Get Shouty

I love a conspiracy theory. And Mark Twain.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes

Don’t get me started on Atlas tags + Microsoft.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

When a web developer in my home town said he would call his baby Spider Pig if 100,000 people joined his Facebook page, and he gets over 120,000 and no journalist checked the story- do we really need to be worried about the millions of pieces of data that we generate with our digital footprints?  

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

As Arthur Wesley might say: “publish and be damned”.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

With the election coming up there are a number of campaigns running to agitate some agenda setting on tackling climate change. And there are a number of advertisers me-too astroturfing.

The independent Climate Institute  launched a $2.5 million campaign, tackling climate change through the eyes of an intuitive nine-year old. It will be the biggest advertising campaign ever by an Australian climate or environment non-government organisation.

By comparison Pilot Pens have launched a new range of pens made from recycled materials. Rock on. They’ve launched a campaign called Make a Scene. On the front page of Yahoo7. Cheap (not) :

Putting our money where our mouth is
For every 100* people who register their email address below, Pilot will purchase a Carbon Credit to offset 1 tonne of carbon emissions**. So tell your work colleagues and friends about Begreen and encourage them to join us in making a positive scene for our planet. 

* Limited to first 5,000 email addresses received.
** The carbon credits will be purchased from an organisation registered under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme

2.5 seconds of research shows that the cost of a tonne of carbon emissions is currently trading at $6. So Pilot are willing to invest $300 in the environment to get a database of 5,000 email addresses. Wow. Applaud the sentiment but donating 6c for an email address doesn’t seem to me to be a message worth waving a flag about…

Perhaps if the pens were used to write up a storm….or if Pilot linked through or supported the initiatives already on the table, or just wasn’t so naff with their over claim I wouldn’t think they deserved a raspberry.

Does anyone have examples of brands really getting it right in this space?

Don’t you love it when your beta testers take your brand outside of it’s safe and self referential environment and show your stuff to the world?

Thanks to Sean and Gavin for spreading the word about the new bellamyhayden blog.

The rationale behind a blog for the agency was inspired by Peter Williams, who heads up  Deloitte and is one of Australia’s thought leaders in online, mobile and emerging technology. I saw him speak last year and apart from being a shining light and beacon for intelligent enthusiasm, calculated risk taking and just going berserk at your job he gave me a fabulous outtake (and I paraphrase)

• the more IP you have outside of your firewall the stronger your brand will become

He spoke again today at the iMedia conference and basically set the room on fire- it was as if he was a Pied Piper for innovation and if he had said ‘follow me’ one hundred people would have quit their job on the spot. Anyways….

I work in an industry where most people play their cards very close to their chest- and not only between agencies, it’s quite common internally in agencies too.

When I started working at bh I noticed that the team here write brilliant, interesting strategy for their clients on a daily basis and as the digital director I might have been the only person to see the entire range of  work across the agency.

This strategy takes the form of stories and is translated into charts that bring to life insight in a compelling and visual way.

I wanted the team to recognise that what they do is  unique- and the design of our website is to recognize and celebrate what we do, and allow us to share our work and our thoughts about our work with each other.

The design rationale behind the site is ‘digital footprints’:

•  allow users (the team and our clients) to follow some of our thought pathways (either in a blog post or a case study)
•  and see some of the journeys that we have taken in order to get to that pathway (our deli.cio.us or our pageflakes reference section).

So, fundamentally it’s about Knowledge Management- sharing the success and thoughts of the team. This is my brief to them:

I’m sure that once a month (at least) you will

• have created a chart that you’re proud of and want to share with the team 
• have found a piece of research that you have an opinion on that is relevant to all of us
• have had a client success that you’d love to share
• remember that a post can be as simple as saving a chart as a .jpeg and posting it to the blog with a title and perhaps a bit of a voice over.

It will be a challenge to get the team’s uptake but I’m sure they are all more than up for it and I look forward to the conversations that they’ll inspire.

I’ve been recently asked by a client if mobile will ever be considered a serious channel by marketers…

Right this minute the mobile phone is bigger in its reach than the car, TV or internet.

Already in China, Japan and South Korea the majority of internet access is via mobile phone. In total over 750 million people access internet content via a mobile phone today

The Communities Dominate Brands post Putting 2.7 billion into context puts forward some great stats: There are 800 million cars, 850 million personal computers, 1.3 B fixed landline phones, 1.4 billion credit cards, 1.5 billion TV sets and at the beginning of 2007, 2.7 billion mobile phones. That’s three times as many mobile phones as automobiles or personal computers. About twice as many mobile phone owners as those of fixed landline phones or credit cards. And almost twice as many mobile phones are in use as TV sets.

Australians love their mobile phones and there are more than 16.5 million mobile services in use in Australia, according to the Australian Communications Authority (ACA). We spend, on average, an hour on the mobile phone every day and 35 minutes of that is spent texting

It is inevitable that the mobile phone will become an important part of the communication mix. While the Australian telco’s walled gardens and premium content focus have restricted advertising innovation, the times are changing.

It’s important to keep reminding marketers that they are in the message delivery business. The ability for marketers to deliver timely and targeted messages to specific audiences is one reason that media planners still knock on the telco’s doors. This, in addition to the mobile phone’s ability to provide a procrastination destination and information a service for the 3.5 million people browsing the mobile internet in this country, means that there is a large and growing opportunity for brands to connect with their consumers by using this channel.