For those new to our little blog every Christmas we play our own version of Secret Santa.  Being the creative lot that we are, Secret Sketch Santa has a slight twist on the traditional secret santa format.

1, Each staff member picks another staff member’s name out of the hat.

2, Draw them in such a fashion that their likeness will be suitable to place on the blog without causing widespread offence.

No one (apart from me) knows who has drawn whom and it is down to you, our plucky readers to vote on which is your favourite – we will reward one of you witha lovely bag of sweeties at the end of the day for your efforts.

To be in with a chance of winning, cast your vote and tweet a link to the post, including a #SecretSketchSanta hashtag.  A random voter will be drawn out of the hat just after voting closes and a bag of Haribo will be promptly stuffed into a jiffy bag and put in the post.

Voting will close at 3pm at which point all of our artists will be revealed and the picture with the most votes will earn some sort of prize for it’s artist.

*********** VOTING CLOSED – WINNER IS NICOLA! ***********

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

MARK was drawn by JO

JAMES was drawn by PETER

MITHUL was drawn by CLAIR

RACHEL S was drawn by JAMES

MARTIN was drawn by ADRIAN

MIKE was drawn by CHRIS

SCOTT was drawn by RACHEL S

BEN G was drawn by LEE

CLAIR was drawn by RACHEL A

SARAH was drawn by BEN E

CHRIS was drawn by MITHUL

NICOLA was drawn by MARK

GRAHAM was drawn by MARTIN

ADRIAN was drawn by BEN G

BEN E was drawn by SARAH

LEE was drawn by MIKE

RACHEL A was drawn by NICOLA

JO was drawn by GRAHAM

PETER was drawn by SCOTT

Young Jack Henderson could well be his own worst enemy.  What started out as a small and well meaning fundraising idea has escalated into an adventure which has consumed his life – as well as those of his parents, Ed & Rose - and turned it into an internet sensation which has charmed thousands.

Jack – armed with his trusty Crayolas and felt tips – set out with an idea: to raise money for the Children’s hospital that cared for his younger brother Noah by drawing whatever visitors to his website requested in return for a charitable donation.  The only restrictions he imposed were the type of rules that you would reasonably expect of a 6 year old: nothing naughty – and in Jack’s words ‘I don’t want to draw anyone dying or being died’.

Their initial target of a raising a humble £100 has been well and truly blown out of the water with the current total on their just giving page (which is still accepting donations!) standing well in excess of £27,000.  Not only this but they have also amassed over 7,000 Facebook fans and nearly 1,000 followers of the Twitter account, diligently and warmly run by his Dad.  You may have seen them in the media recently. Oh, and he now has a book available too.

After completing an amazing 536 drawings, Jack is pooped.  Regular readers of our little blog will know that I enjoy a good doodle myself and I’ve loved checking out Jack’s masterpieces – so I thought I would track down Ed Henderson who has kindly spared us a his time to answer a few probing questions…

So for all the parents out there – just how do you rein in the ego of a 6 year old who has suddenly found himself in the media spotlight?

We made sure we kept him very insulated from too much of the nonsense that can go on. While it is great that everyone wants to congratulate him, being a 6 year old is quite simple, he gets a few people bigging him up, he gets  a big big headed, he gets a few meanies, he gets sad. We had to let him enjoy some of it but made sure that whenever we felt he overstepped the mark, we made sure he knew his standing in the family and the world.

To what extent are you ‘trained’ in web design and social media? Was there a steep learning curve involved in managing a site that suddenly attracted so much attention?

I build websites for a living and have used/advised social media for myself and my clients. On this scale however, no training. When you are at the eye of this social media hurricane it was manic. A couple of times I was so overwhelmed with communication I had to close the Mac and walk away for a while. Its relenting, tough but ultimately rewarding interacting with wellwishers, fans and followers. I wouldn’t have swapped it for the world.

"Gorilla swinging in the lianas in the jungle being chased by a tribe of indigenous people"

A question for Jack this time: who would win in a dancing contest between John Barrowman and Mr Bean?

Mr Bean – because he is a really funny dancer

Did you have a conscious strategy behind your online presence or was it something that grew organically?

We didn’t even have a Facebook page till Day 6 and even then Rose (Jack’s Mum) had to convince me! Jack had a Twitter account since birth (because I am a geek and reserved it for him). After that, “suck it and see” and “make it up as you go” are two phrases that spring to mind.

"Unicorn taking his pet baby elephant for a walk"

Another for Jack – what’s more fun? Getting a Hug from your mum or jumping on your Dad?

Both of them, I like jumping on my Dad becuase its fun and I like getting a hug from Mum because shes warm!

How did the book deal come about?

Someone posted it on their Facebook wall, no idea who. Sara O’Connor spotted it, twas the Heatblast picture.  Sara is a Senior Editor for Hodder Childrens. She called me, I thought it was a windup at first. It progressed from there.

Now that Jack has finished all his drawings and you look back – is there anything that you would have done differently if you had the chance to do it all again?

Jack – Nothing, I loved it all.
Dad & Mum – Closed picture requests a bit earlier than 2 weeks, 536 pics was a lot.

With all the media furore that has surrounded Jack combined with the technical and logistical challenges that surround managing such a popular website, there’s one thing that we really need to know – what does Jack want for Christmas?

Guitar, Space Shuttle (Lego), thats all.

Huge thanks to Ed, Rose and Jack.  Do something nice today and drop them a little donation. Or a really big one if you want to.

DOWNLOAD August’s Desktop Calendar

• Our free desktops are available in these resolutions:
  480×320 (iPhone), 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 960×640 (iPhone 4), 1024×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024 (iPad), 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440.
• If there’s a screen resolution that you’d like for our next wallpaper let us know!

We thought it’d be awfully nice if you could pick out a favourite.  Take a look at all 9 drawings below, cast your vote and let us know that you’ve voted with the following Tweet:

I want to win some dubious artwork from @fluidcreativity! http://bit.ly/mRAVn4 Please vote & RT to enter #FluidDoodle

At 3pm, we’ll close the voting and pick a winner out of the hat.  Our designers will take the doodle judged most popular by you lot as well as your favourite doodle, colour it in real nice and you will receive one design on a mug and the other as a lovely canvas print – fit for your office toilet!

Take a look at our efforts and get voting!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

“A cat playing golf”

“A clown eating a chicken’s foot”

“Bee dressed as Santa”

“A Dog playing basketball”

“The world’s tallest farmer”

“The Bogey monster under a bed”

“A happy teapot”

“An ice skating penguin”

“A vampire pig”

We have broken down our favourite talks into bite sized pieces so that you can digest the most useful nuggets of information so do share it around if you find it useful!

Click to see notes on each of the following talks

1. Retail Panel
2. Paid Search Innovation (and Google Remarketing)
3. Enterprise SEO
4. Market Focus – Travel
5. Negative SEO
6. Attribution & Beyond
7. Link Building Secrets
8. Global Search
9. Stat-o-rama
10. Social Commerce
11. Market Focus – Gaming
12. Mobile Marketing Goes Mainstream
13. Feeds & Microformats
14. Analytics 2.0
15. Location, Location, Location
16. Wordpress SEO

Retail Panel

• Customers want to be treated as individuals so personalisation is important.  Target and segment your customer base.
• Generic copy may compromise this personal aspect so think about how you would talk to your customers and make sure that your copy reflects this.
• Use SEO to promote your products and your brand, use PPC to segment your audience further.
• Utilise all assets of the search results to improve delivery.  Google product results are a good way of conveying the breadth of your product range.  Google local listings obviously a good way of targeting geographical segments.
• Tailor search and usability to work with other media – e.g IPad interface work much differently to a PC so do what you can to encourage engagement.
• re:  proposed cookie laws – IP recognition could be an alternative.
• People are impatient – make the journey to purchase as short as possible.
• Retailers should consider mobile Apps to target returning customers (e.g Ebay’s App which makes it quicker to use the site).  Don’t develop an App just for the sake of it – if your site is purely a mobile site then there is clearly no need for it.
• Forget waiting round for ‘mobile phone internet’ revolution – we’re past it.  Thanks to IPad and tablet PCs we’re now in the age of ‘mobile internet’
• Analytics is your friend – use it to determine how you can make the customer journey easier/shorter.
• Use Facebook to research your customers so that you can segment and target them.
• Many people are logged into their Google account all the time so don’t be afraid to use Social channels to help pepper their results with links.
• Facebook ‘likes’ are supposedly worth around $2 so keep conversation going on your Facebook page to encourage more ‘likes’.
• If you operate within a niche market then your following will be more likely to engage you and be passionate abt the products you sell.  The hard part is finding things to talk about, which is where many large brands fall down.  Smaller brands can capitalise on this.
• Don’t pigeonhole yourself as an SEO/Affiliate/Social – think like a marketer.
• Affiliate marketing is underutilised by many retailers – if you have the capability to generate a recruitment campaign then make use of affiliate marketing if you can.

Paid Search Innovation

• Product extensions highlight particular products within your ads.  Excellent way to get pre-qualified traffic to your site and boost your CTR.
• Be wary of competitiveness as this may reduce CTR.
• Paid video ads will be coming soon – currently rolled out in US only.
• Google +1 hasn’t been completely rolled out to UK yet although when it has been it will be a good way to merge Social and Paid Search.  Recommend paid ads to friends in your social circle.

• When considering paid search, make sure you take into consideration your spend across all media and determine where money should be spent on a day-to-day basis.
• TV advertising has a positive correlation with PPC clicks – estimated that clicks from TV drop off after 4 weeks.
• Press sales promotion also has a positive effect on PPC clicks.

Google Remarketing

• Google remarketing involves showing paid ads to past customers on sites in Google’s display network.
• Remarketing is a simple way to interact with people based in their past interactions with your site.
• Add a remarketing code to the pages of your website.  Once added, you will start to build up a list of ‘contacts’.  This list must have a minimum of 500 people on it before it becomes actionable.
• The more targeted the traffic, the more effective it will be.  For example, it will be less effective if placed on your home page.
• Determine the best time of year to remarket your products (e.g Christmas) and make sure that you don’t remarket for too long as this will just end up annoying your customers if they constantly see your ads.
• If you are using image ads then bear in mind that they can take up to 2 weeks to be authorised.
• Don’t worry too much about the quality of the design of your adverts as it is far more important that they STAND OUT, rather than look professional.
• If your adverts don’t have a call to action then use these to help build your brand/message.
• If you own more than one site then make use of cross promotion.
• Create remarketing lists for users who shop by season/month.
• Use remarketing to send users to your Facebook/Twitter page.

Enterprise SEO

• Referrs to companies which turn over £10+ million per year and which update their content on an hourly basis.
• You are likely to be dealing with different data centres which are based in different countries so make sure that they are all SEO compliant.
• Be clear what you are requesting and what languages/search engines to take into consideration.
• Set up teams to deal with each market segment and ensure that they are trained to ensure effective delegation of work.
• Big brands are slow to recognise how important SEO is.  In general their websites will have been built before the web became really popular.  This means that their sites’ structure/architecture is likely to be insufficient/ineffective.
• The biggest problem for enterprises is ‘getting stuff done’ .  Board members haven’t been properly exposed to SEO so as a result they don’t really care.
• When talking to board members, speak in a language they understand: talk BUSINESS, not search.  E.g instead of saying “our web agency quoted £50k to update URL structures”,  say “we’re losing £50k quarterly on unnecessary PPC spend”.
• Teach search to as many people in the organisation as possible.  Remember that developers are your best friend and that beer is the best way of getting them on board
• Educate stakeholders and C-Level execs so that they ‘buy in’ and realise that SEO is paramount and necessary.
• Big brands tend not to think of SEO as a customer acquisition tool.  Constantly build on this awareness.
• Big companies tend to understand PPC, but not SEO so talk to them in terms of SEO.
• Make use of SEO and content for branding purposes.  Any brand will have thousands of non-brand transactional phrases. E.g ‘how to articles’ relating to your product/brand.  Make use of exact match domains for these queries if appropriate.  Even if visits to these domains don’t convert immediately, will help to get brand exposure.  Provide quality content and then expose the reader to your brand when they least expect it.  Find terms which have very low competition to help you generate content.
• Put GA code on your 404 page and see which pages are being referred to it.

Market Focus – Travel

• Youtube has helped to reach an audience beyond TV.
• People visit 15 sites over 15 sessions, spending 2hrs 14mins before finally booking travel.
• Brand is becoming less of a motivator when it comes to making a purchase, with price being a bigger motivator.
• Search is fundamental to the travel sector with 90% of search terms being generic.
• Users who click on sponsored terms are 1.5 times more likely to convert.
• 15% of search queries now come from mobile devices.
• 69% of business travellers are looking at video when deciding to book travel.
• Google owns 96.29% of the mobile search market.
• Factors which put pressure on travel business: weather, economic, sporting, natural disaster and competitors.
• 2011 Vs 2010:  searches for all inclusive holidays up 227%, searches for cheap holidays are up by 80%.
• Social media increasingly used to find destinations.
• Twitter is increasingly used to get recommendations – people will now trust reviews from people they don’t know.

Negative SEO

I’ll keep notes for this section brief and applicable to general SEO as we don’t condone or practice any of the techniques discussed from this panel.  I have only included quotes/tips which I think may help to spread awareness of certain practices or security issues.  If any of the SASCon organisers or panellists take issue with any of the below pointers being published then get in contact and I’ll remove them.

• If your blog is on a subdomain then it is treated as a separate site so if it gets hacked then only that subdomain will be effected.  If your blog is on a /blog subfolder and gets hacked then your entire site will be affected.
• Server security should be considered the equivalent of fending off negative SEO although there is no way you can 100% protect yourself.
• Detecting Malice is an excellent resource for security issues.
• “The easier it is to install, the easier it is to hack”
• Check your site speed and check your site cache date – if any of them change drastically then the chances are that your site has been hacked.

Told you I’d be brief!

Attribution & Beyond

• One attribution model does not fit all situations.
• Actions are rarely driven by a single website visit, instead they are driven by multiple marketing channels.
• A  journey to action can often take days or weeks.
• Configurable rules for defining the attribution period: fixed length of time, period defined by visit gaps.
• How long is your average path to conversion?  If it is 2 weeks then there is no point checking a revised campaign after a few days
• To grow your business, establish what is currently persuading your clients and ‘amplify’ these factors.
• Instead of providing a drop down ‘how did you hear about us?’ menu on your contact form, make it an open text field as the information entered will enable a much more actionable response.
• Try using 4Q to get an evalution of the usability of your site.
• Identify the persuasive assets on your site and note the elements your prospects didn’t see as well creating a wishlist of assests you need to acquire.
• People often implement GA badly – make use of it to find out how many pageviews a particular keyword generates.

Link Building Secrets

• Find journalists and bloggers via Twitter – journalists actively monitor the #journorequest hashtag.  Alternatively try searching on Journalisted.
• Video listings are much less competitive than organic listings.  Tubemogul is a useful tool to get your videos distributed to multiple video channels.
• Site reviews are massive – find a way to incentivise users to leave a review.
• Put a copyright note/watermark on your images.
• Forums are still good for getting targeted links.
• Flowtown is a tool which analyses the social profiles of customers on your email list.
• Send emails to your customers asking them to follow you on Twitter/Facebook.

• The best votes/links take time and effort to win.
• Site SEO + Resource cost + Risk of Failure = ROI
• Useful CSV tools: Zoho.
• Use Majestic SEO for data collection, run top 10 URLs for a particular keyword through it and determine what sites link to at least 2 of these URLs.
• Make use of SEM rush and filter using the following metrics: domain authority, page authority.  Import into Zoho.
• Try using Blekko – has good link data.
• Link building has to be about creating relationships.  Even controversy is a good way of building ‘relationships’ – e.g www.beautifulpeople.com sent out a press release saying that they were kicking out fat people.  Eventually lead to a link from BBC.
• Make use of ‘badges of honour’ e.g SEOMoz badge – helps to build community and engagement.
• When looking for guest post opportunnities, search for “inurl:category/guest + keyword”.  Alternatively when looking for brand related guest post opportunities, search for “<brand> -site:<brand.com>”
• Backlinks.in is a useful backlink tool.
• Custom search engines are excellent for finding link building opportunities.
• Try running a broken link checker on an authoritative site in your niche.  If you find a broken link then email the site administrator and see if they can offer you a link in return for the favour.
• Qwerly helps you to find connected accounts – simply enter an email address/Twitter account.
• Find trade associations worth joining via www.taforum.org.
• For crowdsourcing, try CrowdFlower.
• For survey results you can utilise along with press releases, try Toluna.
• For sponsorship opportunities look at www.UKsponsorship.com.
• If you find yourself the subject of negative publicity then utilise this to emphasise the unique nature of your business.  E.g Easyjet are frequently criticised, but PR is used to remind people how cheap they are.
• Rather than try to get a link from someone’s Wordpress blog post, try to get them to create a separate page and give you a link from that as it will be more valuable in the long term.

Global Search

• Culture matters – every country has it’s own unique behaviour, although all people are equally sophisticated, impatient and lazy.
• Trust is built through cultural relevance.
• Buying and paying are environmental factors.
• Google is not everything  – e.g it barely exists in Korea.
• Dont abuse keywords and be aware that they are not directly translatable.
• Have a content strategy and be aware of what types of content are required for a particular marketplace.  3 types of different content:  freshly crafted content, translated content and modified/updated content.
• Google webmaster tools allows you to implement correct geo-targeting.
• Make sure that any links you build are local – the value of of a link is that much more when it is local.
• Share link juice between local domains.
• Yandex indicates that it will be moving into western markets quickly and eventually go global.  Google appear to be ignoring this.

Stat-o-rama

• Biggest growth areas in search within the past 3 years: email, entertainment, news & media, shopping, social networking.
• Adult sites have seen their share of searches halved, from 12% to 6%.
• 13% of all traffic from Google now goes to social sites.
• Share of traffic across social sites: Facebook 54%, YouTube 19%, Twitter 3%.
• 1 in 6 of all page views in the UK is on Facebook.
• 1 out of every 10 visits to a website comes from Facebook.
• No company can afford to ignore social and as retail moves more and more towards it’s ‘early’ adopters will benefit most. Assuming getting in now can be considered ‘early’.  Either way, B2C or B2B needs to develop their social strategy as soon as possible.
• Monetisation will be the next big thing in 2012 – giving independant producers the ability to make money off their work.
• Agencies don’t do content very well (although we would beg to differ of course!).  Involving the client and independant producers in the creation of high quality content is a great idea (on this we do agree).

Social Commerce

• 71% of 18-30 year olds say that they are influenced by friends and family (on buying decisions) – Given the explosion of social over the last few years, that now represents a huge amount of buying influence that can be utilised by retailers.
• $300bn spent on digital marketing – 50% of this will be social commerce by 2025.
• On day one of GAP’s Facebook deal they generated $11 million in sales.
• Using social should be about building brand awareness and loyalty, not selling. If you turn off your customer, they will tell their friends and family and they will be turned off.
• Generate good will, good feeling and that will be passed on. This will generate sales better than pushing your latest product/deal.
• Monitoring social mentions and responding, whether they are positive or negative, will paint you in a good light always.
• Social commerce can and should be taken to mobile – people always have their phones and will always talk about their purchases. Make it easy to buy via mobile and share via mobile about your brand.
• With the changes to SERPs social should be optimised as part of the overall search strategy – social likes/shares means more real estate in the SERPs on both Bing and Google.

Market Focus – Gaming (Unibet)

• Word of Mouth (WOM) is the ‘untrackable’ source of customers.
• 67% of all consumer decisions are influenced by word of mouth
• 93% of customers identify WOM as the best, most reliable source about ideas and information on products. This is increasingly online.
• 74% of people hearing a personal, negative recommendation were influenced to buy another brand. This shows the power of reviews.
• 44% of consumers claim to avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising. You spam people, they walk away.
• Focus on identifying your core customers and find out where they are – forums, blogs, etc.
• Join conversations, reply to blog posts, get involved. Always provide great customer service and cool products. Look after your customers and they will do the selling for you.
• Concentrate on service and brand and you won’t need to worry about selling. Just make sure you do it in the RIGHT places.
• Tracking is essential so you now what works best.

Mobile Marketing Goes Mainstream

• 36% UK smartphone penetration.
• 15% of all search quieries coming through mobile devices.
• 23% of all time spent on internet from mobile devices.
• 10% of UK shoppers use smartphones to haggle instore.
• 90% of UK shoppers use smartphones to check prices instore.
• £38m value of UK mobile advertising market.
• 50% of users on mobile start with search and the trend is growing.
• Social: 40% of tweets on mobile and 100m Facebook mobile users.
• Mobile search is growing. It’s useful, it’s measurable. Those that are struggling to see the value should be splitting out their campaigns.
• Click to call feature is 30% more likely to convert into a call than just a number.
• Having a mobile optimised site (or at least landing page) will increase conversions.
• Google is big into mobile and if they are, you should be.
• PPC clicks are increasing, but CPC is increasing more slowly – huge value to be had from mobile CPC. CPC almost half on mobile than that of desktop, again, offering value.
• You need to split out your campaigns so you can see the value and identify the trends coming from mobile against desktop.
• General reluctance from clients to move to mobile so far, but that is decreasing. Cost is a factor (optimising sites, more spend on PPC).

Feeds & Microformats

• There is a lot of data out there that is clearly viewable and understandable by the human eye but search engines struggle to do this.
• Use hReview for e-commerce sites (but Google are currently not approving this one) and hRecipe for structuring data in a recipe.
• The advantage of Micro Formats is that they appear as rich snippets in the SERPs, allowing you to gain more landscape and possibly more clickthroughs.  Good example of a site using this well is Seatwave.
• Test your rich snippets with this tool from Google.
• RSS feeds are a good way of sharing content to create links back to your site. Feeds can be used all over the net and a great start is Feedburner.

Analytics 2.0

• Only measure metrics that get stuff done’ i.e. actionable metrics which should be at the heart of every analysis:
• Track people who use your site,  search and then leave – this means there is something wrong and improvements are required.
• Track the average order value of the site, you may be able to improve this by adding upsells like Amazon do.
• Segment conversion rate and monitor in this way, overall conversion doesn’t mean much.
• Investigate the time on pageviews and look to increase them.

Location, Location, Location (Welcome to Yorkshire)

• WTY made the first branded Foursquare page in Europe in order be unique and get Yorkshire online with more exposure.  They are now one of the most popular brands on FourSquare and have trained 1000 retailers on how to use it to their advantage.
• 17% of social media users actually take advantage of location apps.
• 63% are looking to engage with large brands.
• Claim your assets on location platforms if you are a business
• Too many coupons can devalue brand.

Wordpress SEO

• Many people are looking for tricks to optimise a Wordpress site when their time could be more productively spent on the structure of their site.
• Use custom post type for different types of content.
• Breadcrumbs can help inner pages rank better as they provide structure.
• Never tag something with the same name as a category as this causes duplicate content.
• Use a permalink structure of:
  /%postname%/
  or
  /%category%/%postname%/
• Use the W3 Total Cache plugin to help with page speed issues.
• Use Google libraries for content distribution.
• Use wp-smush it for image downsizing.
• Optimise social buttons as each of these has their own iframe and cause speed problems.
• A number of plugins are very risky to use as they open backdoors to your site.
• There are a number of premium Wordpress theme sites available which users should be wary of as the code is very questionable.  Build your own themes to avoid these problems.

UPDATE: Nicola has added a sign to ensure that no passing smokers will compromise the safety of our new mates.  Foolproof, this:

UPDATE – 18/05/2011 – 8:54 – We have a shot of Mummy bird in the nest!

UPDATE – 18/05/2011 – 15:34 – All tucked up for beddy byes. Some of us are still working. Lazy.

UPDATE: 23/05/2011 – 15:55 – Our little chums have started to get feathers! They’ll be reading next…

UPDATE: 24/05/2011 – Our winged chums now have names!

UPDATE:  26/05/2011 – Wormy Jim has gone awol!  Where is he, Mum?

UPDATE: 27/05/2011 – We’ve managed to get a video of Daddy bird dropping by the nest! Blink and you’ll miss it!

For those of you following me on Twitter, you will be aware of my affinity for that purveyor of cooked dead animals, Gabbotts Farm.  As their range of tasty corpses are more than reasonably priced I thought I could spin this into a bit of a novelty challenge:  spend £4.50 on as much food as you can and consume it. Simple.

You may think that £4.50 will get you a few sausages, and perhaps a chicken wing or two.  You’d be a big wrong idiot.  For this princely sum, I purchased a whole chicken and a chicken burger.  With this feast set up, it was then down to myself and Ben to tackle it – gladiators READY!

And they’re off!  In case you’re asking, the cans of drink don’t come out of the £4.50 budget.  They’re more of a necessity.

It turns out that strategy plays a big part of the Gabbot’s challenge.  I made the fatal flaw of taking the chicken down before the chicken burger.  Trying to eat a dry bun after a bellyfull of chicken was too much for me and I fell halfway through.  Looks nice though, doesn’t it?

Ben effortlessly cleared his plate, leaving  him the winner.  Well played, sir.  Well played.  I’m not a sore loser or anything but Ben is looking a little smug.

Incidentally, if Gabbott’s Farm are reading this and want us to take them on as a client and knock up a lovely new website then we’d love to hear from you.

The acquisition is likely to surprise many in Manchester’s digital community who never realised such a reputable agency could be bought off the back of a scratchcard win.

Speaking from her newly installed sunbed, Armstrong declared:

“Things are going to change big time now I’m in charge.  Our work needs to be more ‘in the area’ so that me mates will reckon its well hench”.

The 18 year old has a reputation for ruthlessness so a company restructure was inevitable.  Previous Managing Director, Lee Turner has taken up his new post as Kettle Executive, whilst Fluid’s creative and development teams are expected to fulfil their new roles as Biscuit Consultants and Baked Beans Architects respectively.  The future of Fluid’s SEO team is as yet uncertain, however the recent delivery of 3 mops and a small toilet brush may help to resolve further speculation.

Fluid’s token green and white studio interior will also be getting a facelift later this month, with local ruffians currently being recruited to spraypaint the walls with questionable designs and vulgar slogans.

Lee Turner was unavailable for comment but was last heard sobbing in the toilet.

It’s that time of year again where we play our version of Secret Santa and you get to help us decide who wins.  Our long time readers may remember us playing last year, but for those of you who are new to our delightful little blog the rules are simple:

1, Each of the Fluid staff picks a colleague’s name out of the ‘hat’.

2, Draw that member of staff.

3, Profit. (still working on this one)

All we ask is that you, dear reader do the following:

• vote on your favourite drawing.
• Tweet a link to this post for other people to see, including the #SecretSketchSanta hashtag

We will be taking votes all day and at 4pm we will name and shame all the ‘artists’.  As an incentive for those of you who have  Tweeted a link to our blog with the hashtage  we’ll put you into a draw and pick out a voter to send some yummy sweeties to at the end of the day.

*****UPDATE – VOTING CLOSED: WINNER WAS MARK DRAWN BY….WAYNE! *****

ADRIAN was drawn by SARAH S

BEN was drawn by GRAHAM

GRAHAM was drawn by JULIE

JAMES was drawn by ADRIAN

JEFF was drawn by SCOTT

JOEL was drawn by JAMES

JULIE was drawn by MARTIN D

LEE was drawn by RACHEL

MARK was drawn by WAYNE

MARTIN D was drawn by JOEL

MARTIN P was drawn by LEE

MIKE was drawn by JEFF

MITHUL was drawn by SARAH O

NICOLA was drawn by MIKE

RACHEL was drawn by BEN

SARAH O was drawn by MARTIN P

SARAH S was drawn by MITHUL

SCOTT was draw by MARK

WAYNE was drawn by NICOLA

Anyway, as I ambled around the Science Museum I came across a fun interactive exhibit on the top floor.  What drew my attention away from the screeching children pulling levers and punching their classmates was a fun display where children had drawn their interpretation of what science was.  I couldn’t help but snap some pictures so lets cue the music as we take a look at some of my favourites:

6 year old Lucy has made an admirable attempt at recreating the modern spectacle that is a rocket launch.  From the looks of things our astronaut friend might want to take a few steps back from the rocket as he’s looking a bit burnt.  Either that or he’s from Cheshire and it’s just fake tan.

The rather pretentiously named Someday Maybe has delivered this more elaborate effort.  If we do eventually make contact with life from another planet I too would like to imagine that the first exchange would be a high five.

Now I haven’t consulted our lawyers before writing this post, however I’d say there was a fairly strong case for the artist above to claim that they have been plagiarised by the artist below.  No one likes to be the victim of creative theft so we’d like to take this opportunity to launch a campaign on behalf of the short changed Mr or Mrs Maybe.  We’ve no idea who the artist ‘George’ is below but to be on the safe side if you do see a small child called George then feel free to call them a ‘big meany’.  Tell ‘em we sent you.

What could embody the values of science any more than a lustful robot?  Beautiful.

Young Lucy Wade has envisioned a colourful future whereby to cut down on the pollution caused by rocket launches, future spacecraft will be fuelled by party poppers judging by the streamers being emitted from the engines of her rocket.  Either that or she’s just a really rubbish drawer.

James from Stockport should really handle himself with more dignity and spend his time more productively rather than sitting on a child’s chair at a low desk scribbling ill concieved doodles with baskets of blunt pencil crayons in an attempt to better the efforts of CHILDREN.