Has Christmas come too early?

I will keep this short. Christmas, every year without fail, comes stupidly early. Now I know this isn't a new thing and spoken about so much every year so I'm not going to bore you with it, but this year it has dawned on me it is here already. I bought my first mince pies yesterday (and I know they've been out ages already), I mean I love this fact, mince pies are ace. I would happily eat them all year round but by buying products such as these and making them perennial favourite are we ruining the festive season, are we in danger of making Christmas nothing but a time for presents and eliminating those little nostalgic festivities which make it all that it more special.

On the other hand Easter appears to be a more regulated time of year for businesses. However with companies only being allowed to promote Easter eggs around that time of the year Cadbury's found another way to promote the great taste of the creme egg back in 2006 with the limited edition dairy milk bar with creme egg filling and two years after that in 2008 launching the evil twin of the creme egg the twisted bar. Having been promoted in the same sort of way and appealing to those who jus love the taste without so much of the Easter connotations this has become a remarkably successful product.

Having said all this you can buy a turkey and all the trimmings all year round but we don't do a christmas meal all year round do we...

Is Harvey the new Aleksandr

This is Harvey, and right now I am loving Harvey for so many reasons. Not only is this dog just plain awesome but he makes a great focal character for an advert which has the potential to be just as successful as those cute little meerkats. 'Every home needs a Harvey' is a new advert (ok its new to me despite being released in September of this year) from 'The Red Brick Road' on behalf of Thinkbox. 


Thinkbox are the main marketing body for some of the UK's biggest TV channels. On their website they say the advert is "designed to show, in an engaging way, the power of TV advertising to affect people's decisions... this is essentially about TV driving instant success in a competitive market."


I think this advert is just great. It effectively works on several levels to show just how effective TV advertising is. Firstly by the depiction of Harvey using the his own advert to try and entice potential adopters (and despite not seeing whether it was successful we kind of presume it was on the basis that we all now want a Harvey). The other level being that by agreeing that we would like a Harvey we are interacting with the ad so admitting that its core message about TV advertising being effective must be true, and we know this is more than just us thinking this by the amount of chat going on about it on the web, including multiple Facebook groups about the ad.