Those of you who have been in the advertising industry for more than five minutes will realise it is advisable to fall asleep during conference speeches (such as Michael Portillo's ramble at the Marketing Society this week) and wake up just in time for lunch.
On the other hand, conferences can be livened up no end by that game where you have to get an unusual phrase into a speech without any of the snoozing delegates noticing. That's exactly what happened when the British Council invited four top UK advertising people - Robert Campbell of Y&R, Marco Rimini of JWT, Nick Phillips of the IPA and Chris Powell of BMP DDB - to form the basis of a conference on advertising, PR and the web in Shanghai recently.
Thus the challenge went out to Paul Sizeland, the consul-general in Shanghai.
And the phrase he had to incorporate in his speech? Why 'Up the Arsenal', of course.
