Hats off to the people behind Kyo no Matcha, a bottled green tea from Japan, for with a twist of its air-tight cap, 1.4 grams of traditional Kyoto matcha (high-grade green tea) is released into the mineral water below, creating a serving of fresh (yet instant) tea with no added chemicals or preservatives. What ingenuity! If only we could bottle that, we'd be filthy rich. 

For a language rich in vocabulary, English has a dearth of what one might call 'function words.' Contrast Japanese, which compared to Indo-European languages, has a much wider variety of words that describe sounds and the way objects seem to feel or look like. Functions words are useful, for they enable you to put a label on a process or concept which would otherwise take many words to explain. They are a sort of shorthand, a code, if you will. Suppose you weren't allowed to the word 'cat'. You would be forced to describe it: a four-legged carnivorous mammalian lifeform. Far simpler just to use the word 'cat.' So here are a list of useful terms:

1) The Goldilocks effect, according to which Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, and the Earth is just right.

2) The Ben Franklin effect. Franklin once said: 'He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than whom you yourself have obliged.'

3) The Leapfrog effect. This is when people in developing nations adopt new technology and use it in ways that allow them to overtake users in developed nations.

4) The Cocktail effect where one toxin in one product alone may not be very harmful, but when that product is combined with other toxins in various products, the effect could be dangerous.

5) The Dog whistle effect, a term from qualatative research in which someone hears something in a statement or question that researchers do not.

6) The Tomato effect. In the early 18th century, both Americans and the British considered the tomato poisonous despite the fact that Europeans consumed the red fruit and still lived to see another day. Two physicians borrowed this behaviour to the medical world and coined it the “Tomato effect.”

7) The Libertine effect. This definition has yet to be written. 

For those who don't know, and I didn't, Steampunk is a term used to describe a subgenre of retro-futuristic fantasy in which steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with elements of either science fiction or fantasy thrown in for good measure. Think H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Hayao Miyazaki's 'Howl's Moving Castle'. Fanciful inventions abound: steam-robots, flying castles, under-water bases, moon rockets, and time machines.

What's more, designers have redesigned all manner of everyday objects in a Steampunk fashion. Examples include computer keyboards and electric guitars fashioned in brass, wood or iron and dripping with cogs. And it occurs to us that this aesthetic would well serve us at Libertine: computers encased in brass and mahogany, sitting atop brass claw feet, talking on brass telephones to the hum of cogs, the hiss of valves and the thump of pistons. Steampunk harks back to a time when things were built to last. It looks back and forward at the same time, rather like Libertine. http://steampunkworkshop.com

Developed by the Graffiti Research Lab a division of the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab, LED Throwies are an inexpensive, yet ingenious way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. You then simply cast it into the outer darkness, as it were.

Anyone fancy a spot of guerilla marketing?

A meme is any idea or behaviour that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can spread like a virus.

We in advertising are makers of memes, are we not? We want our tag lines to be repeated by as many people as possible, thereby increasing 'brand awareness'.

Viral marketing is an invaluable tool with which to spread the word, and since the advent of Web 2.0, we have countless pre-existing social networks in which to do our magic. Of course, shorn of its technological casing, all it amounts to is good, old word of mouth.

But, in these information-saturated times, how do you cut through the clutter? The answer - come up with an idea that's genuinely intriguing enough to get consumers to interact.