What a load of rubbish

July 19, 2010

Picture the scene.  A bag of rubbish lies dormant outside Attinger Jack interactive’s office waiting to be picked up by Camden’s finest.  No problem there, after all rubbish bags are left on the kerbside around London every day.

In Camden, however, the practice is illegal and a clever ruse for the council to raise extra revenue.   Fines and penalties now make up a greater percentage of many of London boroughs’ revenues than the council tax itself.  Westminster, as an example, issued over 680,000 parking and penalty fines in 2009 raising a tidy £400 million. 

Fascist councils aside, a Camden rubbish detective – he’s not rubbish, he’s a detective looking at rubbish – found an errant black bin bag outside Aji and promptly delivered an £80 fine to Alex Attinger.  How did they track Aji down?  Deep inside the bag, next to Andy’s week-old baked beans, Ovie’s used green tea bags and Adam’s penicillin spotted bread, lay an invoice from…..Active You, one of the UK’s biggest special offers websites. 

The fine has been swiftly re-routed to the desk of the Active You account manager, a certain ballroom dancer from South London.  And, if she’s reading, no it can’t be ‘added to expenses’.

Alex takes the plunge, bachelor days over

July 14, 2010

It’s a sad day when someone you know takes themselves out of the game but that’s precisely what happened to Attinger Jack interactive’s founder, Alex Attinger, who recently tied the knot with his beloved, Deidre Jane.

Held at Symondsbury Manor, a beautiful country pile in south Dorset, the free flowing vintage Champagne, St Emilion Grand Cru, beer and cocktails saw the wedding reception start off quickly only to soon become a hazy blur.   The next day, Alex informed anyone who didn’t have a headache that the vintage champagne was chosen especially for its ‘head slamming’ capabilities, thereby taking the pressure off the speeches.  He wasn’t wrong as the room descended into fits of giggles and laughter – 10% due to speech content, 90% due to two hours of free flowing bubbly.  Clever strategy and one we’d wish he’d employ every Friday at Aji.

Stories and gossip abound from the day but the site of Aji’s designer, Dave Hui, scaling a Bridport B&B at 3am in order to find an open window must go down as one of the YouTube highlights.  As for bridesmaid rumours and references to a certain canal in Panama, yes, they’re true.

Finally, I’ll wrap up with the immortal wisdom of Adam Seogalutze, one of the best men, who was heard to remark, “Remember, Al, just because you’re on a diet doesn’t mean you can’t look at the menu.”

It’s a lead, Jim, but not as we know it!

June 30, 2010

So, the news is out.  Marketing Week has run an expose on Attinger Jack interactive’s latest innovation – LeadBooster.  We’ve tried to hold onto the secret for a while but, somehow, the news has now leaked out. 

What is LeadBooster? It’s a lead generation data pool with millions of high performing records for marketers to use for their own direct marketing & email campaigns.  It’s been developed by our business partner Database Group (DbG) who will now collate all the data from holidayyou.co.uk, activeyou.co.uk, claimjunction.com and mobilitycompare.co.uk into one lead generation datapool.

What makes LeadBooster unique is that DbG will take AJi’s data and add their own attributes to it.  This will allow marketers to pulls extracts by lifestyle as well as location, interest and purchasing history.  Added to this will be a unique web interface allowing marketers to create their own counts and pull off their own data sets (a ‘no hassle’ and bureaucracy-free zone). LeadBooster will be launched in September and we’ll disclose more details soon.

To read the Marketing Week article, click here.

Social Media Marketing 2010 – we’ll be there

June 1, 2010

OK, it’s time to get serious.  Enough of this nonsense about chocolate brownies, Ben Nevis and Las Vegas shenanigans.  We’ll come back to that later along with our update on Nevada family law ;-).

On Thursday 17^th June Attinger Jack interactive will be one of the sponsors of Social Media Marketing 2010, Europe’s leading social media marketing conference.  Held at Cavendish Conference Centre in Marylebone, the conference will be looking into how marketers can exploit the viral power of social networks.

Will we be speaking?  Not this time, but AJi will be there with its own exhibition stand (read: table) as well as a few thousand flyers to tell everyone how wonderful we are. 

Organised by social media guru, Murray Newlands, the conference looks set to be timely.  Certainly from AJi’s perspective - running as we do a suite of sites including Mobility Compare, Claim Junction and Active You to name but three – social media marketing has taken off in terms of lead generation.  Indeed, it’s now a hugely important component of lead gen that marketers leave out at their peril.

Tickets are priced at £195 and can be bought here.  See you there.

Snowdon takes its revenge

May 27, 2010

Well, the news is in.  The boys have returned from their own Three Peaks Challenge and the bookmakers are busy paying out.  Highest win?  Adam Seogalutze who took a punt on Tom Evans and Andy Turner not bothering to turn up.  Odds? A measly ‘Evens’ but such was Adam’s confidence, his tidy bet turned into a sizeable £400.  Nice one.

As for the trip itself, all went well until Snowdon loomed on the horizon. Having successfully navigated Ben Nevis and Scaffel Pike, the boys decided to have a ‘night out’ (read: wine, beer and whiskey with a cheeky steak & chips on the side).  When asked why they had such a night on the eve before another stiff climb, the answer was simply, “Snowdon looked quite easy to be honest, so we had a night out in advance.”

The result?  Alex Attinger puts it in his own words, “I felt like the devil himself had clubbed me over the head with a sledgehammer”, before adding, “Snowdon was brutal after that evening and much harder than we’d anticipated.”  He won’t be the first of course – when the Celts retreated to the Welsh mountains the English had problems way back then.  Alex and the Mobility Compare boys simply continued the fine tradition of English people underestimating Taffy-land.

Three Peaks Challenge

May 17, 2010

The staff at Attinger Jack in Bath and AJinteractive in Farringdon have been laying their bets on the forthcoming three peaks challenge shortly to be undertaken by David Attinger, Alex Attinger, Tom Evans, Andy Turner and Clipper Tea’s former owner & founder Michael Brehme.

The three peaks challenge involves walking up Ben Nevis, Scafell and Snowdon within 24 hours.  The boys have organised their own version of the challenge, stretching it out by a day or two to take in the local ‘scenery’, namely Ye Olde Dram in Fort William, the Roasted Pig in Windermere and Llangollen’s Prince of Wales.

The odds?  The shortest belong to David Attinger for the first dram of whiskey to be sunk during the event.  Our guess?  Half a mile in; hip flask; Talisker.  2-1 on.  AJi’s Adam Seogalutze disagrees and says that with Tom’s expertise in scaling twin peaks, he should be ‘evens’ to navigate both Ben Nevis and Scafell in record time. 

Good luck to the chaps and before they set off, we’d like to alert them to the fact that the number of emergencies recorded in these mountain areas has doubled over the past few years.  No doubt this figure is soon set to rise and that’s worth a punt at 3-1.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

May 6, 2010

Anyone who has watched the infamous film about the life and depravities of author Hunter S. Thompson will fully understand why the managing director of Attinger Jack interactive, Alex Attinger, chose to hold his stag weekend in Las Vegas.  They will also understand, for legal purposes, why this particular blog cannot outline any details whatsoever.

However, as the chaps arrived back from 5 sleepless nights in the Nevada desert, we can tell you they looked like they’d been mimicking Hunter S. Thompson to the letter. Not so. According to that model of propriety Tom Evans, their reticence to speak of events has more to do with complex Nevada family law than any substances consumed.  As Tom endlessly drones on, “the most exciting thing to cross my lips was a day-old Subway sandwich”.

Whilst we tend to believe Tom, his failure to tell us why Nevada family law ‘could be a problem’ has created more office conspiracy stories than 9/11.  Pouring further fuel on the rumour fire was the fact that all cameras were banned during the course of the stag weekend.  That didn’t stop the AJi paparazzi from taking a cheeky snap of Alex wearing a dress and a pig’s head.  Further details to come as soon as we’ve cleared them with our lawyers.

China Tang

April 16, 2010

It’s come to our notice that Attinger Jack’s Financial Director, Beverley Attinger, will this year embark on a 500km cycle ride in aid of charity. From 16^th October onwards Beverley will join a group of others riding across the Chinese subcontinent to raise funds for Professor Winston’s Charity - Women for Women.

The charity specialises in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a huge range of diseases, infertility, cancer etc and is a very worthy cause.

Beverley has set herself a fundraising target of £3,500 which is ambitious but ‘doable’ in her own words. For anyone donating money to her JustGiving webpage she has provided the added incentive of entering them into a draw to win a week’s free accommodation at her family’s ski apartment in Arc 1950. There will be two lucky winners each winning a week’s stay.

As Beverley told us, “it’s a nightmare trying to raise funds for charity and I thought this would add something a little different.”

Our view? Having seen the proposed route, all we can say is that her journey will make the pancake-flat State of Nevada seem like a scenic wonderland. One office wag whispered that by the end of the journey even a baseball pitcher’s mound will be worth stopping for. Apparently the route’s flatter than a ten day old pint of Guinness.

Good luck Beverly and don’t forget the vaseline!

Mobility Compare skyrockets

April 9, 2010

After many long months of developing, testing and refining Mobility Compare, the website has hit the ground running – or rather, as Alex Attinger delicately points out, it’s gone ballistic.  Results are now in for the first few weeks of trading – six to be exact – and in March alone £40 grand worth of mobility scooters were sold off the back of the website.

Everyone’s pleased as punch, not least because the many months of hard work are now paying off in sales. More than a few manufacturers are astounded at both the volume and quality of leads being generated. 

The site has also been making a difference for mobility users themselves as it is the only mobility comparison website online in the UK.  For the first time ever, people can type in their details and receive a list of recommended mobility products that are perfectly suited to their needs.

The only fly in the ointment is that we have now become the first port of call for PR’s looking to hawk their mobility products.  The boys have asked me to state that the only mobility scooter they will review for the remainder of the year needs to be turbo-charged with a straight-six 3 litre engine.  Then it’s game on.

Robin Caller, good luck from AJi

March 11, 2010