Zeusblog

Julia and I are getting more and more annoyed with the news recently. It seems that every item has a ‘this has cost the economy blah blah million pounds’ angle. So the recent snow cost the British Economy £XXX million and will apparently be responsible for 6,000 small businesses going under. Then the snow melted and the damage to potholes will cost £250 million in London alone.

What a load of old nonsense. Who works these figures out? And how do they work them out?

I’ll tell you – lazy journalists work them out by sticking their finger in the air and thinking of a big number. And lazy viewers and newspaper readers don’t think things through and then get outraged by the huge sums bandied about. And Daily Mail readers get even more outraged by the effect it has on house prices too.

The snow didn’t cost whatever they said it did, because we’ll all work a bit harder to catch up – so it actually improves productivity. In fact, if you could put a value on the grins on everyone’s faces when they took a day off and went sledging, the recession would be over. 

And as for the cost of London potholes – well that would assume that the councils had any intention of filling them in in the first place. (That was a pleasing sentence with two ‘in’s together – it’s always fun to goad the spellcheck isn’t it?) And quite how lobbing in a bucketful of tarmac which will wear away in a month or so adds up to £1 million, let alone £250 million, is beyond us.

I could go on and on but now I’m getting worried about the cost to the economy of me writing this and you reading it – it could run into billions and affect our house prices too – so I’ll stop now.

Chalky

Every single person who visits our offices always comments on the size of our lift. When we were moving in it was a pain. Almost every piece of furniture had to be carried up five flights of stairs because the lift is so small. Chalky swapped his commuting bike for a folding Brompton because he got fed up of lugging it five floors. 

In case you think we’re exaggerating, its dimensions are approximately 38 inches wide by 21 inches deep. (That’s 97cms x 54cms in new money.) 

Actual size

It’s supposed to hold 4 people. But they’d have to be very thin people, not because of the weight limit (although Chalky is 100kg on his own), but just to fit into the thing. It would work out as just less than 200 square inches of floor space each ( approximately 14 inches by 14 inches for the less mathematically adept among you – just less than 36cms x 36cms in new money). Even two people have to synchronise their breathing. Perhaps we should market it as therapy for claustrophobics, or a leisure destination for agrophobics.

You may have seen that there may not be enough money to have a GB Water Polo team at the Olympics in 2012, which I think is disgusting – and Seb Coe should hang his head in shame.

Firstly, I’ll declare my interest: I used to play water polo. It was a long time ago – my days of tight rubber trunks and gumshields are way behind me now. It’s a great game (to play, if not to watch) and to take part at the highest level you have to be a hell of an athlete. Not to mention tough – although it’s technically a non-contact sport, it’s one of the most brutal and demanding games you can play. 

But my dismay at the situation is not because I feel a special affinity for water polo. I think it’s just as wrong if handball or volleyball or any of the other sports under threat aren’t funded to compete. The same applies to the paralympic sports under threat. 

Quite how we can spend billions upon billions on hosting the Olympics and not have enough money to field a team in every event (as other host nations do) is beyond me. And how cycling (which I am a fan of) can get millions and millions of funding, on the basis that they are really successful – while others struggle to compete – can make any sense is also beyond me. How do other sports improve if we only fund the ones that are successful? It’s like only allocating teachers to the brightest kids. And wasn’t the point of the Olympics that it would raise participation in sport and make us a healthier nation? What kind of message does not competing in events where we may not win send to the obese youth of the country? They’ll just carry on eating fast food in front of the telly – after all they’re not going to win anything either – unless pie-eating becomes an olympic sport.

Call me old fashioned, but isn’t the spirit of the Olympics best summed up by “It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that matters”?

Chalky

This made me laugh when I saw it in Private Eye. I guess if you substitute “Britain”, “future”, and “bicycle” for “America”, “Michelle” and “Puppy”, then it would work for David Cameron.

I suppose it was inevitable that after Blair got in by copying Clinton’s campaign, that the conservatives’ strategy would be to do whatever Obama had done. Hence the shoe-horning in of the ridiculous line “Now for change” onto a perfectly good (in political advertising if not factual terms) poster – “Dad’s nose. Mum’s eyes. Gordon Brown’s Debt.”

“Now for change” does that mean they are cheaper now, or does it mean that they’ll be standing for something else as soon as the results of the next focus groups are in? It’s not even english. You can just imagine the meeting can’t you – “we love the poster, but can it say change?” and a room full of chinless types all nodding vigorously and repeating the word “change” over and over. And there was probably a suggestion to have “Yes we can” in there too. Although I suppose they’d have preferred it say “Yes one can”

Is it just me or does everybody think about advertising when they see the news? Watching the BBC news report last night about the plane that ditched in the river in New York, apart from the expected “wow” thought, I found myself thinking “that’s great advertising for Twitter” even though I don’t even properly understand (or even like the idea of) twitter. (The picture was circulated around the world before traditional news organisations even knew about it.) And then I saw the (branded) simulator footage of what happened and thought “what great advertising for the simulator company”. I expect the airline will probably even do well out of it.

And the other night a friend insisted on showing me his application video for that £70,000 job to live on a beautiful Australian island, and after thinking “That’s a lot of money to be paid for an idyllic 6 month holiday” I then thought “That’s very smart marketing for the Australian Tourist Authority – how far would £70,000 get you in ordinary media? Certainly not millions upon millions of server-crashing hits”. 

No doubt some terribly posh girl called Natasha or Anoushka will say that’s PR not advertising, but then she’d probably spend more than that on handbags and bellinis

Chalky