Editco.net

Maverick Irish bookmaker Paddy Power (yes, he does exist) claims this ad showing hooligan wheelies has been banned.

So he's showing it on YouTube to try to get some cheap publicity prior to the big gambling fest of the Cheltenham jump racing Festival.

The Guardian reckons that the new Apple iPad ad, aired at the Oscars, reveals that the iPad is positioned as on the hoof entertainment for the masses, a departure for the Apple kings of cool.

The iPod and iPhone have both become mass market products of course, although it's possible that they weren't planned that way. And Apple, thanks to these and also the success of its newish Intel-powered Macs, is now such a huge company that anything it launches has to appeal to a large chunk of the local market.

But it will be interesting to see if its new giant status eventually affects its cooler than thou image.

And BBH, after a gruesome year in 2009, must be hoping that he funnels more business their way.

Keith Weed is a long-time Unilever-ite who, on the face of it, doesn't seem like the most exciting appointment.

He's been the personal care supremo for Unilever for about a decade now, in which sector the company has done well with Lynx and the like - and BBH, which has produced the ads for most of this stuff.

Not forgetting O&M with Dove, of course.

Anyway go-getter CEO Paul Polman has put him on the executive committee, the first time for a marketing director apparently. Which is a bit daft, considering that's what Unilever does.

WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell always tries to save up something for the hacks when he announces his results and this week he went for them being 'less worse' than they otherwise could have been.

This, alas, did not play as well on the Today programme as the 'bath-shaped recession' he essayed a few years ago.

Not only is 'less worse' ungrammatical and ugly but it's also completely meaningless.

As it happened WPP's profit only fell by 11 per cent to around $1bn because it got rid of 14,000 people.

WPP now finds itself in the slightly peculiar position of being the stock you buy if the ad market is going up and the one you dump if it ain't. Even though it's not biggest adland company, Omnicom is.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.