Recent media coverage has pointed an accusing finger at the Royal Mint and claiming it is producing overpriced commemorative coins with minimal investment value.

Until recently Royal Mint commemorative coins were rare items and only struck for exceptional occasions. Experts now contend that the Royal Mint issues far too many coins in too many different metals whilst continually cranking up the retail price.

Is this a fair criticism? Well, the Royal Mint has created 68 coins to commemorate the 2012 Olympics. 68. How would you know which one to buy? These include a £5 gold coin selling on the Royal Mint website for £2,880. Richard Lobel of Coincraft, the UK’s largest dealer in the secondary market for Royal Mint coins, states that a consumer would only get around £1,400 – around 48% of the original price. A dealer would resell it for probably no more than £1,600.

Another expert, Seth Freeman of Baldwin’s, states “I’ve never known anyone get their money back, even in these days of high gold prices.”

Yet demand for Royal Mint commemorative coins is strong – last year they coined £150 million in sales. Shane Bisset,the Royal Mint’s Director of Commemorative Coin, is quite clear on their role. “Commemorative coins are not sold as investments. They’re sold to celebrate commemorative events.”

So, in terms of investment, it seems to be a case of heads or tails, you lose. But you will be the owner of a unique and well-crafted souvenir.

Too many of the latter dismiss the social networking site as purely a place where people swap pictures, trivia and hang out with friends. But a recent story in the Daily Telegraph may cause businesses to sit up, take notice and think again.

At the heart of the article is a report by financial advisors Deloitte which examines the benefits of free Facebook pages used by businesses for trade. Figures quoted in The Telegraph include Facebook being worth £1.1 billion to the UK economy and supporting over 18,000 jobs in the UK. Interestingly a similar piece in Media Week pushes up the figure to a £2.2 billion contribution to the 2011 GDP and Facebook’s growth and that of mobile apps have helped support over 230,000 jobs. I guess it depends on how you cut the stats.

Deloitte arrived at its conclusions through a number of calculations including Facebook’s value as an advertising medium, a platform for apps and a driver for sales of tech items like broadband and mobile.

This is all very good news but the momentum must be sustained. Facebook has put forward over £4 million of advertising credits to help 50,000 small businesses in the EU and joined the ‘Next Gen Skills’ campaign to help train young people in digital skills and the high-tech economy.

Small businesses need all the help they can get right now to maximise growth. Setting up a free Facebook page should be high on their list.

But there is a very serious point to this deliberately derivative new internet game. It wants to highlight the illegal practice of demanding dowries which is still widespread even though it was banned over 50 years ago. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau there were 8,391 dowry-related deaths in India in 2010 – many commit suicide as a result of physical and mental stress while other victims have been allegedly murdered.

Angry Brides has been launched by Shaadi.com and can be downloaded from their Facebook page. Players are brides-to- be and have to hit three potential grooms – a pilot, a builder and a doctor- with a variety of household objects like a frying pan, broomstick and a tomato.  http://www.facebook.com/shaadicom?sk=app_293631520675443

Shaadi hopes Angry Brides will create further awareness of the issue.

Apparently Jon Hamm will direct the first episode which runs for two hours. So that’s a Mad Men movie really. Creator Matthew Weiner commented, “I don’t think anyone is going to think it’s two episodes spliced together. There is a story that starts in the middle of it [but otherwise] it’s one story. The beginning and the ending are related to each other.”

Well, that’s a relief. Fans wait with interest.

The first story ran with the headline Stay off the booze for two days a week. It details finding by a government group and includes the following quote by Sir Ian Gilmore, Royal College of Physicians’ special adviser on alcohol. “There is an increased risk of liver disease for those who drink daily or near-daily compared with those who drink periodically.”

The second story features the headline Red wine ‘can ward off breast cancer’. It explores a study by a group of US medical researchers and includes the following statement – a glass of red wine a day may cut the risk of breast cancer.

Now red wine has consistently been mooted as beneficial to health over the years but would it be as efficacious if you only sipped it five days a week? Who knows? Not the medical profession it seems.

And what of New Year resolutions? Several sources date this back to Roman times when resolutions were made to gain favour with the gods, and it has only recently become associated with achieving personal goals such as losing weight, giving up smoking and to be more prudent in financial matters. This makes it a prime time for marketers pedaling weight-loss plans and nicotine substitutes, and recently banks have held ‘sales’ in the New Year.

New Year resolutions are always pledged with good intent but sadly it seems that many fall by the wayside as we trudge into late January. Have you got any this year?

Make no mistake, Dickens was commercially minded and he wrote A Christmas Carol  for money (he had severe debts at the time). But he believed in the story and paid for the production of the book in 1843, stipulating the selling price should be no more than five shillings so virtually everyone could afford it.

There is also a touch of serendipity about the book. Dickens’ timing was right as Simon Callow says, ”There was definitely something in the air. In 1841, Prince Albert brought the tradition of decorating the tree to England.”

It seemed the country, and many parts of the world, was ready to celebrate Christmas again.

Thanks to LinkedIn, the article appears in full below:

LinkedIn, the social-networking site for people with business cards, has released its list of the year’s most overused professional buzzwords, culled from the profiles of its 135 million members. As one might expect, they’re terms that sound awfully nice but say almost nothing specific about a person. They’re the type of terms that are roughly the equivalent of listing “showing up to work” in your skills section. (Note: this might be rough to read if you are one of the people using these words, but we all need tough love sometimes.)

For example, dynamic is at No. 10. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its primary meaning is “of or pertaining to force producing motion: often opposed to static.” So by using this word, you have literally told your potential employer that you are adept at not being stationary. You are the type of person who does things and moves from place to place.

At No. 9 is communication skills, and at No. 8 we have problem solving. Both of these guarantee nothing more than the person not being paralyzed by the prospect of a conversation or an empty stapler. Innovative is No. 7 and motivated is No. 6 — two more generic adjectives suggesting attributes that an employer would probably like to take for granted.

Track record is at No. 5. Note that it is not specified whether this track record is good or bad, though this person definitely has a track record of some kind. More important, a curriculum vitae is a track record in and of itself. Listing “track record” on a résumé is the equivalent of putting “reasons you should date me” on your OkCupid profile. Or tacking “things I need to buy” onto your shopping list.

At No. 4, we have extensive experience.

At No. 3 is effective, a promise that when you are being dynamic, you’re really making the most of it. And in second place, we have organizational — which may be important if you are, say, applying to be an accountant. But in most cases, it is not the most striking skill to be championing — it’s like saying one is punctual or has neat handwriting.

And the No. one most overused professional buzzword is creative. This attribute, like many of the others, is one that is better shown than told. As LinkedIn’s connection director put it in a release, “Use language that illustrates your unique professional accomplishments and experiences. Give concrete examples of results you’ve achieved whenever possible and reference attributes that are specific to you.” And please, never use the word synergy without your tongue firmly pressed into your cheek.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/12/13/ten-buzzwords-to-take-off-your-linkedin-profile-now/#ixzz1ggga9KWa

For starters, nobody buys film anymore. So Kodak decided to shift their focus to printing and, rather than concentrate on the quality of the output, they decided to zero in on the cost. And they had the courage to use the ‘c-word’ as Kodak is about beautifully cheap printing.

This looks like a pretty smart move as the recession grows scarier and scarier. Perhaps they decided that decades of previous advertising had established the quality of the Kodak name by using the strong emotional pull of ‘keeping memories’.

So Kodak are to be applauded for actually saying what people are looking for.

Initially, men joined up because they thought it would be an adventure or for reasons of patriotism. Many were convinced they would only be serving for a few months including Private Godfrey Buxton of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

“I’d had one year up at Cambridge and then volunteered for the Army. We were quite clear that Germany would be defeated by the 7th of October when we would go back to Cambridge.”

But as the war progressed and its true horrors became more widely known, recruitment advertising adopted different tactics. Ambient campaigns preyed upon the potential guilt or shame of not joining up as Private S.C. Lang encountered.

“I was walking down the Camden High Street when two young ladies approached and said, ‘Why aren’t you in the Army with the boys?’ So I said, ‘I’m sorry but I’m only seventeen’, and one of them said, ‘Oh, we’ve heard that one before. I suppose you’re also doing work of national importance.’

Then she put her hand in her bag and pulled out a feather. I raised a hand thinking she was going to strike me and this feather was pushed up my nose. Then a sergeant came out of one of the shops and said to me, ‘Did she call you a coward?’ I said yes and felt very indignant about it. He said, ‘Well, come across the road to the drill hall and we’ll soon prove that you aren’t a coward.’

Lang was duly signed up as the recruiting sergeant pressured him and appeared to deliberately ignore the fact he was just seventeen. So were the two girls really pushing Lang forward to join up from patriotic duty? Or were they in the pay of the recruiting sergeant to make young men feel ashamed?

In January 1915 the Order of the White Feather was created under the direction of Admiral Charles Fitzgerald. This group handed out white feathers to any young man not wearing a uniform whom they suspected of cowardice. They met with some success in shaming men to enlist but the tactic was also widely criticised.

Appealing to your patriotism or your fear: two powerful weapons to recruit people to go to war. Ethically one is reprehensible but in advertising the job is always about ‘getting results.’ Something to consider on this Remembrance Sunday.

]]> http://pgiw.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/recruitment-advertising-tactics-in-ww1-patriotism-or-a-white-feather/feed/ 0 bleedingpencil ww1 recruitment 2 ww1 recruitment 3 ww1 recruitment 4 white feather