CONFERENCE SKETCH: It seemed a case of a new gloss on some very old problems. Sure, there was a flashy new look, a cool slogan and some right-on-dude staging.
But behind the (no-doubt quite expensive) makeover lay some ill-disguised wrinkles on the face of the fresh and youthful branding.
Gone is the "P" from the UUP - the very term "party" now deemed too exclusive and lofty. Gone too is the old logo - Union flag-bedecked six-county "Ulster" floating in an Atlantic free of any Irish Republic.
In comes what the marketing guys call the double dynamic curve of the new UU logo. It's designed to suggest a bugle of sorts that enables idealistic unionists to trumpet fairness and decency and reclaim the very name of unionism from pretenders. (That's what the PR man said, I wrote it down.)
And of course the slogan: Simply British. This reporter was not alone in thinking the logo seemed related to the French "tricouleur" while the slogan was uncomfortably reminiscent of "Simply the Best" - the anthem of the lower Shankill UDA led by a certain Johnny Adair.
Despite the new suit, there were still plenty of reminders of the old UUP - the one that used to meet in drafty halls with a Union flag sellotaped to a trestle table. Delegates, some of them old enough to be parents of the man who was spending their money to tell them all this, learned where they were going wrong.
And in the course of his advice he employed some concepts reminiscent of "the other side" in another decade.
They were implored to target "lapsed unionists" and to reverse the lack of confidence to say "I am British" with a swollen chest. They were told, in the most obvious but unspecific reference to the DUP, not to "compete for the negatives" and to replace their disjointed message and its lack of clarity with one which had "clear emotional resonance".
Indeed there were sufficient overlaps with the drive for recognition by 1960s nationalists that a quick blast of We Shall Overcome would not have seemed out of place.
No PR budget can disguise a split. The divisions were as obvious on the elegant platform as they were on the giant screen which carried the conference relay into the press room.
David Burnside's one-word contribution from the floor ("Rubbish!") was as resonant as Jeffrey Donaldson's decision to abstain in person from Mr Trimble's address, and every bit as eloquent as the expression on Martin Smyth's face throughout.
One senior delegate suggested afterwards to The Irish Times sotto voce - "they haven't gone away you know".