I am currently over in Estonia, speaking at a conference in Tallinn about media and marketing innovation. The lovely Hando Sinisalu from Best Marketing has been filling me in on the state of affairs over here.

Estonia has been incredibly hard hit by the recession, with an 80% reduction in advertising in print since its peak in 2008. He told me that very few advertisers are spending any money at all - the only category that is seems to be Telecoms, where there is fierce competition.

Between 2000 and 2007, Estonia was one of the fastest growing countries in the region, with year-on-year growth in consumption averaging around 9.5%.

The economy shrank by a massive 14.1% last year, so times are very tough, but the hope of joining the Euro next year is keeping people optimistic.

My presentation was about the learnings we have from the Festival of Media and the Festival of Media Awards, including lots of examples of media innovation, new technologies and branded utility.

In terms of technical malfunctions its up there with Janet Jackson's nipplegate. Time Warner mistakenly broadcast the Playboy channel onto two children's channels. 

So instead of Spongebob Square Pants, they got a naked lady talking about sex. Well, you might as well educate them while they are young. Time Warner has apologised - see the video here.

These are the ads that are served around my name on the site 123people....? I cannot fathom why these words have been triggered unless my wife has had a tragic fatal accident this afternoon that the internet knows and I don't. They makes me sound like a bit of a nutter or even a stalker, yet this inevitably becomes part of my aggregated internet profile beyond my control. Also not sure why Michael "IAA" Toedman's picture makes it onto my profile, unless there is something in fact that I need to tell the wife....

You may (or may not) have become familiar in recent weeks with a little site called ChatRoulette, it was a real geek secret until a couple of weeks ago when Jay Leno decided to feature it and now it is arguably (and a little annoyingly) mainstream but retains its underground geeky roots (depite being invaded by the odd perv, which possibly makes it nsfw btw, depending on what your company policy is on randomly viewing people live via a webcam in various states of...let's call it delight, be warned). Anyway, it is undoubtedly a web phenomenon and in the last few months there have been some very creative projects even including the first ChatRoulette advertising campaign which bizarrely was for petfood. 

Today we got wind of the AMAZING piano improv man on ChatRoulette. I won't do it justice by explaining it, just watch. There is no nudity on this one but he does use the word MF...once, just like, so you know.... 

And, if you want to know more about what all the fuss is about, Casey Neistat has devoted one of his brilliant films to explaining and researching it...well worth a watch below

And if you still want more, well, get in on the action.....do you dare to press 'New Game'....?

Aren't women a bit like beer? You know, all frothy on top and consumed by footballers by the dozen... That seems to be the point that this ad is making. Beer is "a thing of beauty", and just as women adorn themselves with tart stilts and voluminous hair, so the barman prepares a glass of Stella Artois.

I'm not entirely sure this is the right way to move away from the wife-beater image, but then again I am obviously not the target audience.

Conventionally if someone says your face looks like a piece of fast food I'm not sure you'd take it as a compliment. However, Burger King put its customers' faces on its burgers to highlight the fact that each burger is made to order, exactly how they like it.

A hidden camera captured their image, which was then printed onto the conventional burger wrapping paper (there is probably a better phrase to describe this, but it's early in the day). The burgers were then presented back to the customer - sunny side up. Note to self: next time glam up for the grease. You never know when your 15 minutes of fame will come:

From Ogilvy in Brazil and via Thisisswordfish.com

How do you celebrate the launch of a new line of shoes in candy colours? You create sweet versions of them out of icing and chocolate and adorn them with real macaroons, of course. This took place in Paris at the colette shop.

It made me chuckle to read Private Eye's comment on the recent win by WPP of the Central Office of Information media business (COI is the UKs largest advertiser by spend, essentially government messaging, some say party political, some might even say stealth electioneering).

Either way what is the most interesting about this news was its context. There is a lot of scrutiny being paid to to the tax status of the British wealthy, with a general uproar about wealthy individuals and the odd government employee being based outside of the UK for tax purposes but taking a business interest and indeed a significant income from UK. We call these non-domiciled.

In the week following the COI announcement, putting around £200m of tax payers money through WPP's book, WPP themselves announced that moving their operations from England to Ireland last year had saved them £50m in tax.

In an era of greater transparency, this is right to be called into question. I have no doubt that WPP made a compelling case to COI (especially as the alternatives in Aegis and Publicis both have French tax status), but you would like to think that a company making considerable profit from "the taxpayers advertising business" might be able to direct some of those profits by way of tax back into the pot. As it stands now, even more UK tax-payers' cash is being lost from the system.

This has been well reported, with a nice piece a month back in MW

I can't imagine that this would have been allowed to happen in the US. Now, we don't need to be quite so protectionist as our American cousins but we do need to be sensible about leaking money from the system just when the treasury needs all the help it can get. Still, this may all be academic when the COI budgets are slashed post-election...