You are a huge, super cool company. You spend a fortune on branding and advertising. You are trendy, adored by many - worshiped even. Until your brand becomes the poster boy for something very uncool – and it’s not something you can control. What do you do?

Any of you familiar with Channel 4’s show ‘Dogging Tales’ may remember Les in the owl mask, spraying himself with Lynx, holding it up to the camera and telling us it was THE scent of choice for dogging – “You can’t beat it.”

There you have it, Lynx it can make anyone pull, even an old guy called Les in an Owl Mask that seems a bit like a dirty old perve. How you react to this unfavourable brand advocate can make or break you. I’m sure everyone remembers when the Burberry became the brand of choice for chavs (with many thanks to Daniella Westbrook dressing head to toe in its print).

With just under 3% of the 1.99 million watching the show logging into Twitter – tweets pouring in like “After watching #DoggingTales I’m beginning to question why I was given a lot of lynx and joop at Christmas now!” and Alan Carr broadcasting to his followers: ‘Lynx spends millions on advertising and then this happens!”

So what do you do? 

If you can’t beat them, join them. With a few great tweets, a crisis room picture and a mock-up of a limited edition ‘Lynx Owl’ – they owned the conversation. Lynx is still cool, even if it is the only choice for dogging.

While the BrewDog founder James Watt said “I would rather set my money on fire” than invest in traditional advertising, but here at Active – we think there is nothing better than creating a campaign so iconic that you just have to go back to it again and again.

With Diet Coke now in its 30^th year, and the delectable Andrew Cooper as their new hunk – we wanted to revisit our favourite diet coke adverts that have made the brand as memorable as it is today.

My personal favourite…its 11.30 with Lucky Vanous in 1994

Robert Merrill – 1998

Francois Xavier – 2007

And now in 2013 – Andrew Cooper

Up here on the 19th floor in Active Towers, I’m waiting for our window cleaner to have his own diet coke moment.

“Almost 1,000 shoppers queued outside a city centre store from 2.15am so they could bag bargains as the Boxing Day sales got underway in Staffordshire.”

To me, that seems an entirely absurd statement.

I’ll have you know that as an avid bargain hunter, sample sale lover and all round furious shopper – I’ll never be caught dead queuing early in the morning, let alone all night to snap up bargains at the sales. I’m not a morning person, I’m impatient, and I wait the extra week until I think everything is 70% off rather than 50%. But am I missing a trick?

But what is it about these big sales that drag the crowds in their thousands?

Andy Street, managing director of John Lewis, said a series of bumper sales weeks totted up to a Christmas that was the “best in its history”. Helen Dickinson, director general of the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said the Christmas rush had come even later than usual as hard-pressed customers held out for bargains. The frugal mind-set helped explain the huge Boxing Day crowds.

More than 2,500 people queued round the block to be first into Selfridges on Oxford Street, which was offering discounts of up to 75% on designer labels such as Alexander McQueen, Prada, Céline and Yves Saint Laurent. In the first hour of trading, sales had reached £1.5m, putting Selfridges on course for record takings at its four UK stores. The New West End Company, which represents retailers in the major shopping district, predicted £50m would be taken over the course of the day.

Boxing Day saw the number of shoppers on the High Street surge by 50% in Northampton and Cambridge compared with last year, with an average 20% increase across the country, analysts Springboard said. Tim Walley, general manager of Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre, said more than 200,000 shoppers came through the door yesterday with a further 150,000 expected today.

More surprisingly (for me anyway), security staff at the centre’s Next megastore issued tickets to each person in the queue before the 6am opening before allowed allowing customers to enter one at a time in single file.

With these kinds of crowds I’m clearly missing something – mainly claustrophobia and the desire to beat people that come near me while I rifle through piles of handbags. I think I’ll stick to my own system of browsing once the crowds have dispersed a week later, and snap up those same initial bargains online from the courtesy of my own bed.

Again this year we will not be sending out e cards or Christmas cards but as usual donating a substantial amount to the Make-A-Wish charity in the UK. With Active International’s s donation we hope we can make some wishes come true.

Make-A-Wish in the UK is a charity with a single purpose – we grant magical wishes to children and young people aged 3-17 fighting life-threatening conditions. Make-A-Wish has granted more than 8,100 magical wishes over more than 26 years. We know that our wishes transform lives!

Over 20,000 children in the UK are living with a life-threatening condition, a figure validated by research commissioned by Make-A-Wish. At a human level, we believe few things can be more important, or more deserving, than giving a seriously ill child the chance to have their wish come true, with all the hope, expectation and happiness that brings

This year alone 1,400 children will turn to us to have their special wish granted. And we want to grant a wish to every one of these. For many families the Make-A-Wish memory can be the last happy memory they have of their child having fun in a magical world, surrounded by family and friends – rather than memories of days and weeks of painful treatments and hospitalisation. The memory of the wish may be of their child laughing and enjoying being a princess or zoo keeper for the day or meeting a favourite celebrity. In years to come, the family can look back and remember that special time.

• Make-A-Wish is expert in wishgranting; it is all that we do, each and every day.
• We need to raise at least £6.8 million this year if we are to realise this aim.
• Make-A-Wish Foundation® UK was launched in June 1986 and for the first six years we operated from offices above a shop in Camberley, Surrey. We are still in Camberley today.
• Four wishes were granted in the first year, 13 in the second and by the end of the third year, 100 wishes had been granted.
• The very first wish was for Anthony from Liverpool who, with his family, went to meet the Disney characters in Disney World, Florida.
• Our 100th wish in 1989 was also the first wish to be granted in Scotland. 16 year old Clark from Balerno wished to go on a US aircraft carrier and see an F14 jet. This very exciting wish took place in the Mediterranean only two weeks before Heads of State joined the ship for a summit meeting.
• In November 1989 the first wish in Wales was granted. 14 year old Louise from Rhyl went with her family to experience all the sights and thrills of Disney World, Florida.
• Also that month, the first wish in Northern Ireland was granted. 16 year old Gary from Benburb wished to visit his uncle who worked at Disneyland, California. Very sadly, Gary died a short while after his wish.
• 1,000th wish – Jessica, aged ten and from Grimsby, had her wish, to meet the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, granted at a very special occasion – Make-A-Wish UK’s 10th anniversary party. The huge Beast, as tall as the ceiling, entered the room carrying a red rose. He approached Jessica, who was dressed in her pretty yellow Beauty dress, and invited her onto the dance floor. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room!
• 5,000th wish – ten year old Ciara from Wigan, living with a Brain Tumour, had her wish granted in August 2008 when she was a model for the day in London.
• 7,000th wish – 16 year old Marcus from Goole, a keen physics student, lives with a Brain Tumour. He had an unusual wish – he wanted to visit CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva. Marcus was able to meet some very distinguished physicists during a vist that was arranged in August 2011 with the help of colleagues from Make-A-Wish Switzerland.
• 8,000th wish – 15 year old Mischka, who lives with cancer, lost her hair due to her treatment and was bullied at school as a result, causing her to lose confidence. We granted her wish for a confidence-boosting makeover day with Nicky Hambleton-Jones, and she really enjoyed the chance to look and feel great again.

One in three people get cancer. Fact. But it’s a fact we would rather not acknowledge.

Almost everyone knows someone affected by cancer, I personally have two friends that got cancer in their early 20s – it isn’t just something that affects us when we ‘get old’. Therefore being aware of cancer, understanding the symptoms and donating towards crucial research is key for each one of us.

November has now given way to Movember, a whole month dedicated to raising awareness of prostate cancer. Team Active – the Bristly Barter Boys have been growing their tashes at an alarming rate.

Mark Chippendale our MD has a tashe likened to a Victorian gentleman, our CEO Dean Wilson however has not had as much luck – his face is still as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

At the end of the day, it is the sentiment that counts – and thanks to Spud in Covent garden (@ILoveSpud) sponsoring our Movember fundraising lunch  - with donations so far over £100, and still pouring in – we’ll have over £650 in the Movember bank for December 1^st.

We love a Spud lunch and we were ALL getting involved with this.

Thanks @ILoveSpud – We love Spuds too!

A guest post from our IT genius in residence, Chris Bingham:

Although Active International UK is 3471 miles from New York and the devastation caused by hurricane Sandy, the effect was still majorly felt.

Active International UK, like many other companies, accesses the majority of its IT services via a data centre in New York.  Put simply, we couldn’t communicate to the data centre.

New York electricity went down, and with it so did thousands of company websites around the world including ours. We were not prepared for it; most people wouldn’t have thought to expect it.

Despite resilient communications to the internet and private lines directly to the data centre, we were still cut off.  This unfortunately meant we were without email, enterprise applications and a web presence.  Fortunately, the problems we encountered were not down to flooding, but loss of power in some of the sites that handled telecommunications in the New York area.

At least we didn’t have to resort to using typewriters…

In the weeks and months to come, companies will be reviewing their disasters recovery plans and trying to minimise single points of failure (backup power, backup connections to the internet etc).

I believe jargon is the art of using big words to make you sound smart, and everyone else feel stupid. They feel stupid because often it doesn’t make any sense. It encourages people spend their time trying to work out what it means whilst nodding and not fully understanding the point. Jargon is also the stupid complication of words. For example “international relocation”, what is really meant is “moving abroad”.

“Action” this, “facilitate” that – I had an old boss, that in meetings whenever a topic came up he didn’t want to discuss, would say “let’s take this offline.” What does that even mean?

A journalist friend of mine was ranting to me the other day about how shocked and appalled she is by how many adults, successful graduates, cannot write well. I believe that everyone in the whole English speaking world should be forced to read George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ at least once.

Yes, I’m kind enough to give you the link here

It is put considerably more simply on the Economist’s website:

“The first requirement of The Economist is that it should be readily understandable. Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible. Keep in mind George Orwell’s six elementary rules (“Politics and the English Language”, 1946):

1. Never use a Metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do (see Short words).
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out (see Unnecessary words).
4. Never use the Passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a Jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous (see Iconoclasm).”

John Rentoul in the Independent kindly continued this by offering us a list of the top 100 list of words and phrases that should be banned from the English language. My particular favourite is 72. Paradigm shift. Or anything to do with a paradigm.

If however you still are not convinced and you need a helping hand to convince your bosses that you are the sharpest tool in the shed, you can try this jargon generator and disaggregate mastery-focused decision-making.