Johnny Rotten, crumpet-topped camper vans and stunt-jumping cows. Who said butter was boring?

As marketing budgets are scaled back, few categories are spending more on advertising this year than last. Butters and spreads is one category bucking this trend, however.

The category's press and TV advertising was up more than 50% on last year over the four weeks ending 25 January.

Heavy activity from Clover, Flora and Anchor more than offset the inactivity of market leader Lurpak.

January is traditionally a time when advertising seeks to tap into the public's desire to eat more healthily. This has been true even in the yellow fats market, but this year the sector pushed a broader range of messages.

Dairy Crest was the spender of the month, with ads promoting its Clover Lighter product, which was launched last year. The TV-dominated campaign features idyllic spring and summertime scenes showing families, children and friends getting together and eating Clover. This marked a change in tactics on last January, when the brand did not advertise.

Like Clover, Flora's sales growth has not been as strong as Lurpak's over the past year [Nielsen to October 2008] and it was the ­second-biggest spender with its TV campaign promoting its Flora Buttery product.

In its ad, TV chef Gary Rhodes heads off in a crumpet-topped camper van to demonstrate in a series of taste tests that people prefer the brand to Lurpak Lighter Spreadable. The ad also claims the seed oils Flora is made from have heart-health properties. Health has long been at the centre of Flora's message, underlined by its sponsorship of the London Marathon, though that ends this year.

Having been inactive in January, Lurpak has announced it is returning to TV next week as part of a £12m multimedia push.

Anchor, meanwhile, is adopting a mixed-media approach to its advertising. Its cows are back in a

40-second Fuzzy-Felt-style TV advertisement that stresses its free-range qualities and features a cow on a motorbike jumping a fence, in the manner of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.

In the last three months of 2008 the sector also brought about the unlikely marriage of Dairy Crest's Country Life brand and Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols.