Would you run onto a football pitch naked to promote your venue?

Here's a little something to (hopefully) bring a smile to your face if you're a bit weary after the summer holidays. (Using the word hopefully in a pedant-friendly way there, I note.) Audiences North East have just shared a report on Low cost/no cost marketing and ideas generation. You can find it here. As well as lots of ideas it also shares the methodology used by Lisa Baxter in a 'creative ideas generation' workshop with lots of arts folk in North East England.

Although this is exactly the kind of thing that has some people clenching their buttocks and smiling tightly, and I might draw the line at water pistols myself, I've often felt that some arts organisations - or more accurately people who work for them - don't always practice what we preach about creativity. So it's good to see it working. Whether any of the ideas happen is another matter, of course, but there are some mad and good ones here, and some which are both.

Favourites, though not necessarily ones I'd advocate, from the list of 480 ideas include:

- World record ‘moon’ spells out venue name from aerial perspective• Do a mock political march, in the colours of your venue. Ferociously steam through town shouting about your venue
- Croissant trail to your venue
- Get a traffic warden to dress up as mascot to put tickets on cars
- Walk around with a box of smells for your venue and ask people to guess where it is
- Redirect all traffic past venue
- Set up camera on one seat in auditorium and take a picture every performance for a year, capture expression – make into time-lapse video for YouTube and advertising
- Start a conga line, everyone who joins gets discounted tickets
- Run naked with a banner at St James Park

There was a slight running theme of nakedness and nudity. It may be a Northern going-out-without-a-coat-even-in winter thing taken to extremes.