The first half of January was something of a dead zone for new advertising campaigns.
As a consequence, this week we are looking back at one of the rather unnoticed successes of the Christmas advertising season.
AG Barr's Irn-Bru Christmas campaign actually originally aired all the way back in 2006, but it was limited to Scotland.
While the ad was only seen on TV screens north of the border, in the age of YouTube, ads don't necessarily stay in the markets they are aimed at, and the ad then became a big hit on video-sharing sites.
So, for 2007, Irn-Bru released the same ad, only this time it ran across the whole of Britain.
The advertisement itself was a beautifully realised pastiche of the classic animated film of Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. The boy and the snowman are shown flying across Scotland, with the snowman begging the boy for a sip of his Irn-Bru.
Eventually, the snowman gets hold of the can, drops the boy and happily flies off with his spoils (having also discarded that troublesome carrot nose - so tricky when you are trying to drink out of a can).
The ad was accompanied by a choirboy singing a version of Walking in the Air, again adapted to be about Irn-Bru.
The ad is classy and amusing, but did it have an effect?
When it returned to the screens on 10 December, Irn-Bru's buzz increased from zero to +4, and general impressions of the brand shot up from -2 to +5 while the ad was running.
In the weeks following the airing of the ads, the proportion of those people reporting themselves as being satisfied customers rose to +8.
It looks as though hanging around on the internet for a year has in no way dulled the effectiveness of the campaign.
Methodology: YouGov interviews 2,000 people each weekday to form its BrandIndex, a daily measure of public perception of more than 1,100 consumer brands across 32 sectors.
It is measured on a seven-point profile:
1. Buzz
2. General impression
3. Quality
4. Value
5. Satisfaction
6. Recommend
7. Corporate reputation
In addition, we supply an index score.
- Sundip Chahal,