A fine of £850,000 has been handed down by the Claims Management Regulator to a personal injury claims firm that made nearly 6 million unsolicited phone calls to canvass for customers looking to claim for noise-induced hearing loss.

Ofcom received almost 2,000 complaints from subscribers to the Telephone Preference Service about the cold calls to them made by the impressive-sounding and Lancashire-based National Advice Clinic, whose cynical marketing strategy of nuisance calls was described by the regulator as “deliberate and sustained”. The regulator also commented that the company “showed an alarming disregard for the misery their tactics can cause, particularly to elderly and vulnerable people”.

Our government have now made it mandatory for companies making marketing calls to display their telephone number, rather than hide behind the 1471 announcement “We do not have the caller’s number”.

Campaigners looking to clean up the grubby area of telephone marketing have welcomed the move as a step in the right direction, as it will make it easier for consumers to report nuisance calls and for regulators to identify regular offenders.

A non-spill spoon has won its British creator and designer a £1,000 prize in a design competition to find innovative new products to help those with mental or physical disabilities.

The S’up Spoon, which has a deeper set bowl that partly extends into the handle, is designed for use by those whose hands are shaky and was conceived by computer science graduate Grant Douglas, who has had cerebral palsy since birth. It was designed by Mark Penver from 4c Design and the world-wide competition was sponsored by housing and care provider Blackwood, who will be backing the product with legal and marketing advice.

It doesn’t take much to make some business types happy, it seems.

An honorary doctorate was recently bestowed by Birmingham City University on Jim McCarthy, CEO for the budget shops Poundland and 99p Store, for his well-rewarded services to industry.

“To say that I am flattered and delighted would be a significant understatement. I am very grateful and immensely proud” McCarthy said as he received one of the worthless honours, bestowed to generate publicity for academia.

Is there anyone left out there stupid enough to trust celebrity endorsements from paid “brand ambassadors”.

Clearly Typhoo tea think there is, having paid the lovely, languid and sincere Nigella Lawson lots of dosh to fulsomely praise its cups of rosie on TV, the same toe-curling job she did as a brand ambassador back in 2008 for rival tea firm Twinings.

Meanwhile cultured readers are urged not to enjoy the very rude internet production Nigella Talks Dirty, an over-dubbed version of one of her TV appearances, but not featuring anyone’s tea, not yet anyway…

Back in the day in the USA, when car-buyers generally trusted Volkswagen, the company was highly praised in marketing and advertising circles for its refreshingly honest 1960 Lemon advertisement.

This black and white ad showed a VW Beetle with the word “Lemon” underneath, and explained that rigorous inspection procedures rejected around one in fifty Beetles, sometimes for something as minor as a small scratch on the windscreen or a blemish on chrome, and that VW called these rejected cars Lemons. The sign-off was “We pluck the lemons; you get the plums”. Continue reading →

Doctors are being paid bribes for not referring their patients to hospital specialists, it has emerged.

The bribes are being paid by some NHS clinical commissioning groups, such as in Lambeth and North East Lincolnshire, who deny that their actions could undermine patient trust in doctors, or compromise needed medical care. The bribes apply to referrals by doctors for cancer diagnosis. Continue reading →

According to the Transparency Intenational Corruption Perception Index list, which ranks 175 countries by levels of corruption, the most corrupt in the world are Somalia and North Korea at the bottom of the table at joint 174th. Moving up the list, at 173rd is Sudan, followed by Afghanistan (172) South Sudan (171) Iraq (170) Turkmenistan (169) and Uzbekistan, Libya and Eritrea at joint 166th. The least corrupt, at the top of the table is Denmark in first position, followed by New Zealand (2) Finland (3) Sweden (4) Norway and Switzerland at joint 5th, followed by Singapore, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Canada in 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th places. Continue reading →

Banks are anxious to get everyone using contactless debit cards, despite the proven problems of accidental charging and high fraud risk, so that their marketeers can collect valuable information on their customer’s spending habits, to be sold on.

An editorial piece by Ross Clark in the Daily Mail – “Creepy reason banks want us all to have ‘tap and pay’ cards” – pointed out the ease with which researchers at Which? magazine were able to obtain a card reader, place it where someone’s wallet would pass within a few centimetres of it and then use the name and card number collected to buy a £3,000 television set, despite assurances from the banks that the maximum anyone would be able to take was £20. Continue reading →