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Leith is where we are.
The Leith Agency's weblog.

A few months ago this article appeared in The Guardian. Tyrells, the independent crisp maker, had succeeding in getting its products out of (yes out of) Tesco stores. Tesco had apparently sourced the crisps indirectly, against the wishes of Tyrells. Will Chase, the founder of Tyrells, expressed his desire to support the independent outlets that had supported him. Allowing his product into Tesco would have run counter to this principle.

It was this rare adherence to principles (presumably at the expense of additional profit) that made me want to find out more. This and my memories of working on Phileas Fogg in a previous life and having seen the merry dance that they were led by the multiple grocers.

So I had a look at the Tyrells website.

Gratifyingly the website supports the image I’d gained from the Guardian article. It’s personal, unpretentious and easy to navigate. It’s not quite homemade but there’s definitely no fancy flash stuff. On the other hand there is plenty of interesting back story stuff, like the fact that they grow all their own potatoes. The whole site speaks of cottage industry, principles and a close-knit team.

Indeed, there’s a section on the site that features the Tyrells Team. There’s a photo of everyone from Wayne the potato foreman to Will Chase himself. And there’s a link by each picture that allows you to e-mail each of them direct. This small, cottage, principled thing is accessible too.

Or so I thought.

I sent Will an e-mail basically saying that I’d seen a whole load of marketing veneer in my time and that it was nice to see some genuine brand integrity for once. He’s obviously a busy man with a business to run but, to me, the direct e-mail link carried with it the implicit promise of some kind of response. Is that fair? Anyway, we’re three months on with no reply and the feeling that Tyrells is not as small as it’s cracked down to be.

This web accessibility thing represents an interesting challenge for brands. There’s a general desire to get behind the scenes of things these days, whether it’s via Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares or Google. And offering direct access to the people behind the brand is, in some cases, a valid strategy. But it comes at a price. For a while I had my e-mail address published on our website and received dozens of messages every week. This gave me some valuable insights into who was visiting our site and why, the occasional useful contact, and lots of job applications. It also gave me the burden of replying, which I conscientiously tried to do. In the end I gave up and had my e-mail address taken off the site. But, having removed it, I was left with the distinct feeling of an opportunity missed. That’s sort of how I feel about Tyrells too.

I’m not sure that it’s strictly in the spirit of this blogging lark to blow one’s own trumpet but here goes.

The image is a framegrab from David Reviews, the advertising review site.

It shows the average review score for all of Leith’s featured commercials in 2006. We’re currently averaging 70% which, at the time of writing, is the highest score of any UK agency. You’ll need to click on the thumbnail to read the list properly, but it’s pretty tough competition.

This blog will probably act like a Queen’s Award for Industry and be the kiss of death for our future reviews.

I got invited to judge The Sharks International Awards in September in Kinsale. I turned it down at first because it fell in the week of my wife’s 50th birthday. But in mid-refusal I changed my mind. It dawned on me that Kinsale would be the ideal place to have a long weekend of birthday celebrations. Luckily, the missis agreed and the day after the judging ended my whole family came across.

Although the organisers have speakers from the world of advertising like John Hegarty for example, they also do one very smart thing: they invite a speaker from outside the business too.

This year they excelled themselves by inviting Mike Scully, the Executive Producer of The Simpsons and his wife Julie Thacker, a very funny writer in her own right, with stuff like The Golden Girls to her credit.

Late on the Thursday night, Mike and Julie joined us for dinner straight off the plane. The pair of them were jet-lagged and Julie had a chest cold but they joined in the chat and got stuck in like the rest of us to John Hegarty’s very fine self-cultivated “Hegarty’s Red”.

Mike was slightly alarmed to learn that he was billed to address his audience of hungover media whores for two hours, not the easy one hour he had in his head. As it turned out on the day in Kinsale’s ancient town hall, we could have listened to him for six hours. He was effortlessly funny and informative. He talked without notes and answered every question he was asked with great generosity. He was a lot funnier than most stand-ups.

For example, he started out by asking to be interviewed. My own son Olly stuck his hand in the air and ended up on stage in a chair facing Mike, Parkinson-style. Mike had pre-scripted the questions so he could milk them for laughs (“So Mike, tell me about your heroin and crack addictions?”)

What followed was Scully’s life story, laced with off the cuff gags and spiced up with behind-the-scenes stories about The Simpsons.

He was born into a blue-collar family in Springfield, Massachussets. Mealtimes were colourful: “My father was the only man who could work the word ‘cocksucker’ into grace.”

He moved to California where he sold jokes to stand-ups. He was jobless for six months and his wife left him – “so it wasn’t all bad”. His second wife Julie coaxed him into joining The Simpsons.

It takes 20 people 9 months to make one Simpsons show and there have been 400 to date. They try to get away with murder but US laws on TV censorship have tightened up since Janet Jackson’s live nipple exposé during the Superbowl and they can’t show Homer’s butt crack any more.

Someone in the audience asked about product placement. Scully says a lot of advertisers make approaches but it can backfire on them. Like when they worked the brand Breath Assure into the script of a show and Homer asked: “Hey Marge, did you hear that Breath Assure causes cancer?”

Someone else asked if there had been times when they turned down stars’ requests to be in the show. Scully said if he had his way Madonna would never get on: “If ever I want a sour-faced bitch, I’ll go somewhere else!” Al Gore got invited on but declined. When he came back later during his presidential campaign he was told: “No, sorry, you had your chance.”

Anyway, you get the picture. The two hours whizzed by and soon enough I was back here at my screen in Leith looking at an e-mail from the Scully man himself. He asked me to send him a few Leith ads “because I hate to miss a good joke”. So I sent a bunch of stuff down the interwebtube. Here’s what he saw: Electric Lady Carling Crab Pintlings Irn-Bru ‘Baby’ and Leith Xmas viral and here’s what he said:

“Hey Gerry,

Mike”
Later on, I sent him our most recent Irn-Bru ad. This One and this is what he said:

“Hey Gerry,

Happy Holidays,
Mike”

So it’s official; we’re funny. Coming from Mike Scully, that really means something.

The Agency is the sort of place where anything can happen.

Last week for instance, Mr. Rowley rushed out of his office, binoculars in hand, imploring the entire third floor to look out of the window. “An Otter! An Otter!” he excitedly cried. Sure enough, across the Water of Leith, a sleekit beastie was swimming alongside and exploring the nooks and crannies of the opposite quayside.

The combined wildlife expertise of the floor was put to the test and found wanting.

I’ve seen otters in the Highlands and thought it might be one, although it would have been a fantastically rare spot, in the middle of a city. Matthew from Finance thought it might be a humongously large rat. Despite pointing a Nikon 300mm lens at it, while hanging out the windows, we couldn’t tell what it was definitively.

So Mr. Rowley and Chris, the owner of the aforementioned Nikon, donned coats and ran downstairs to get a closer look. This was the fastest any of us have seen either of them move.

The otter was not phased by being pursued and photographed by two fast walking gents. It even poked its head out of its hiding hole as if to ask, “What are you two up to? Do you want to make something of it?” Mr. Rowley later confessed he had been ready to turn on his heels just in case of an otter attack.

Chris managed to get off a few good snaps and here’s the inquisitive fellow querying his pursuers’ right to exist.

© Chris Hamilton

A quick photo comparison on the web ruled out the intial otter theory.

Our identification attempts then veered wildly from stoats to weasels to an outside bet on a pine martin. This was proved to be fanciful as Gerry Farrell our resident wildlife expert looked in on the excitement and then at the pic, nonchalantly pronouncing, “That’s a mink. Hard bastards mink - they’ll fight anything.”

So what we saw was a “Leith Otter.”

Leith Walk has more than its fair share of quirky shops, which either have fun names, or which offer niche services, or both.

Take Borlands for example. They spotted a gap in the market for a combined snooker, darts and TV repair business.

Then you have a hydroponics business that pays homage to the Proclaimers in its name.

Or the planner’s favourite, which actually sells telescopes and such like.

The betting shop whose name can not be mentioned.

And, continuing the theme of the bard, Leith Walk’s favourite combined book and record store.

We liked Elvis Shakespeare so much that we did and ad for them last year.