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

Now I’m hardly a prolific blogger at the best of times but if you’re a regular attentive and loyal reader, you’ll have noticed that recent posts have been skimpy to say the least. Your digital team has been rather hampered by x2 things:

1. Jim Wolffman has selfishly been en vacances in Montreal
2. Me, I, Claire Wood, is about to launch a Fringe show upon the unsuspecting public, the like of which you have never before seen. So that’s been eating up a good portion of my free time.

We are doing, courtesy of a very smart idea from Mr Brooke, a show on our fair barge, the Mary of Guise. This show is The Tempest, by a little known fellow called William Shakespeare. It’s not quite Shakespeare as you (might) know it. I’ve cut the script to bits (such arrogance!), we have live music peppering the fine Shakespearean tongue and, well, I never saw Jonny Depp in a Shakespeare play. (Not that I have exactly Jonny Depp in my cast but you’ll struggle to tell the difference…)

The spectacle starts on Monday. Runs from 9 to 21 August at 7:30pm each night except Sunday with a matinee both Saturdays at 2:30pm. Tickets are available here and I know everyone always says they’re selling fast but they genuinely are. So do pop along if you’re in that neck of the woods and fancy a little sliver of something approximating to culture. (Although don’t pop along spontaneously as we might be sold out - get a ticket Now and Then you can pop along. I’d hate you to be disappointed!)

An amazing lady called Lori Idlout popped in to visit us a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of clever Suzie at ’see me’.

Lori works for the Embrace Life Council in Nunavet, the most northern and most recently established province in Canada. The community living in (huuuuge) Nunavut numbers some 32,000 people. The median age of this community is 22. They speak 4 languages, one of which is English. Historically, a nomadic community, they were settled at last some decade in this incredibly inhospitable landscape (dark for three solid months of the year, beating sunlight for three months of the year and something in between the rest of the time) and urged to apply themselves to adhering to the same governing principles as the rest of that fair country. As you might imagine, it was all a bit of a shock to the system.

The suicide rate in Nunavut is incredibly high. Whether due to the clash of cultures, the remote land, the uncompromising weather or, as Lori suggested, the sudden exposure to slivers of a Western culture that offered aspirations that could never be realised for many of the community members. The Embrace Life Council was set up to explore how this had come about - and how this attempted suicide rate could be slowed if not ceased.

So Lori has been working away on improving the mental health of the young people up there. Similar to what we’re doing with ’see me’ down here - kind of. She outlined their approach to tackling the situation, the work they’ve been doing with young people locally and showed us some of the materials they’ve produced as part of all of this.

We see a lot of people talking in this here job. I’ve still to write about Malcolm Gladwell (thanks to Hamish’s nagging) and John Grant. Both of which were fascinating. And it’s hard to describe why Lori was so remarkably unusual without sounding trite. But she was humble, hopeful and imaginative in her approach to a situation which would overwhelm many more people with the scale of the challenge.

She offered three pieces of advice in essence to her young people:

Learn about what you feel about your identity

And respect your relationships

Wisdom that would not be out of place for people that aren’t 22 and living in Nunavut.

She finished with a lovely thought:

“When you’re going through such a hard hard time, you forget to see the things that are beautiful.”

Let’s not preach. But you could do worse.

At dinner that night, she was so kind as to present me (me!) with an Inuksuk, a stone figure that played a practical and spiritual role for the Inuit people. Jim took a rough looking photo of our lovely thing.

It occupies pride of place in the planning department. I’ll be happy to show and tell when next you’re passing.

Getting some v nice coverage for our latest BRU campaign.

The Scotsman have a big plump piece today - it can be viewed here.

The Sun have gloriously gone to town with the story.

There’s even some real live coverage of the press conference on the Mirror’s website (assuming you don’t mind sitting through the Kleenex ad first).

But find it all in its purest form on the IRN-BRU website here. Have fun.

Marketing Society Star Awards on Friday night. We did really rather well (oh how arrogant) with a couple of golds, seven silver awards and five bronzes between us and our tangible cousins.

Our esteemed Scottish Government client - for whom most of the above awards were collected - won Marketing Team of the Year which was very well-deserved.

IRN-BRU’s storming Can Clan event last autumn carried away one of the above silvers which was equally well-deserved.

But far and away highlight of the night was our very own Planning Director and my personal master, Mr Amers, winning Agency Star of the Year. Here he is looking modest. Though he hardly needs to.

A twelve day blogging absence when I’ve been at work for most of those days isn’t really acceptable I’d suggest. So for this, apologies. I can only blame busy-ness. A feeble excuse I know.

So apologies for being a little late in the day to draw your attention to this rather superb campaign just produced for Know The Score. Bundles of research with 18 to 24 year olds, the biggest users (mostly) of cocaine, demonstrated that:

- they were, by and large, blasé about the dangers of cocaine
- the only health risk that they took half seriously was the possibility of cocaine causing a stroke
- telling them that they might have a stroke as a sole advertising message was felt to be stretching credibility
- but presented as part of a handful of effects, some familiar and others (self-evidently) less so, built belief in the possibility and so encouraged them to question their previous perceptions

Six months of research in six lines.

Chris and David have done an absolutely cracking job with the creative. Thanks to them and to Gillian for her ever patient, pro-active and positive account handling. Judge the end result for yourselves here. And be sure to listen to the digital ads for spotify. I’m a bit biased - but they are magic.

I’m just looking through some online qual research that the fine guys and girls at face have engineered and moderated for us.

The qual was conducted with the Young. And I’m looking through various blog posts and wondering why now and again, they feature a capital D for no particular reason at the end of a sentence.

And then I look again at one particular cap D and I realise to my ageing horror that it’s a : D

Specifically:

Reminds me of when i was a kid

How to make yourself feel old.

I dipped a toe into the water of the Leith Festival last night. A chap called Liam Rudden, arts editor at the Evening News, is directing a play as part of the Leith Festival, round the corner from us at a fabulous little café / coffee bar called Kitsch.

The play is called “Cock and Bull Story” and it’s written by a couple of chaps called Richard Crowe and Richard Zajdlic. It’s a measure of my innocent eyes that I saw no insinuation in this until my play going colleagues started investigating the website. Or maybe it’s a measure of the fact that I’ve been brought up on terrible amateurish plays with poor puns as titles. Whichever. The title turned out to be infinitely cleverer than I had anticipated.

I shan’t spoil the surprise but shall let the director’s note speak for the content here. The play is “set in the working class, testosterone fuelled world of a boxing club” and tells the tale of a long-standing friendship. One of the boys is teetering on the brink of boxing stardom. The other is his coach, mentor and best friend. And, as it turns out, rabidly anti-gay.

This production is proper festival stuff. A tiny stage. Seats stuffed into a humming with fridges venue. But actually, the production values far outstripped (without the slightest disrespect meant to Kitsch) the relatively inauspicious surroundings. The acting was superb. The two boys were brilliant (and pretty – which helps).The lighting was cracking. And Mr Rudden directed beautifully, particularly considering the stage must have been all of eight foot square.

The script bursts into life in the first act. But by the second act, is showing its age. It was written almost twenty-five years ago so I guess it’s all credit to how times have moved on that it starts to seem slightly far-fetched as we bounce through act two. But the boys do it as much justice as you possibly could so the end is as poignant as you could hope.

It’s on til Saturday. Along with a whole array of other delights as part of the festival. Not least of which is, I believe, my photo in one of the art exhibitions. I shan’t tell you where.

As well as a dance off, the first floor had a cheese off last week on the barge.

Each person on the floor brought in one of their favourite cheeses. It was a wonderful varied selection of cheeses – from a supermarket Cheese String to a very smelly top notch Madame La Forge.

We each had to present our cheese and big it up. Then give a mark out of 10 for each cheese.

The winner was a joint effort from Yvonne & Toni for their ‘Creamy Dream’ and they won a wonderfully cheesy ‘Best of Barry Manilow’ CD. Steve came a very close second with a cheese that was actually made by Pixies! He won the much loved ‘ Michael Parkinson Collection’.

It was such a good laugh smelling out the barge and just chilling over cheese,wine and nibbles.

To many more Cheese board Thursdays!

You see some funny things in Leith. My favourite sighting to date was a man, dressed as a tourist with the trademark heavy backpack, pausing to look out over the water on the Bernard Street bridge over the Water of Leith.

When I walked past him, I noticed that what looked for all the world like a backpack containing his worldy possessions, was actually a backpack containing, of all things, a parrot. It was sitting quite happily on its perch inside the rucksack, watching the world go by. Fairly surreal as sightings go. Needless to say, I didn’t have my camera to hand.

But I think even this sight of strangeness was excelled a couple of weeks ago when 1,500 rubber ducks floated carefree down the Water of Leith to the astonishment of onlookers one slightly hazy Sunday afternoon.

Stockbridge has an annual rubber duck race on their stretch of the Water of Leith. But once the winning duck has passed the finishing line, the race organisers gather downstream scooping the losing ducks up into huge nets.

This year, dramatically, disaster struck. The nets burst with the weight of the oncoming ducks so they drifted on, all 1,500 of them, unencumbered all the way through Leith and out to sea.

I wish desperately I had been sitting slightly hungover outside one of the lovely shoreside pubs as the sea of ducks swept past. I’ll have to mark the date in my diary next year. Just in case. And maybe I’ll manage to carry my camera with me then too.