Get the biggest, loudest and most audacious PR campaign that you can afford, make sure the media is fully aware of what it is that you are trying to achieve, and then blast the more cynical and marketing-led awareness events out of the water The public will only support your efforts," says Mr Barr.. but we can explain, as forcefully as we are able, that the public is going to get pretty sick of every day in the year being used as yet another marketing platform," he says. "The only way around it is for the marketing industry to pull out of the awareness slots altogether, or for them to make a real effort to tie in their vast publicity budgets with the organisations that are seen as promoting good causes."Although US marketers avoid embarrassing awareness date-clashes with a strictly-controlled PR events register that allocates each "industry"or charity sector its own dedicated week or fortnight, Profile believes that the free-for-all that marks the UK's approach to awareness events is set to continue:"Our advice to charities and voluntary organisations is not to let the marketers muscle in, but to fight fire with fire. He says that firms would earn far more brownie points from the public if they showed a willingness to work with non-commercial organisations in the same sector."We can't actually ban any marketer ... According to Profile, however much sections of the media deride such events as National Chip Week or Pet Smile Month, "the coverage they get from all branches of the media is enormous; particularly, it seems, when the subject is funny or even crass".While Gossard was severely criticised two years ago for holding Wonderbra Awareness Day on Breast Cancer Awareness Day - an event that spawned hundreds of photographs of cleavages, and rather less column inches about breast cancer - Mr Barr believes that marketers "are continuing to commercialise what was once a non-commercial publicity device".

In the past two years alone though, the number of awareness campaigns has soared by 72 per cent, with the majority of newly-sponsored days, weeks or months being for toe health or shinier hair, rather than for cystic fibrosis or homelessness.The fact that companies tend to have bigger advertising budgets - or more proficient PR agencies - than most charities, means that the more worthwhile events tend to be "shouted down". And they are in danger of being "hi-jacked by cynical marketers", according to the company that compiles the official register of such events. Simon Barr, the director of The Profile Group, which for the past three years has attempted to control the alarming spread of awareness events, believes that "awareness fatigue" among the public is now at an all-time high. Awareness campaigns have until recently been viewed as a fund-raising tool for charities, rather than as an inexpensive marketing device for manufacturers. NEXT YEAR the UK will have a record 380 "awareness campaigns" - which include everything from the Breast Cancer or Deaf/Blind awareness weeks to National Phone-In Sick Day or Gnome Appreciation Month. We wondered what kind of naughtiness can only occur after 10pm [that could not occur before it]?Suggestions to Loki.Valhalla btinternet or Creativity, Features, The Independent, 1 Canada Square, London E14 5DL by 5 January Results and three more Chambers prizes on 11 January. Next week: Uses for Velcro [that manufacturers never imagined possible].

Peter Holmes says it will make cash machines throw out free money, fire all remaining nuclear missiles into the sun and produce free electricity and gas bills for a century. Eric Bridgstock predicts the Queen Mother [who is "as old as the century"] will become new-born and start wearing nappies again.Lorraine Contreras' Millennium Horribilis for the Royals has the Queen's bank accounts all wiped out so she becomes penniless, thus creating the premise of Sue Townsend's novel The Queen and I.Carrie Sheard foresees burglar alarms all going off and repair firms charging a fortune to break into houses and turn them off again.Tim Mason has all computers hereafter speak only in Babylonic Cuneiform and needs a hammer, chisel and infinite supply of granite blocks in order to get any print-out.Martin Brown has the bug scramble communications and a Department of Transport memo to get all old bangers off the roads leading to the MAFF conducting MOT tests for sausages.Claire Roche is confident that when the clock strikes 12, bugs will be released from a big silver spaceship and all those bitten will turn into tin-foil-wearing aliens.Rhiannon Harper anticipates the new fashion accessories next season will be wings, antennae, and the six-legged look.Katie Watsham thinks World War Three will be bugs versus humans.Sophie Howarth's vision has everyone catch flu, sneeze simultaneously, rip open the ozone layer and ascend through the hole to heaven.Bruce Birchall's Apocalypse has the catacombs open, Freddie Mercury rise phoenix-like from the grave to sing one last chorus of "I Want To Break Free", all living people turn into ectoplasm and a transmigration of souls wing its way to the aurora borealis, via Cleethorpes.Clair Hubble's Armageddon has mass choirs of parking meters sing the Hallelujah Chorus, phalanxes of traffic cones march in formation up the M1 squirting icing sugar onto car windscreens [and all watches and clocks melt and dissolve into Salvador-Dali-designed timepieces].Andrew Duncan thinks giros will be sent out in triplicate, and Kirsty Tillett has all fruit machines pour out money non-stop.John O'Byrne thinks MI5 will become MMI5 and Mike Gifford hears Bugsy Malone is offering protection.Elise Rumary thinks computer memories will remain intact but it is all human memories that will be wiped clean.Peter Holmes, Claire Roche, Elise Rumary and Carrie Sheard win a Chambers Dictionary of Quotations.[Ex-Tory Minister] Jonathan Aitken now joins the ranks of those let out of prison early on condition he [wears an electronic tag and] abides by a curfew. THE MILLENNIUM Bug is on the rampage, in Nasa's imagination at least, and in Fleet Street's, so we asked readers to let it go footloose and fancy-free in theirs, too. He also knew how to get a party going, if Milton's account is anything to go by. Milton is not the first person you think of when you try to arrange a hedonistic bash, but his Comus's speech to his revellers is as good as anything I have heard to serve as a motto for what we should be getting up to on New Year's Eve:Meanwhile welcome Joy and Feast,Midnight shout and revelry,Tipsy dance and Jollity.What hath night to do with sleep?Night hath better sweets to prove,Venus now wakes, and wakens Love.Come let us our rites begin,'Tis onely day-light that makes SinWhich these dun shades will ne'er report.Hail, Goddess of Nocturnal Sport ...Come, knit hands, and beat the groundIn a light fantastic round.. Dionysus, god of wine, madness and the theatre, would encourage his followers to become no better than animals, to the point, in Euripides' Bacchae, where his devotees tear people to shreds; Circe regularly made a point of turning unwary travellers into swine; and the offspring of Dionysus and Circe - what a lineage - Comus, the god of revelry, and so, the one we should really be raising our glasses to on 31 December, also rejoiced in turning people into animals.