An unexpected row has blown up in the US state of Maine over Fentiman’s Victorian lemonade. This botanically-brewed tipple has caused consternation because although its blameless ingredients include lemons, ginger and herbal extracts, there is a little sting in the tail. Apparently a Maine schoolboy who was having a glass noticed with horror that the beverage contained 0.5% alcohol.

Rather than rejoicing and telling all his friends, he took the offending ‘hooch’ off to his principal’s office – whereupon all hell broke loose. The police and the state attorney general are now involved and two pressure groups in the substance abuse area are calling for it to be banned. Someone called Clare Desrosiers from the Aroostook Substance Abuse Coalition said: ‘To me, it is sold in what looks like a liquor bottle.’

‘I think it's quite amusing, really,’ said Eldon Robson, Fentimans' managing director and master brewer, when interviewed by The Guardian (all publicity is good publicity, right?). ‘Maine is of course where our Puritanical forefathers went because Britain was not strict enough. And it has been said that Puritans are people who are always worried that someone, somewhere might be having fun.’

I’ve written before about the coming whirlwind that is heading for UK booze producers. Having already shown an appetite for prohibition in America, they are further down the road to demonising alcohol than we are in the UK. Two years ago, the mother of a 16-year-old boy from Virginia was sent to jail for allowing booze to be consumed at his birthday party.

Although one can be amused by the OTT reaction to a devil’s brew lemonade in the States, the effects of alcohol on the young are one of the principal reasons the anti-booze lobby is gaining strength. The fact that 20% of 11-15 year olds in the UK are consuming booze at least once a week isn’t anything to be proud of.

So, in the long run, Robson is onto a great thing with his range of adult soft drinks. One of the age-old problems is that the non-alcoholic niche is still so poorly served in pubs. Most mixers taste terrible on their own as they come from cheap concentrate; a Virgin Mary is usually a bottle of ageing Schweppes tomato juice with a bit of white pepper thrown in (how difficult can it be to get a tetrapak of V8 juice behind the bar?). As for the Nab Labs (non or low alcohol beers), they taste like god knows what.

But the tiny Hexam-based Fentiman’s – with its 15 employees and a turnover of £4 million - is a cool brand with some excellent products: their ginger beer is infinitely superior to Old Jamaica and they have a new rose lemonade flavoured with petals from Bulgaria. And no need for Nurofen the following morning.

It’s hard to know what to make of Warren Buffet. He is deeply weird. And last night’s BBC documentary presented by Evan Davis made the old boy from Omaha appear even odder.  For a man who is the second richest in the world, his genuine folksiness is quite bizarre: he lives in the same modest house he bought decades back, he loves burgers, steaks and cherry coke, shunning vegetables. He swears that Dale Carnegie’s gruesome ‘How to win friends…’ changed his life. He answers his own phone but doesn’t have a Bloomberg terminal or even a mobile phone.

The temptation at the moment is to contrast what Buffet does with the activities of all those evil investment bakers. Buffett goes for ‘long term value’ by investing in real companies that produce real goods and services (even if, like Coca Cola, you could argue that they  rot kids’ teeth and make people fat). Investment bankers are mere frenetic gamblers fiddling,  like Faustus, with dangerous arcane financial devices of no social use whatsoever. He creates, they just churn. He’s the acceptable old style face of capitalism – in for the long term - whereas they are the vampire squids of unacceptability, ready to suck on anything they can get their fangs into for ten minutes. And we love him because he got Goldman Sachs by the short and curlies, when they badly needed $5 billion he had kicking around as loose change.

This is all very well, but the truth is the business and financial world has moved on since Buffett’s visionary days. He’s also apparently not averse to the odd punt on derivatives.  And he picks the odd bummer, getting into oil at the top of the market last year and even taking a very unwise punt on a pair of Irish banks. So he may be conservative but he isn’t infallible.

There is another potential criticism of Buffett. He’s famously averse to backing innovation – anything that is a start-up with no proven track record. He prefers mature business that have shown they are viable but where he detects oodles of steady, long term value. You could argue that having the stomach to back creativity and get behind new ideas is vital to capitalism’s survival. It’s also very hard to do because winners are tough to pick.

One thing it’s hard to fault him on is his philanthropy. He refuses steadfastly to indulge his kids, who will get nothing when he passes. (His daughter Susie explained how she asked for an extension to her kitchen so she could fit a table for two in it. He refused. This strikes me as plain unreasonable and mean. At his worst he can come over as a crusty old bore, even if he does utter the odd memorable witticism.)

He’s terrible at spending money and is going to leave the lot to Bill Gates’ charitable foundation. But Buffett dislikes the vanity of having his name on anything. As he himself has said: ‘I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when I die.’

It’s hard to know where to start when considering the shambles that is ITV at the moment. The place is starting to appear like a de-masted and rudderless Ship of Fools adrift on the high seas, heaving around looking for both a captain and first officer to put a joint hand on the tiller.

Sir Michael Bishop looked like a good prospect for Chairman. He’s smart, he’s got media experience (having been Chairman of Channel 4 in the mid 90s), and he has a £223m cheque from the sale of his BMi stake to Lufthansa burning a hole in his pocket. So, time for some good works with some media luvvies, then. But after a sniff around, he came to the conclusion that the ITV board was so dysfunctional and the broadcaster’s situation so bleak that he’d rather spend a quiet Christmas having a few pina coladas in the Caribbean. (As BSKyB holds a massive ITV stake, the last thing the seeker-after-a-quiet-life will want is Rupert or James Murdoch on the phone every five minutes.)  So Bishop, like Tony Ball the hard-man prospective CEO, dropped out of the running.

This means the latest round of opprobrium has been directed full and square at head-hunters Russell Reynolds, who have the task of finding both a new Chairman and CEO – and appear to have made a ghastly mess of it. And the agony isn’t over: they are back to square one, with everyone now waiting for them to make fools of themselves all over again.

The ITV job is a poisoned chalice. It may well net Russell Reynolds hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees, but it’s the search from hell. Not only is the organisation in a mess, in dire requirement of a new strategy, but the whole place (like so many media holes) leaks like a sieve. Thus the search has been an embarrassingly public affair, which headhunters don’t like unless they are controlling the leaking.  

It doesn’t make sense to slag off the whole profession, though. Luke Johnson suggests that media head-hunting is a piece of cake because all the usual suspects know each other. But ITV needs someone a bit special coming from a new angle. Headhunters may be a funny old lot, but when they do their job well they are a useful resource. They bring knowledge of the sector, discretion, impartiality and – one would hope – some degree of wisdom to help a company hire the sort of individual it requires. They also provide a buffer between the company and the job market, and have to take the blame for failure.

To conduct a search without a specialised consultant would not be easy. What is a Chairman supposed to do – get out his Filofax and start ringing around a few mates? Invite the hottest prospects for a round at Wentworth? Of course, intrinsically any organisation ought to be able to do this for itself, but it just doesn’t work like that. It would be seen as unprofessional.

So after five months of flailing around the ITV search has to go on. Maybe they’ll have the ship crewed up before the end of the year at least. It has to be a great opportunity for someone to make his or her name as one of the best turnaround stars in media history. 

It had to happen. Just as ITV writhes around in its prolonged death spiral, still searching for a new CEO and chairman, and Channel 4 falls out with its boss, along comes the headline that ‘the internet has now overtaken TV to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK’.  A sign of the times (except that it’s not strictly true: print, although in steep decline, remains the largest advertising medium). 

Last year’s record online spend of £1.75bn means that the UK is the world’s first major economy where advertisers have put more dosh online than on TV. The web has achieved this in little more than a decade, which is remarkable. But there’s quite a lot that needs unpicking here, not least the fact that ‘online’ contains so many separate facets: email, classified ads, display ads and vast quantities of search marketing (large chunks of which winds up in Google’s pocket). 

Within these Internet Advertising Bureau figures sits the fact that online display ads such as banners actually fell by 5.2% year-on-year, to £316.5m. Just today I’ve come across two unbelievably irritating and obtrusive online display ads - one on the FT’s site and one on The Times’s - shrieking to be noticed like an intensely irritating kid in a class.  And one of them has the dire cheek to be hiding behind a click where you expect to get editorial. Very naughty behaviour indeed, and their effect is to make me actively hostile towards their perpetrators.

The web’s success is also due to dire state of the economy. Downturns understandably make advertisers very cautious; they want very precisely directed marketing material that brings easily measurable results and ROI. Online promises a lot to the nervous and the thrifty, but doesn’t always deliver it.

The BBC – surprise surprise – has gone big on this story, and its website includes a feature about the ad agency that has just launched the new VW Golf Gti entirely online. Gone are the lovely 30-second telly and cinema VW ads of old – apparently there are no press spreads. Just an online racing game (which isn’t actually a game because it’s not interactive, and isn’t strictly speaking an ad because it’s hosted on the VW website).
 
All one helluva lot of fun, I’m sure. But I hadn’t previously seen it and, as a consequence, the launch has completely passed me by. I know media is necessarily fragmented these days, and I know I may not be the target audience for a GTi (I hear they’re a lot fatter, heavier and less fun than the old icons of the 80s). But what online advertising does less well – and I’d include banners in this – is build broad brand awareness. The GTi got to become the icon it is because of those skilfully crafted DDB TV ads of years back. Everyone saw them, everyone got and shared the message. But we’ll never get back to that because it’s too expensive and wasteful in the world of 21st century marketing. 

Online is brilliant for job ads and outstanding for small ticket items in classified. But it’s not effective for everything. I’m not sure how good online is, for example, at luxury goods – those sorts of wildly expensive treats that have to be made to appear intensely desirable (beautifully presented press ads and posters can do this). Neither is it great at making things loveable. I know I keep banging on about the success of Compare the Market’s meerkat, but that had to be done by television (of course there’s now a website and the whole thing is 'viral').

In short the web is here to stay, will advance further and has made marketing an even more arcane and problematic art in the last decade. But neither TV nor print is quite dead yet. 

In today's bulletin:
BAE threatened with £1bn fine as SFO gets tough
Asda raises the stakes in the bid for customer loyalty
Why shouldn't Northern Rock boss get another chance?
Editor's blog: The limits of online advertising
Budding green entrepreneurs short of role models