A Clean Marketing Idea

“The Cleanest Twitter Account.” Could your window cleaning company come up with a great marketing idea?

Cleaning Product Brand Launches “Cleanest Twitter Account” With Automagically Appearing Images: The brand's feed may look like it's solely tweeting blanks, but clicking reveals surprises and chances to win.

European homecare brand Spontex, with help from Fred & Farid, has launched a French Twitter account — @SpontexFrance — that is being billed as “The Cleanest Twitter Account.” Get it? Cleaning product brand launches clean Twitter account? OK. Moving on.

This “cleanest Twitter account” is clean in the sense that, well, the feed is basically blank white space until, that is, you click on the white space which then expands to an image which delivers witty, secret messages — some showing the brand’s cute hedgehog mascot — all designed to tout the brand’s new Full Action System Broom.

If the lure of finding the secrets behind the white space isn’t enough, the brand will occasionally insert tweets that reward the new product to the first person to favorite them.

The images in the tweets are made from white PNG images which automagically display when the larger Twitter image window opens.

Here’s a video overview of the campaign. It’s in French but you’ll get the idea. 

Two Window Cleaners From The Great War

Benjamin Clouting's window cleaning business was so distinguished, it cleaned the window of Windsor castle.

Teenage Tommy who saw history made: Benjamin Clouting was 16 when he witnessed the first British shots of the Great War. He was the son of a groom working on a large estate near Lewes in Sussex and his love of horses and desire to join the Army brought him to 4th the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards.

Just a week after setting foot in France, Ben took part in the British Army’s first engagement near the Belgian town of Mons when his colleagues opened fire on a group of enemy lancers. Ben remained on the Western Front for almost the entire war and later in life took over a window cleaning business in Reading, where he worked until shortly before his death in August 1990, aged nearly 93.

His window cleaning business was so distinguished, it cleaned the window of Windsor castle.

Later in his life Benjamin relayed a vivid account of what he saw that day to author Richard van Emden who was interviewed here along with Ben's great grandson. We also hear from Benjamin Clouting himself (pictured above & right) in an interview filmed just before his death on the very spot those shots were fired.

Commemoration of First World War 100 years.

Of all the first-hand accounts of the First World War, few capture the horror of battle better than the diaries of Netherfield soldier Albert Williams. His accounts are thick with stories of starving, filthy and exhausted soldiers shivering in mud-filled trenches as German shells fall around their ears on the Western Front. The war was little more than a week old when Private 9122 Williams, of the Northumberland Fusiliers, was shipped off to France.

For weeks Albert and his Northumberland chums went back and forth between the trenches and the rear, at one point facing the ominously named Mound of Death. Although he did not know it, Albert Williams's war was drawing to a close. Behind the lines the Northumberlands practised charging, bombing and cutting barbed wire until, on the night of June 15, they were given their orders: take out three lines of trenches "at all costs". The following morning, after a fierce artillery bombardment came the order to attack: Northumberlands, Royals, Lincolns, Scots Fusiliers, Liverpool Scottish – thousands of men going over the top.

June 16: The trenches were all taken but what a straffing." Soon afterwards, the shell that ended Private Williams's war landed. "I was in for a good time," he wrote in his diary, "as I had three G helmets and a bottle of wine and was going to had (sic) a good drink when the dirty devils buried me.

"I was dug out and lost everything, even my speech. What a row that shell made, good job it dropped in the traverse and buried me ... a few inches further and there would have been no Pte Williams to bury." He was carried from the battlefield and eventually returned home to England. His speech returned but he was no longer considered fit for duty. Traumatised by his experiences, he had suffered trench foot, been injured in the back and finally blown up and buried, but he came through his journey into hell to return to Nottingham, where he became a window cleaner.

D-Day Window Cleaning Veteran Talks

Ken said: “I was window cleaning before the war and the bloke I was working for said to me, ‘if you come home, there’s always a job here for you’, and that’s what I did.

D-Day 70th anniversary video: Bucknall survivor Ken Wright tells his story of landings - Ken Wright was fighting in France when he heard his brother had been killed. His other brother was risking his life for King and country too. This is his story...

Ken Wright was still a teenager when he was called up to join the infantry and fight the Nazis in the Second World War. Despite his mother, Mary Alice Wright, telling him he could not go because she already had two sons serving in France, Ken found himself in a troop ship on D-Day, about to take part in the invasion of Europe.

D-Day veteran Ken Wright, pictured during the war.

Some time later, he passed through Caen, where his elder brother Ralph was stationed, but in the darkness and the confusion of thousands of troops passing through the area, there was no hope of a chance reunion. Within two months of D-Day, Ralph was dead, killed by mortar fire during intense fighting around Caen. Mrs Wright wouldn’t tell her surviving sons the news until after the war, but Ken found out himself within days, because his brother’s mail instead went to him.

Ken, of Werrington Road, Bucknall, who is now aged 88, said: “The three of us were over in France at the same time. My brother Harry was OK, because he was in the Royal Army Service Corps. He used to take up ammunition. “But I was infantry and Ralph was. He got killed in Caen by a mortar shell. My mother didn’t let me know, but I knew, because I had all his letters. “We were ‘up the line’ and I couldn’t do anything about it. I went to see the padre, but he said there was nothing to do as we couldn’t move. There was nothing to do anyway. After that I didn’t care. I was mad. “I was very thankful that I made it and Harry made it through. “But Ralph didn’t.

Corporal Ralph Wright, of Burslem, was aged 22 when he was killed on August 18, 1944. He is buried at the Bayeaux War Cemetery in France. Ralph was a battle-hardened veteran when he landed on Queen Beach, a sub-division of Sword Beach, on June 6. Ralph fought through France in the early stages of the invasion of Europe, until his death. Meanwhile, his younger brother Ken was an 18-year-old raw recruit serving with the 51st Highland Division – and took part in his very first action on D-Day. He said: “I was 18 and they were calling you up then. You had no option but to go. I went in the Army. I had three months of training in Shrewsbury, then I went out on D-Day – June 6, 1944.

D-Day – June 6, 1944.

“My mother said: ‘You can’t go, your two brothers are out there’. That meant three of the family would be out there, but of course you had got to go, you had no option. “I had joined the North Staffords, but I was transferred to the 51st Highland Division. I was in the infantry – ‘plodders’, as they called them.

“We would get carried away in a big truck, dropped off, then we would probably have to walk four or five miles to get to the action. It was hard, but when you are young, it didn’t bother you much. “After training, we went out on a big troop ship on D-Day. It was a happy atmosphere on the crossing. We were singing ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’.

“I was only 18 and I had never been abroad before. It was nice. We were all young, all the same age and when you are 18 or 19-years-old, you don’t bother about the danger. You don’t think anything will happen to you. In any case, there’s nothing you can do about it. “You’ve never been in action. You don’t know what it is like. But you soon find out. “You worry more about those you are leaving behind. There was only my mother and my sister, Joan.”

On D-Day, the 51st Highland Division landed as a second echelon division to support and fill in behind the first wave. Ken said: “I just followed the others off the beach. All you did was you got your head down, because you could hear the shells coming over. “Then, when it stops, you walk on. If it’s a good way to march, when you stop, you dig a trench and that’s where you stay.

“I can remember we stopped at a cemetery in Belgium and there were all these coffins ready to be put down and that acted as a trench, which was a bit naughty. “After every little battle you always buried your dead – whoever was in your own company. “You would wrap them in a blanket and bury them in a hole. After the war, the War Graves Commission came and dug them up and buried them in cemeteries and that’s what happened to Ralph.

“If you were not fighting, we would have a cook and he would do soup or something like that – nothing fancy. If we were going somewhere and came through a farm, we killed the chickens. “I remember one bloke, he was a full corporal, he kicked this pig and killed it – but we all ate it. If you’ve got to eat, you’ve got to eat. “If the Germans had been anywhere, we’d often find eggs left behind, and that helped us a lot. “As an infantry man, a lot of the time you didn’t know when you were going to eat. You had to wait for this little truck to come up with bowls of soup.”

After D-Day, Ken – and the 51st Highland Division – was involved in virtually every major conflict up until the end of the war, including in France, Holland, Ardennes – the notorious Battle of the Bulge – and ultimately, across the Rheine and into Germany itself. “You never forget. It always stays with you – but I don’t like to talk about it,” said Ken.

SWORD invasion beach on D-Day.

“I didn’t worry (that I was killing people). You looked after your mates, and they looked after you. You never have such good mates in Civvy Street as you do in the Army. I had a lot of good friends and I lost a few of them. “We had a bloke from Chesterton. He was going on about what he was going to do when he got out there. He was all wind and nothing else. “We went to Le Havre and we never saw him again. He scarpered – did a runner. He went to a camp in Le Havre. I don’t know what happened to him. He was a waste of time. I didn’t think much of him.

“We went to one place in Germany, we were going through these houses we broke in. “There was one where there was a cellar full of women and children. They were shouting, don’t throw anything down (like a grenade) and ‘boom’. “We didn’t, but we went down just to make sure there were no Jerries and they really were just women and children. “In those days, we didn’t have much pity, but I would hate to think I did something like that.”

After the war, Ken returned to his job as a window cleaner, which he did until he retired. He married his wife Lily, now aged 84, in 1952 and the couple had one son, Gary Ralph Wright, now aged 50, and two grandchildren, Christopher, aged 26, and Grace, aged 23. Ken’s second brother Harry died many years ago from lung cancer, aged 49, but he is still close to his sister, Joan Pedley, now aged 84.

Ken said: “I was window cleaning before the war and the bloke I was working for said to me, ‘if you come home, there’s always a job here for you’, and that’s what I did.

“I was de-mobbed from the Army at the end of the war. We were given £40, which was a bit of a pension, but once it was gone you didn’t get anymore. “But you didn’t have a lot of money. It was quite hard for them back home to live. “I used to get 21 shillings as a soldier and I would send 14 bob of that home. Mother had not got any money really. Some of the lads hit the town, but I used to save my money and bring it home. “I had some good times as well. I enjoyed some of it. But there were a lot of bad times. “I do like to go over to France to see Ralph’s grave. I will go again. I would go every month if I could.”

Window Cleaning Trade Tales

Window washers keep buildings clean whether they are small commercial buildings or touring skyscrapers.

Trade Tales: Washing tall buildings in a single bound: Fear of heights is not a common job complaint, unless the job includes dangling 30 stories above the ground cleaning a window. Fear of heights is not a common job complaint, unless the job includes dangling 30 stories above the ground cleaning a window. "It was a natural progression for me," Mike Draper said of how he got into the window cleaning business. "I had done some work for a buddy in high school and we did some window cleaning. I started here in Bloomington in 2000 and it has led to bigger and better things. They put glass high up in the air and so we clean it."

Draper's company, Clearly Windows, cleans windows in Peoria, Bloomington, Champaign, Springfield, Decatur and other places in central Illinois. "We do anything from storefronts to retail restaurants all the way up to the big buildings," Draper said. "We do the Twin Towers in Peoria even."

Making ends meet for the company typically finds the window washer cleaning a variety of buildings, Draper said. "It's a mix of buildings, especially in the area," Draper said. "There are not as many big buildings as smaller buildings. It's not like Chicago where you have all those skyscrapers to clean."

To get up and down the buildings, the washers are seated on a plank of wood which is counterweighted for balance and suspended on two ropes. "Most of the work we do we do from a bosun chair," Draper said. "It's basically two ropes coming off a counterweighted teeter-totter, if you will. The counterweights keep the focal point to where you won't tip over." Being suspended on a plank of wood a little more than seat length can give even the most seasoned window cleaner nervous at times, Draper said. "Sometimes you do (get a fear of the height)," Draper said. "You try to stabilize yourself the best you can when you are up there. You can do that with a suction cup."

Cleaning the windows is a process similar to how someone cleans their car windows at a gas station.

"We soap the windows down with a commercial window cleaning agent then squeegee it clean," Draper said. In a unique business like professional window cleaning, Draper said longstanding relationships are key. "We have contracts with people and, more than that, we have relationships with the property owners," Draper said. "It's a big process." How long a building takes depends on the size and amount of windows. "Cleaning times can depend but most of our buildings we can do within a week," Draper said. After all these years in the business, one might still find Draper in a variety of places, high above the ground. "I am more of the organizational side now but I sometimes get out there," Draper said. "Yesterday for instance I was hanging about the University of Illinois football stadium."

Click to enlarge.

Daredevil Photographer Rappels Down Skyscrapers For the Perfect Shot: Even window washers can be scary when you don’t expect to see them outside your office window. But a camera-wielding man dangling from a single rope goes beyond the pale. Caracas-born photographer Carlos Ayesta has freaked out thousands of Parisians over the past few years, rappelling down the side of Paris’s skyscrapers to shoot remarkable images of the city's towers.

Ayesta is an architectural photographer and urban spelunker: With the help of his team, he’s rappelled down the sides of the tallest buildings in Paris, including the Eiffel Tower and the shell-shaped Center of New Industries and Technologies. He calls the ongoing project Vertical Visions of La Defense, the Paris business district that’s long been at the center of a city-wide scandal over the construction of new skyscrapers (basically, companies want them and Parisians don’t).

Ayesta’s photos are less about the contentious politics of the neighborhood and more about capturing the contentious buildings from a unique perspective. "My approach of taking photographs whilst abseiling and from hanging platforms shows the architecture in another dimension," Ayesta told Dezeen recently. "I can take pictures of hidden things. No-one on the ground or on top of the buildings can see what I see.”

Check out the video below to see Ayesta dangling from the top of La Grande Arche, the monumental Mitterrand-era rectangular monument designed by Johann Otto von Spreckelsen in the 1980s—and make sure to peep the surprised building occupants in several of the images.