It’s not often that third place can be regarded as a winning position but that’s how we see coming third in the recent pitch to provide Boris with a brand for London.

Apparently, City Hall received over 400 proposals in the open tender that was eventually won by Saffron. With most of this fine city’s creative thinkers working on the pitch, coming third gave us all a little lift, a well earned pat on the back for our ingenuity and hard graft to create a compelling proposal with next to no contact with the client. But as it’s turned out, being the dirty donkey has been a much bigger multiplier for us than merely raising us to the power of the feel good factor.

We’ve made some new friends at City Hall, we’ve formed a collaboration with a city branding expert, we’ve published a how-to guide on city positioning, and, most importantly, we’ve won some new destination branding contracts.

The reason for this posting is not so much to brag about our good fortune but to have a dig at all the whingers out there on the interweb, those agencies that seemed more hell bent on criticising the process and their chances of winning than seeing the opportunity in taking part. If Boris and his team had gone through official channels they’d have used the beloved OJEU process and if they’d done that, none of us would have got a look in.

Always better to be the dirty donkey than make an ass of yourself me thinks.