Garner has revealed to How-Do that next week Manchester Confidential will mastermind a giveaway of some 12,000 Krispy Kreme donuts in the city centre.

On Tuesday or Wednesday the team will send out emails to Man Con subscribers asking them if they want the chance to be ‘the office hero’.

1,000 of those that reply to the e-shot will then be told to rendezvous with the Krispy Kreme/Manchester Confidential barge that is set to make its way down the city’s canal system next Friday. Upon doing this they will receive a box of 12 of the supremely sweet confections, that they can then either take back to the office, or stuff themselves with in the nearest available railway arch.

According to Garner, he’d probably opt for the latter option.

“When Krispy Kreme, through PR agency MC2, first approached us I began to question whether this was a good idea for our brand,” noted the man known to many as Gordo. “Manchester Confidential has built its reputation on an appreciation of good food and booze, and I wasn’t so sure we should be promoting donuts.

“Then they sent a couple of hundred to the offices to let us try them out. I ended up leaving looking like Homer Simpson. They were great.”

Garner is well aware that Krispy Kreme is a brand with a sizable cult following and that the December opening of its first Manchester outlet is set to be big news. This, aside from his sweet tooth (and an undisclosed fee? Ed), is the other main reason he has for welcoming the brand tie in.

“We already have an agreement with Wagamama and Famous Grouse and the fact that we can get a mega-brand on board like Krispy Kreme shows just how far this business has come.”

He continued: “it demonstrates another step forward for the Manchester Confidential business model. We always had the idea that there would be different tiers to this business and this is evidence of that.

Gordo

“MC2 and Krispy Kreme obviously understand that.”

Garner stresses that the Planet Confidential business reached profitability “some time ago” and the figures he reels off for the Manchester operation certainly sound impressive.

He claims to send out 1.3m emails every month to subscribers, resulting in the site being accessed by 96,000 unique IP addresses, with each visit lasting an average of 12 minutes.

As he takes pains to point out, those IP addresses mask the real readership figures (“Cobbett’s, for example, has one IP address, but there’s 200 subscribers there”), which he believes, and believes he can prove, are closer to an average of 2.2 readers for every IP address logged.

“The development of the site is really pleasing for us,” he concluded, “and this tie-up shows that when we sat down and plotted a course for this business three or four years ago... well, we knew that we were on to something special.”

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