Desperate Housesellers (Series 2)

Regular readers of Open-Heart Branding will recall my reaction in a previous post when these beauties dropped through my letterbox to lure me to the debauched surroundings of Bellingham in Co. Laois.

Well, clearly my blog isn't read by the desperate housesellers as another flier landed on the mat yesterday. Either that, or I'll need to find a less subtle way of discouraging junk mail.

Or maybe it is working and people are leaving the city in droves to sample the under-appreciated charms of that neck of the woods?

Somehow, I don't think so.

Scrap Of Sense

Here's a great idea from Dublin design-agency Dara Creative: A Website Scrappage Deal.

At Islandbridge, we ask our clients to think in terms of 'what are you like?' in order to help them help their customers make sense of what they do.

Dara's use of metaphor in this case is both elegant and effective, particularly in a downturn when the idea of getting something in return for trading in a 'banger' of a website is very appealing.

Vroom, vroom, Dara; this has my engine purring.

Many Words For Play

They say that children have as many words for play as we do for work.

Yesterday, I was delighted to see that even those children whose brains we suspected had grown addled through their addiction to virtual games had only one word for snow when they awoke to a whiter world: Play!

Mobile phones were (almost) forgotten by the moody teenagers who attend the school near our home as they got stuck into the age-old game of snowballing. Meanwhile, snowmen soon dotted the once-green areas, and some lone walkers found themselves under attack from a sudden flurry of white missiles.

Of course, the phones did come in handy when it came to recording the action or the works of art for posterity.

"Ah," said the old man with a smile, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

A lesson there for brand-owners too, methinks.