The example I would give is the Just For Men ad with a frumpy daughter and a dad going for a job interview. When he gets back, he tells her how he’s going to need… ‘more ties!’ and they both hop about joyously like utter dicks.

At first I thought this advert was stupid. Then I found it fantastically annoying. Then, somehow, it’s laughable quality gave it laugh-worthy quality and I ended up enjoying it. If I ever get bothered about my grey hair, one brand name is now very familiar to me.

Different ads ‘bed in’ at different speeds. Generally, a person will need to see an advert a number of times for it to really have much of an impact. But how much is too much?

Because some advertising campaigns are highly targeted, you can find that you see the same ads again and again and again if you watch certain programmes regularly. When these ads become overfamiliar, they merely become irritating and this is the feeling your target audience ends up with.

When I was in India recently, I spotted a worrying trend in the TV advertising there. As well as having ad breaks and various companies sponsoring each programme (often six or seven sponsors for one show) they also have these invasive ads that run during the thing that you’re watching.

The way it works is the main picture is shrunk slightly – like a window on the computer – and ads are presented along the bottom and side of the screen while the programme continues. I experience intense irritation whenever these ads are run. Is that the feeling you want associated with your brand?

I think that some genius marketing techniques can give you the edge over your competition, although your budget might have to be up for it.

A good example is Comparethemarket.com using mere cats as their mascot if you can call it that, the good thing is that it works, Confused.com has been beaten well and truly here. They have even created a website for Comparethemerecat.com which incidentally sees a lot of traffic.

Take a look at this picture, who has got the edge, despite the fact they are not in direct competition with each other.

Over the past month recruitment companies have noticed that there has been a sharp increase in the demand for marketing positions.

During the first part of the year many companies were not spending valuable money on marketing projects and also taking on staff.

Over the last month there has been a massive increase in the demand for jobs in the marketing sector which was a really positive step forward. 20 or so jobs were called for while six months ago were would only have been half that meaning that recruitment agencies had to proactively go out and find the right candidates.

Another encouraging fact is that redundancies have started to slow down also hinting at the economy starting to recover.

With Google having a whooping 60% of the market can this merger have a significant effect?

By sheer coincidence, my annoying Google capture came up with:

Individually, their market share is such that they lack the reach required to achieve a good revenue  for their advertising services. Yahoo’s U.S. search market share is 19.8 percent while Microsoft’s is 8.4 percent (according to comScore) compared with Google’s 65 percent.

As the recession bites, resulting in people losing their jobs, disposable income decreases and the take-up of these more expensive products declines. It is not rocket science.

The figures bare this out. A survey by conducted by Lightspeed on behalf of strategic marketing PR firm Cohn & Wolfe asked 1005 consumers  showed that 73% of consumers will seek to find cheaper goods in the future.

Additional evidence is provided by the shopping statistics for UK organic food which declined by 1.7% following a steady increase over the past decade.

In a bid to save money consumers are turning increasingly to discount stores such as Aldi and Lidl.