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We've been appointed by Sainsbury's Finance to manage its marketing account.

We’ll be developing data-driven initiatives and campaigns to improve their DM sales as well as maximising the potential of Nectar customer information to deliver highly personalised and innovative creative.

Tangible Account Director, Kate O’Donovan and Head of CRM Planning and Insight, Howard Barber will be heading up the team.

We're developing exciting and strategic creative work and we look forward to bringing it to market.

Marketing Society Star Awards on Friday night. We did really rather well (oh how arrogant) with a couple of golds, seven silver awards and five bronzes between us and our Leith cousins.

Our esteemed Scottish Government client - for whom most of the above awards were collected - won Marketing Team of the Year which was very well-deserved.

Niki was particularly chuffed with a silver for her Business Stream (First Aid kit) campaign and a bronze for our Napier University work.

When it comes to generic advertising campaigns, there are quite a few success stories. Foods come to mind - beef and lamb, milk, eggs, guacamole, Californian raisins. (OK, I was joking about the guacamole.) But there are an awful lot of failures, and I'm afraid we've heard in the last couple of days that the latest effort in the financial world - a proposed generic campaign promoting the joys of life assurance - now comes into that category.

I was fourth to present. And right up to the moment that went on stage in front of the 300 or so open-eared individuals, I sat at the back of the theatre and rehearsed, deleted, re-wrote, rehearsed again and adapted my script - completely ignoring the other three speakers that addressed the audience before me.

Innovation and innovative is one of those words that get's sprinkled about a lot.  Sounds dynamic.  But what actually does it mean?  By coincidence two of my clients have been tackling this in different ways recently on different projects we've been involved with.

There’s a rather lovely book written by Kate Fox called Watching the English that starts from the following premise:

"I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep."

I’m liking the fun that Sony Ericsson are having right now with their space hopper campaign. The TV ad is colourful but mildly unwhelming. But online, the idea sparks into life. You can visit the hopper warehouse here (