Sugar puffs up old ideas

Marketing is all about making your product stand out from the crowd.

Sir Alan Sugar did his best to do that recently when he described his new business venture – a company that recycles old IT equipment, which will be headed by The Apprentice winner Michelle Dewbury – as “something that has never, ever existed”. However, Jan Smith, the managing director and founder of End-O-Line Services (EOLS), begs to differ.

That is probably because EOLS is, wait for it, a company that recycles old IT equipment. “IT equipment recycling is not something new,” she points out. “We are just about to celebrate our tenth anniversary. Our clients include many top UK and global companies.”

It also looks as though Sir Alan has been concentrating on his TV show and neglecting his press cuttings, as Jan appeared in the pages of The Sunday Times a while back – in a piece that focused on her entrepreneurial aptitude in IT recycling.

After last week’s item on “amusing” England World Cup songs, news reaches the Diary of another effort, this time all the way from the northern frontier of adland.

The logic behind it is faultless. After all, what is the point of working for an agency called An Agency Called England, if you can’t use the name to good effect at times like these?

And so it was that some of the Leeds-based shop’s staff went to the pub and came up with what is now, cleverly, the official Agency Called England World Cup song.

The track is cleverly entitled Win-gerland, and features the chorus/ “Sing-