Editco.net

Political advertising is an extremely inexact science despite the presence of endless pollsters and researchers. And the client is the ultimate nightmare of course.

Even though everybody is talking of a hung Parliament in the UK the Lib Dems, who may be the power brokers, are languishing on 17 per cent in most of the polls. They need 22 per cent of the actual poll to maintain their representation in the House of Commons.

They've just produced their first ads, by agency Iris, saying that the Tories and Labour are effectively the same (which actually they'e not), dubbing them Labservatives.

Rod Liddle, who now no longer appears to be in line to edit the Independent, is the first blogger to be censured by the Press Complaints Commission.

This is for asserting, back in December, that afro-Caribbean young men were 'overwhelmingly' responsible for violent crime in London. The PCC said Liddle and the Spectator has failed to substantiate the accusation.

Rod prides himself on saying the hitherto unsayable but is he right?

Well there's no doubt that young black men are responsible for a lot of crime, often against each other as it's easy to see from police actions like Operation Trident.

And the great man's point is that businesses who regard humans as friends rather than enemies do best.

A point Tolstoy makes in his great novel about a love affair interrupted by a train.

But I do wonder if Richard is a bit swayed by CEO soundbites. There's one in the link from the head honcho at GE.

Hardly a cosy company.

Especially when they seem to be playing for both sides.

As Stephen Armstrong points out in this Guardian piece, the Tories have signed up M&C Saatchi to put the boot into Gordon Brown whereas the Labour Party's agency Saatchi & Saatchi doesn't have anybody resembling a Saatchi.

And neither agency has one Charles Saatchi, the creative wizard behind the Tories' most famous campaigns - 'Labour isn't working' - even though, at the time (1979), he was hardly a Tory.

Charles has now severed his connections with M&C, the agency he set up with brother Maurice when they were turfed out of Saatchi & Saatchi by a now-forgotten Chicago fund manager called David Herro.

Which is precisely what various plotters, most recently the David Milliband party from a year or so ago, then the resigning James Purnell and even the hapless Patricia Hewitt/Geoff Hoon combo, have been saying ever since the clunking Scot took over from Tony Blair.

We didn't really believe it then, with David Cameron and the Tories ten clear points ahead in the polls, but we do now.

Despite the orchestrated abuse of most of the national Press chancellor Alistair Darling, increasingly described as a national treasure because he doesn't lie out of habit, succeeded in delivering a balanced Budget which most people think was the best that could be done in the circumstances.

My friend Andy Evans, the maestro of IT publisher and ad network operator Net Communities has chosen this gem from the Guardian's Charlie Brooker as a take on what we are served up with as TV news.

But how else would they do it?

Even on Newsnight the victims are served up for Jeremy Paxman's delectation, only to be spat out with the viewers none the wiser about the issue - although satisfied to a degree because a politician or a bureaucrat has received their come-uppance.

The only answer of course is longer news programmes with fewer items taking more time.

It's an interesting take on marketing hotels to associate them with Jack Nicholson's in The Shining (and there's another ad in the same campaign with a take on Pycho's terrifying Bates Motel).

But that's what RCKR (or Y&R) is doing with its new Premier Inns campaign featuring Lenny Henry:

The more than somewhat accident-prone Garry Lace of agency Beta, last in the news for a disastrous campaign for the poster industry that seemed to offend everybody, has deployed the old pals act to win frozen food retailer Iceland's £10m account.

He's an old mucker of marketing director Nick Canning apparently, his client when Canning was at News Group and Lace at TBWA.

The business moves from Machester's Tom Reddy advertising, who have also had their share of accidents, choosing benighted 'celebrity' Kerry Katona as the downmarket 'face' of the brand.

Nobody has a clue of course, including owner Rupert Murdoch and son James who surely cooked up the scheme to charge Times online readers £1 a day, a bargain £2 for the week which presumably includes the Sunday Times.

Coming hard on the heels of Russian Alexander Lebedev's 'purchase' of the Independent (he's been given £9.25m to take it away and kindly given Independent News and Media a pound back) this is all beginning to look rather like a Last Chance Saloon for the UK's newspaper businesses.

Lebedev may decide to follow his London Evening Standard model and give the Independent away (in major cities anyway) which will put even more pressure on papers including The Times, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph.

**Well actually it's not that Aleksandr (wish I could spell this bloody name) but Alexander Lebedev, the former Russian KGB agent, who also owns the London Evening Standard.

But the non-meerkat Alex clearly knows a bargain when he sees one, he's bought the from Tony O'Reilly's Independent News and Media for a quid, exactly what he paid Associated Newspapers for the Standard.

And INM has chucked an extra £9m as a sweetener - nice work if you can get it.

The Standard is allegedly doing better now that it's free as the higher circulation produces more advertising. Not that you can get it at Oxford Circus most afternoons.