A newspaper story which could scarcely have less information has been an unlikely internet hit. Paolo Di Canio’s appointment at Sunderland, known as The Black Cats (BOOOOOOOOOO!), and subsequent focus on his Fascist (allegedly-ish) views have taken up plenty of column inches in the last week.

Some people have felt that many of those column inches were unnecessary, but few could compare to an article which appeared in the Irish Daily Star.

Trying to extract views on Di Canio, the paper tried to contact the former Sunderland (BOOOOOOOOO!) winger Andy Reid who left the club two years ago and is now back at Nottingham Forest.

“Irish star Andy Reid has no opinion on the Paolo Di Canio controversy.” read the ‘story’.

Phantom.fm morning DJ Joe Donnelly spotted this non-story and with a need to fill his twitter timeline tweeted

And guess what, it was re-tweeted over 200 times, which was in turn re-tweeted, and then re-re-tweeted, picked up by Paddy Power, The Daily Star (UK), Yahoo, and even @kildarejoe was trending in the UK! The story (or non-story) then hit a new level when Joe received a call from ‘Have I Got News For You’ asking Joe if it was OK if they used his non-story about a non-story on their topical satire TV show! All this from a non-story …and now I’m writing about it!!!!!!!!!

So kids, here’s a top tip. If you want your 15 minutes of fame, just SAY NOTHING!

Paul Gibson
Art Director

Did you know that Google is now letting you type your favourite scent into its search engine, tap the “smell button” and inhale the relevant scent to your heart’s content. But it comes with a warning – not to sneeze on your monitor!

So, how many times were you April-fooled on Monday?

There’s lots more funny stuff where this came from.

Click here to see how other brands were fooling around this year.

Sinead Ni Ghaora, Account Director

I thought I was a dinosaur. But it seems buying a USB-enabled turntable – or in old money, a record player – a couple of years ago made me an ahead-of-the-curve hipster.

There’s an Oxfam charity shop around the corner from Dialogue that sells second-hand vinyl albums. Since their stock comes from the collections of the recently-departed, it’s a glimpse of the real ’60s and ’70s. The decades when Mantovani and James Last, not Jimi Hendrix or the Sex Pistols, shifted units by the billion.

Occasionally I’ll strike gold lurking behind some Andy Stewart atrocity. After handing over €2, I’ll race home to hear the warm ‘thunk’ of the needle connecting with the opening groove of classic vinyl.

But why bother? Can’t the same song be downloaded in milliseconds?

The thing is, it’s not the same. When you interact with music, you listen more. You hear more. You enjoy more.

I’m not the only one that thinks this. It seems that vinyl is selling more and more – and not just to the nostalgia brigade.

So what’s all this got to do with marketing?

It says that pixels aren’t everything. There’s still an appetite for real stuff. Things you can hold, open and interact with.

Don’t get me wrong. Digital has given us an incredible new toybox to play with. But when the world is overwhelmed by the ‘deluge of data’ (to use the phrase we coined for Amdocs) tangible, objects become exceptional. A physical communication – whether it’s delivered via mail, dragged across the sky behind a plane or stenciled onto a mucky wall using bleach – now stands out.

All this was sparked by a recent observation: when we passed a tangible object around the table at a pitch last week, the audience lit up. Their body language said ‘finally, something that’s not a powerpoint visual’.

Engaging the senses makes sense and it’s something that a lot of major brands have latched onto as this presentation shows.

So if your view of marketing possibilities has narrowed to what’s possible on a screen, maybe it’s time to also look up and get real.

Des Columb, Creative Director

PS: If you know your music, you might spot a couple of genuine classic covers lurking amongst the specimens above. Can you identify them?

In this wonderfully crafted caper between Coke Zero and the makers of Skyfall, a vending machine on a platform in Brussels takes on a life of it’s own. It issues a seemingly simple challenge: get to the vending machine on the opposite platform in under 70 seconds and win 2 tickets to the film.

Ger Nolan, Creative Director

Michael Killeen discussing the trend of large clients hiring smaller centre-of-excellence agencies rather than using large networked agencies.