When I were a lad in advertising, topical ads were all t’rage.

Responding quickly to take advantage of an opportunity presented by something in the news was a win, win, win situation.

It made the agency look proactive, engaged, interested in the eyes of the client.

It made the brand team look good in the eyes of their business.

It made the brand look good in the eyes of consumers.

I remember a couple of days after the 1987 hurricane, Volvo ran a black and white press ad featuring a press photograph of one of their cars that had been hit by a falling tree. The occupants had emerged unscathed, reinforcing the brand’s reputation for safety.

Brands such as Heineken and Durex clearly had contingency budgets ringfenced to allow for this kind of activity.

More recently the same topical principle has been applied to this bus-back execution…

That’s the ‘traditional’ approach to topicality.

But what does topical advertising look like in 2010? Maybe a little like this?

During the extended cold snap of January this year, we noticed a few people on Twitter talking about the fact that cans of IRN-BRU left in the car overnight had frozen solid.

So we created WillMyIRNBRUFreezeInTheCar.com, a simple, single-function, topical microsite that answers its own question.

The site was conceived and built in an afternoon. It cost less than £x (where x < you think), including purchase of the domain.

The user simply selects the predicted overnight temperature in their location using a slider device and the site tells them whether their IRN-BRU is at risk via a series of randomised, amusing responses.

We then waited (not very long) for the next cold snap and promoted the link via IRN-BRU’s Twitter account.

In next 36 hours or so we generated just under 750 unique visits, and some very favourable qualitative response.

No doubt we’ll have a few more opportunities to further promote the site before the end of winter, next time hopefully with an offline PR ‘booster rocket’.

Expect to see more of this down-and-dirty, low-cost, do-and-learn style of topical/tactical digital activity over the coming months.

Social channels thrive (nay depend) on social content or social objects as they’re commonly referred to.

And clever, brand-relevant, topical content is as good a route to generating social objects as any.

Blonde’s attention was diverted yesterday from the virtual aspects of the IRN-BRU Can Clan to the Homecoming event that everyone’s work has been leading up to.

7,000 people turned up to Glasgow Green on a lovely day to enjoy free music from Pearl & the Puppets and The Zutons, and to break a world record.

Here’s the “the man from Del Guinness, he say yes” moment when the new record for the most people simultaneously dancing the cancan was confirmed. Still waiting on the final official figure but it will be over 1,000.

Meanwhile, back in the virtual world, the online cancan line is tantalisingly close to the magic 5,000 ‘BRUZERS’.

The BRUZERS were also a prominent part of the event branding. Here they are behind one of Pearl’s puppets on stage.

Nice piece in The Sun highlighting celebrity involvement in the IRN-BRU Can Clan. As detailed in the earlier post on this subject, Can Clan is IRN-BRU’s inimitable, fun take on this year’s Homecoming celebrations – a free music event on Glasgow Green on 13th September, including a cancan world record attempt, and the world’s largest online cancan.

We have recently launched the IRN-BRU Can Clan site.

Can Clan is IRN-BRU’s take on the 2009 Homecoming celebrations. The Can Clan will gather at Glasgow Green on September 13th to make an attempt on the Guinness World Record for the highest numer of people simultaneously performing the cancan – Can Clan / cancan geddit? There will also be a free mini music festival with a couple of exciting acts that will be announced later this month.

The role of the microsite is to support and promote the Can Clan event, and it features the world’s largest virtual cancan. Anyone can join this virtual cancan by creating their own “BRUZER” – as nearly 400 people have done at the time of writing.

The site is fully wired for social media showing and telling via all the usual channels and mechanics, and you can create your own group or mini-clan. The BRUZERS are fully portable as avatars and widgets.

It’s good to see the brand creating something original and of value to its drinkers as part of Homecoming rather than just jumping on the bandwagon like certain other soft drinks brands we could mention…

Partick Thistle are riding high at the top of the first division Score With IRN-BRU league table.

Details of the promotion are all in this previous post.

Here at Blonde we’re speculating that Partick’s table-topping performance and the fact that the club has one of our Score widgets embedded prominently in its homepage may not be entirely coincidental…

With just over three weeks to go, they’re currently looking good for the £7,000 prize for youth development at the club.

As part of its ongoing sponsorship of the Scottish Football League (SFL), IRN-BRU has just launched a new £70,000 fund to help with youth development at the 30 SFL clubs, and a promotion mechanic that will allow the fans to determine how that fund is allocated.

The promotion is called Score With IRN-BRU. It is an SMS text based promotion that is being prominently featured on a number of pack variants. Participants text “Score” plus the division and first 4 letters of their club to the promotion number.

You can win for yourself, in that all participants (over the age of 16) are entered into a draw for one of five home cinema systems.

And you can win for your club, in that all texts feed into a series of league tables hosted on the Phenomenal Footy website. The higher the position of your club when the competition closes on 28th May, the more money it will get for youth development.

To allow ardent fans the opportunity to keep a close eye on league table movements, we’ve developed widgets for desktop and social media. These give real time updates on the progress of your team. These will no doubt become increasingly useful as the competition progresses to its climax at the end of May. The promotion is only a few days old but there is already a healthy level of activity. If this competition is anything like the Real WAGS competition we ran last year, then things will hot up in the final furlongs. Over 47,000 Real WAG votes were cast in the last 15 days of that competition.

The Score With IRN-BRU promotion is another example of the brand’s “Real Football” approach to its sponsorship of the SFL. This marries the strong grass-roots community presence of the brand with the strong, grass-roots community passion that characterises the support for SFL teams.

The Sun, The Star, Scotland on Sunday, The Daily Record and The Daily Express all picked up on the Ads That Never Ran section of the IRN-BRU site over the last few days. This led to a record day on Monday in terms of unique visits, time on site (over 5 minutes) and page views for the Ads That Never Ran section.

Hats off to Burt Greener for the coverage.

I beg your pardon?

These are the names of a few of the IRN-BRU ads that can be found in the Favourite Ads section of the new IRN-BRU website.

To say that IRN-BRU is a content rich brand via its advertising heritage is a bit of an understatement. But as if a mini-archive of ads that did run wasn’t enough, we’ve also included a section of ads that didn’t.

This section is the subject of a separate post, but suffice to say here that it has enabled to tap into an even richer seam of content, based on the fact that the ads that did run are just the tip of a creative iceberg going back over more than a decade.

Here’s a more comprehensive list of ads from the two sections…

Bitches, Suck, Dick, Laid, Ass, Snog, Mad Ferret, Hard Core Prawn, Nookie .

I challenge you not to…

A couple of hours getting very dusty in a spooky storage facility in Granton turned out to be time extremely well spent. We were raiding the archives for IRN-BRU poster concepts that, for one reason or another, failed to see the light of day. This is going back to 1994, so there was potentially a lot of stuff.

Some of the old files were missing or in the wrong place, but we came back with nearly 70 pieces of paper ranging from hand-rendered scamps to fully worked up presentation visuals.

Some of the concepts are recognisable as coming from the same stable as ads that have graced the bill boards of Scotland over the last decade or so. But some are the basis of entirely original campaigns that have never been in he public domain before. Until now that is.

The new IRN-BRU website features an Ads That Never Ran section, and we’ve launched with a selection of 12 concepts. More will be rolled out over time. Here are a couple of examples to whet the appetite.

We’ve just launched the all new IRN-BRU brand website. The launch coincides with that of the new “IF” TV commercial, which, not surprisingly, features prominently on the site.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

There is other advertising based content, housed in two sections named Favourite Ads (ads that did run) and Ads That Never Ran (ads that didn’t – in case that isn’t clear from the title). These sections will be the subject of separate posts.

From a digital strategy point of view the most interesting section is one that we’ve called the Community Centre. The idea behind this is to give a platform to the healthy number of consumer fan clubs and IRN-BRU communities that exist in social media. They are doing a good job of spreading the word about the brand. Now, via the Community Centre, the brand can return the favour by spreading the word about them.

Fan club and brand group administrators can upload details of what they stand for, a link to their site or page and a representative visual. The result is the digital equivalent of a customer ad display in a newsagent window.

We’ve also provided access to a range of visual assets that can be downloaded and used on these sites.

So, rather than jumping in feet first and setting up official brand spaces on the likes of Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, we’re hoping to help grow the membership of unofficial communities. These have more credibility and tend to express their pro-brand views in forthright ways that would make even a brand like IRN-BRU blush.

As well as there being a lot of active IRN-BRU communities out there, there is plenty of IRN-BRU news and chat, not to mention a good smattering of colourful interesting blog posts. Via a Google News feed we’re pulling this news into the site. It’s a good way to introduce dynamic content on a daily basis, and it confirms the impression of IRN-BRU as a talked about, happening brand. The vast majority of comment is positive.

Watch this space for news on results.