin, go kitesurfing in Brazil, whatever.

Tim's about my age, and the nice thing about this book is it's an American book that shows that American culture is shifting. People are asking "why"? More and more people are daring to ask the 'American Beauty' / 'Into the Wild' questions. If you spend all your life chasing a dream, what if you don't like the dream when you get there? So try the dream now. Or just stop chasing and opt out.

In the end, Tim's ebullient "join the new rich" sounds a little flat - we beging to sense that the "new rich" are just as angst-ridden as everyone else.
But at least they're not sitting in front of a computer all day.