Diary: On the QT ..

Diary wonders about the sobriety of the amateur cameraman who shot Dave Trott talking about advertising and binge-drinking on GMTV and posted it on YouTube. The camera shakes so much that you can only assume its owner is suffering a horrid hangover...

The Advertising Standards Authority has been heaped in praise from an unlikely quarter - the National Union of Journalists, to be precise. The union's magazine is overjoyed at how the watchdog bit the Daily Express for dressing up ads as editorial, claiming that rules on truthfulness and substantiation had been breached. The mag wishes the Press Complaints Commission, now under the command of Baroness Peta Buscombe, the former Advertising Association chief executive, would bare its teeth in similar fashion. "Just imagine the PCC censuring Richard Desmond's tacky papers in such terms," it declares. Over to you, your Ladyship...

At Campaign's Direct Essays lunch, Gavin Wheeler, the chief executive of WDMP, said he loved how much his former employer Amazon budgeted "great customer service" into its marketing spend. But he might have wished it had invested more in boosting staff morale. How's this for a parting shot? "When I left (as head of eCRM for Europe), I was told I was being replaced by an algorithm." ...

First it was the Liberal Democrats. Now French MPs are demanding health warnings on ads featuring heavily airbrushed images of women. Diary can only shrug its shoulders in Gallic-like despair.

This article was first published on Campaign