We’ve noticed more and more promotional campaigns for places in the UK recently. The other day we were on our way from London Liverpool Street to Norfolk to visit our parents. Every time the train stopped, it seemed, there was a poster paid for by the local tourist board or investment council, correcting misperceptions about the place or urging us to set up a business. We didn’t know where to get off! Perhaps our favourite was the county-wide campaign for Suffolk (headline: ‘Isn’t it time you Suffolk-ated your family?’). But there were lots of great ideas and it was heartening to see the region’s creativity bubbling through. Here is our journey in full, told in tag lines:

Shenfield. The jewel of Essex.
Ingatestone. Will your business be the first to thrive in Ingatestone?
Chelmsford. With a leading polytechnic university, two cinemas and four nightclubs, it’s no wonder the Romans settled here.
Witham. Have you rejected Witham too hastily?
Marks Tey. The furthest viable commute from London.
Colchester. You’re wrong about Colchester.
Manningtree. Will somebody visit Manningtree!
Ipswich. What will your IP address be?
Stowmarket. There’s plenty of room in Stowmarket.
Diss. You’ll be shocked by the changes taking place in Diss.

Placements are the pits, say commenters at Scamp and Gordon Comstock. But if you think it’s tough for talent to break into the UK industry, you should watch Placement Island, the brainchild of Malaysian tiger agency Pumani-18.

The hugely popular reality show sees dozens of keen young teams dumped on a remote island where they must literally fight for briefs. As in a real agency, they have to be tough to survive. The island has plenty of latte machines and fussball tables but food is scarce – and in addition to Pentel signwriters, every team receives a weapon to attack their rivals with.

At time of posting, the island’s ‘Top Team’ is Li and Gok, who hide out in coastal caves with their crossbows. “It’s brilliant to have a cave to work in,” they say. “At night, one of us always stays up to keep the fire going and guard our portfolio.”

Sometimes, for a change of scenery, the team stroll along the beach with a frappe: “Getting out of the cave for a few hours can really help your thinking when you get stuck on a tough brief,” says Li, “but once we were just on the verge of a big idea when an enemy art director shot Gok in the ankle with a poison dart. He’s been scared to push ideas into other media ever since.”

To increase the challenge even further, bored middleweight creatives from the agency’s mainland HQ have taken to flying over in helicopters, strafing the island with machine guns. The violence pauses only when flamboyant bitch creative director Jackie Hu makes a rare visit to lecture the survivors about creativity.

For juniors in the UK, watching Placement Island may be a comfort, but they face a battle, too. Increasingly, the only way to get a placement in London is to first do a placement placement, where a placement team does unpaid work experience with another placement team, warming the toilet seat and pressing T-shirts for them like boarding school ‘fags’. And when the placement placement placement teams start queueing up to lick the placement placement teams’ boots, we’ll know that advertising is a glamour industry once more.

More on Pumani 18

But are they really the atheist? Are there other vehicles that are even athier? This car, for example, is very athy indeed:

Seriously though!!! It’s all very well for the great debate between religions to take place on public signage, but the other day we were with an extremist Sikh friend and it took us over two hours to get into central London. We had to stand at the bus stop while four atheist buses, three Christian buses and a bendy Islamabus went past.

WOW! We’ve just been to see Australia, the movie co-funded by the Australian tourist board. It’s a great film, but more than that, it’s a great advertisement. Within the first half-hour of the screening we had booked flights to Sydney using our iPhones. By the end of the second act we were singing the Australian national anthem at the top of our lungs. We didn’t even see the end of the film because everyone in the theatre was on their feet waving flags.

Such is the power of Baz Luhrmann’s masterpiece that other tourist boards are looking on with interest, and some nations have already launched their own eponymous productions. We’re particularly looking forward to Yemen and Wales but first in theatres is this effort from the landlocked Republic of Chad, a country that ironically has just one cinema within its borders.