Gavin Duffy – Entrepreneur, Media Coach, Dragon's Den Presenter, Public Speaker

Good morning what a fantastic Monday morning.

If you have just caught up with us recently, I blog twice a week. Thursday nights, 11:15pm, after Dragons’ Den is broadcast and Monday mornings. They are two definite updates but of course as you have seen I will also go in and update from time to time.

Looking for Great Marketing Ideas

There are now thousands of people following this blog. I am flattered especially by so many overseas friends from around the globe. This is a big resource and I want to use it.

So please check out www.TanOrganic.com and www.Hidbin.ie

I want your advice on how we should best market these two products. Gives us your views on both or which ever one takes your fancy.

Let me give you a bit of a steer. For Tanorganic, the 100% natural, organic, anti-aging, healthy, sunless tan-lotion I am looking to really grab the Irish public’s attention when it is launched mid to late May. I am thinking of billboards around the cities of Ireland and a large prize for the most beautiful tanned woman to appear actually live on the billboard and wave at people as they go by. Please don’t involve yourself if you think it is sexist or demeaning of women etc. It is a beauty product aimed at women and also it is a bit of summer fun. If you can’t get your head around that you are wasting your own and our time. Don’t restrict yourself. Let your imagination  runawy with itself. Please submit your ideas for this one to info@tanorganic.com Now don’t restrict them to the billboard concept I just want you to know what I am thinking.

Hidbin, as you know is a synthetic screen hedging that neatly hides your ugly wheeliebins. “Making the unsightly unseen.” It costs €99 for a one bin unit and €179 for a two bin unit. Can you think of any guerrilla marketing tactics for this concept. Please send your best ideas to info@hidbin.ie 

Our Last Show This Thursday

Thursday’s show is the last in the series and I genuinely believed they have saved the best to last. I am actually going to be out of the country with all the Dragons, well actually Sean can’t make it now. We are going on a late season ski trip to Zermatt. It is all down to Sarah’s great generosity. I am not the facebook type but I will ask Sarah for her permission to report from there and her wonderful chalet, www.chaletgrace.comI am told it is literally out of this world, so Bobby, Niall and myself are really looking forward to a few days ski-ing and crack with the hostess with the mostess.

Great Ideas and a number of Investments

The show on Thursday, and I will be blogging at 11:15pm directly after the show, features some really interesting pitches including an Irish developed, I-Phone App’ and you will also get to see just how bad Sean Gallagher is at hurling. If you are a Dragons’ Den regular and you followed last year’s first series I’d like to know why you think this was even better? I say it is better because the ratings are even higher. During the series the programme had a bigger audience than the main evening 9 o’clock news (Programme 6). That’s a large audience for 10:15pm and the viewers stay right until the end until well after 11pm.

Desperate Housewives twinned with Dragons’ Den

Also we are informed there was a very large number of female viewers. In fact the programme was “diaried” and “twinned”, we are told by the media buyers in the advertising agencies. That means about 125,000 women had two favourite shows per week, that they definitely would NOT miss. Desperate Housewives on Tuesday and Dragons’ Den on Thursday. Sean says he knows why, he claims it is his sex appeal. I argue his most endearing quality is his modesty. But if anything, I believe, it is down to the humour. Niall O’Farrell was just so funny at times this year. For example when he held up the Feel Good energy boost cocoa ball and said “It looks like something you’d find behind the couch,” I cracked up. Bobby can be so brilliant at giving fantastic advice to the point and succinctly and then the next minute he can crack a great joke. And all the audience research tells us women are fascinated by our Sarah. I feel privileged to be in such great talented company.

Eugenia Cooney Producer

Sadly not coming away on our little Dragons’ Den trip, though we did everything to twist their arms, are Larry Bass and Eugenia Cooney. Larry, the Executive Producer, is at the TV festival in Cannes this week. By the way that’s where he bumped into Mark Burnett in a lift in 2004 and that led to him acquiring the rights to both the Apprentice and Dragons’ Den. Both were invented by the genius of Burnett.

But the genius behind our Dragons’ Den is, Producer, Eugenia. She and hubby Ed’ are attending a family wedding this weekend and couldn’t join us. I would have dropped my family to go to Chalet Grace but Eugenia is a good Dundalk woman and they value family not like us south Louth, Drogheda types who eat their young, well that’s what they say about us in Dundalk.

600,000 Viewers

The success of the programme, and the almost 600,000 viewers a week is down to Eugenia who takes it from people applying to come on, vetting them, accepting a fraction to come to studio, recordings for weeks, editing down 120 hours to about 7  hours in total for the full eight shows of the series and she is across every item until the last credits roll this Thursday night.

We have been honoured to work with such a great leader.

I will talk to you on Thursday night.

Bye for now.