Editco.net

Well it certainly sounds like it, Captain Sensible and the mad scientist.

But Waitrose has signed up the contrasting culinary duo of Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal for a new campaign trying to persuade customers to cook 'proper' meals from proper ingredients.

And Waitrose is saying it will be taking the complete ad break on ITV (at a cheap rate allegedly) to allow the duo time to lecture us all. This is actually the most interesting part of the deal, ITV used for infomercials! What is the world coming to?

Ad giant WPP now boasts three of the UK's top five media agencies according to new figures from Nielsen to be published in full in Campaign on March 19.

Mediaedge (formerly Chris Ingram's Mediaedge:cia) has joined MediaCom and MindShare among the elite as it was one the few media agencies to increase its billings in 2009.

This is a considerable achievement by the management because the real point of WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell's contested acquisition of Ingram's business was the Mediaedge operation in Italy.

Cadbury, now part of Kraft of course, has had second thoughts about a Cadbury's Flake ad by esteemed director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, lots of Guinness commercials) and pulled it after some post production research (allegedly).

Given that they research these things endlessly before they get near a camera this looks like, one, a cock-up of major proportions or, two, an equally major case of corporate cowardice (and still a cock-up).

What's more Cadbury's has fired agency Saatchi & Saatchi and moved the business to sister agency Fallon, which won't do holding company Publicis' inter-agency relations much good at all.

Rory Bremner is doing a series on satire for Radio 4 and Billy Bragg was on Today this morning talking about protest songs (presumably Rory was somewhere else).

This is the best one, about Vietnam by Country Joe and the Fish:

People may be flooding into multiplexes to see James Cameron's Avatar, endless computer-generated cartoons and anything with Angelina Jolie or Russell Crowe in it (there's no accounting for taste) but the cinema advertising market is beached after an ocean of losses.

If you look into the small print of this report in the Guardian of STV's figures (STV is the ITV equivalent in Scotland) you'll see that Pearl and Dean, the venerable cinema advertising firm it bought for about £20m a decade ago, managed to lose £13m last year.

Here's IKEA's 'kitchen squad', the people who are supposed to persuade you that an IKEA kitchen isn't something you completely fail to remove from its box.

Which is probably a good service to offer (unless you're a fan of partially-opened boxes) but this reality stuff struggles to convince.

The Tories have been slipping in the polls and the final straw may be the revelation that William Hague, currently shadow foreign secretary and de facto deputy leader, was stitched up like a kipper when, in his time as Tory leader, Tory treasurer Michael Ashcroft persuaded him that he was going to pay his UK taxes in return for a seat in the Lords.

Ashcroft, whose millions have driven the Tory campaign in marginal seats over the last several years, appears to have proceeded to strike his own deal with the Parliamentary authorities - and avoided millions in income tax as his main residence remained Belize. Without telling Hague or indeed current Tory leader David Cameron.