Media: Russell Davies.(advertising campaigns)

When I'm not composing these glistening pearls for Campaign, I spend quite a lot of time writing a blog called eggbaconchipsandbeans It's about fried food and cafes, as you might imagine.

It's quite popular in the fried food and cafes world, so occasionally someone from a related brand gets in touch to try to sponsor the site or involve me in some promotion.

The last people to do this said they were attempting to 'save the Great British Cafe'. They were making their campaign journalist-friendly with a survey they wanted me to endorse which demonstrated the British cafe was on its last legs.

But they hadn't counted on me being a pedantic planner, so they were a little taken aback when I asked about the research methodology, which was the usual faux science PR rubbish. All they'd done was ask a bunch of people whether they thought the Great British Cafe was under threat: rather like asking the Family Fortunes survey the speed of light and basing your space programme on the most popular answer. They then trotted this nonsense out to the papers and got the required editorial flurry. I was especially annoyed that The Guardian fell for it, as its own Ben Goldacre does such good work unpicking this stuff in his Bad Science column.

We marketing and ...