My Week: In, out, shake your Brexit belly all about

An inspired idea for an advertising campaign from a creative chief executive

Are you an "innie" or an "outie"? (Getty Images)

What bothers me most about the Brexit debate is how fashionable it’s become to say the whole thing’s boring. “Blah blah blah. I just wish they’d get it over with and we’ll deal with the consequences either way.” There’s still a huge sense of disengagement among the public at large.

I guess that’s largely the fault of the politicians leading the debate, and the way the media has portrayed it. A battle between two old Etonians in the Tory party is hardly going to inspire a 100 per cent turnout.

So surely, I asked the anti-Brexit chief executive of one of our biggest advertising companies this week, our creative geniuses should be able to come up with some eye-catching campaign to get the voters interested. Something catchy and viral to get the youth out.

Never fear, he said, we have an idea: the belly button campaign. Are you an “innie”? – cue video of beautiful, midriff-baring hunks and beauties with gorgeous inverted navels having fun on a continental beach. Or are you an “outie”? – cut to sad image of a topless old man with a belly button like a pig’s nose.

It just might work.

The Gravitas of Darling's eyebrows

Unlike the public at large, business is totally engaged in the EU debate. There was little else discussed at the CBI Annual Dinner at the Dorchester on Wednesday night. Smelling the mood, the CBI had bussed in as guest speakers the former chancellor Lord Darling (Lab: Remain), and the night-scented former Tory leader Lord Howard (Con: Brexit).

How refreshing it was to see Darling back in action again, those jet-black eyebrows accentuating his wise words like thick inverted commas. Lord Darling held the vast room of bowtied bigwigs with his experience, intelligence and passion – something we get so little of from the Establishment talking heads who’ve dominated the debate thus far.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wishing the Opposition had someone of his gravitas these days.

Whenever he’s asked to take risks he didn’t understand, he said, he thinks back to the phone call he took from Sir Fred Goodwin, then boss of RBS, in May 2008. His bank – the world’s biggest – was running into the ground thanks to its suicidal lending. Darling recalled him saying: “We’re haemorrhaging money. We can only survive another two or three hours... So what are you going to do about it?” An interesting way of looking at the situation, Lord Darling added, wryly.

Lord Darling went on to rail with passion against Boris Johnson for dropping the H-Bomb at the weekend. It was, he declared, “utter nonsense” to compare the EU with Hitler, and proof of how desperate the Brexit camp had got.

Lord Howard also spoke convincingly and with style, but, as so often happens with the Brexiteers, he couldn’t adequately answer Lord Darling’s questions about why we should ignore practically every major economic group in the world who tell us not to do it.

His only response was that most economists’ forecasts are wrong anyway. That seemed to me an utter vacuum of an argument.

Secrets of the complete Hollywood package

One of the bigwigs at United Talent Agency had a bash at the Groucho club in Soho on Thursday night. While I knew companies like his represented glamorous Hollywood stars, I wasn’t sure exactly how. Little wonder: big actors, studios and movie investors have so many layers of middlemen and fixers you’d need a month to get your head around it.

Chris Day, a surprisingly unpretentious guy with a Beverly Hills business card but little in the way of visible botox, gave me a crash course: the star has an agent, who moulds his career, and a manager like UTA, who helps get them the roles. Increasingly, the biggest managers – like UTA - now also represent the directors, the scriptwriters, the producers and even the moneymen. With those clients, the management company can assemble into a neat, ready-to-go package every component of a movie for the studio except the film itself.

Having all that red carpet talent on its books (UTA’s roster includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Radcliffe and Angelina Jolie), there’s plenty of marketing deals to do, too. Not only do companies like UTA arrange commercial deals for their stars – Channing Tatum vodka, anyone? – but they’re using their contacts to get big corporations a ride on the Hollywood money-go-round.

An example: Hollywood spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year transporting filmmaking kit, production teams and talent around the world to shoot movies. For airlines, that’s business worth having. So Delta Airlines has hired UTA to get its movie industry clients to select Delta as their carrier of choice.

The sell is soft, of course. UTA arranges luxury Delta Festival flights for movie types to travel from festival to festival in celebrity-pampered style, with parties and schmoozathons all around. Goody bags with free international flights help get the message across too.

Sounds a lot of fun, doesn’t it? I feel some research in Tinseltown is needed. A week or two should do it…

You give me fever - but for how long?

I have to admit, I’d never heard of Fever Tree tonic water until one of my colleagues put them up for the shortlist in our SME business of the year award. Since then, it seems to be the mixer of choice at every bar I’ve visited.

The business was set up by Charles Rolls, who used to run Plymouth Gin, and food marketer Tim Warrillow in 2005. They floated it on the stock market in 2014 at 165p and now the shares change hands for a stonking 711p. Messrs Rolls and Warrilow upgraded their profit forecasts yet again this week and the business is now valued at £850m.

It never ceases to amaze how savvy marketing and clever flavours can create such a phenomenon so quickly. A contact at easyJet told me over gin and Fever Tree tonics on Tuesday that, when they started stocking the stuff in their planes, sales of tonic shot up something like 40 per cent. That’s a lot of passengers drinking a lot of G&Ts.

The trouble is, these fizzy drinks and mixers so often seem to become huge, then disappear as drinkers move onto the next big thing. I wonder if Fever Tree is just, ahem, a bubble.

Just the tonic after being shaken and stirred...

Speaking of booze, I’d like to toast the drinks giant Diageo’s suave, Goa-born chief executive Ivan Menezes for administering first aid with one of his products yesterday.

On my way to meeting him for lunch, I got knocked off my bike by a careless cabby. Seeing my somewhat shaken and stirred demeanour when I arrived at the restaurant, Mr Menezes swiftly stood me a stiff Smirnoff and tonic (Fever Tree, of course). That, and a jolly good lunch, calmed me down no end. Cheers, Ivan!