A WARNING to the Irish banks - don't be persuaded to follow promotions mounted by the British banks, they might come to a sticky end.

Last week, NatWest in Britain thought up a brilliant wheeze - hand out lots of pink, green and yellow sticks of rock as part of a personal loans promotion. Quite what sticks of rock have to do with loans isn't immediately apparent to The Margin, but then marketing people sometimes think in strange ways.

The only problem with the NatWest promo was that a couple of the sticks of rock were found to contain a metal staple - not an ingredient calculated to drive borrowers towards a NatWest loan. Nobody was injured but all the rock was recalled and the marketing campaign moved from rock on to rock off.