Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: rhys giles jones, the day the media died
Was surfing a new site this morning by Giles Rhys Jones and found this little musical ditty. All sensationalism aside this is a great little toe tapper. Enjoy.
Filed under: Advertising | Tags: pocket bar, pocket optimism, surry hills
Has anyone been to Pocket bar in Surry Hills Sydney? I haven’t but was surfing the net having a nosy about when I came across this cute little promotion they’re doing for pocket optimists. I wonder whether they’re relying on the fact that many people don’t respond to things like this [the averade direct mail response rate used to be about 3% I think] or whether they’ve been inundated with parking offenders. I did recently receive a parking fine the other day and considered taking it down to Pocket Bar for just a moment but then . . it felt kind of rude to just rock up to a bar that I had no relationship with and present my parking fine. I wonder if anyone has taken them up on their offer? Either way, it’s certainly an usual promo idea…
I’ve been trying to make a claim (or in fact about 40 claims) with HBA my health insurer today. It has become so difficult to even make the claim that it’s becoming laughable. I pay an extraordinary amount for health insurance a month, I mean a lot. I looked up on the net today to see whether I could make a claim online to start sorting out my receipts, you can claim online but not for medical, dental and some other category. Right.
I then rang them to see if I could visit an HBA centre (how very old school I know) but guess what? they’ve closed every single HBA centre in Sydney apart from Chatswood which might as well be in Canberra given the proxiomity to Surry Hills and the CBD. They said I could claim over the telephone which I thought sounded labour intensive but at least it provided me with an option. But wait, you can’t claim amounts over $500, or anything to do with medical, sport and some other restriction.
Okay so I’m just a little peeved so far so I ask the nice lady on the phone what my options are to which she replies – Snail Mail. She says she can send me out some claim forms by post and I can return them in the post and get them to process the claims remotely, all of which will obviously take a significant amount of time. I check the website to see if I can circumvent even one step in this arduous process and download a claim form online but the link is broken. Of course it is. So I ring back another nice lady and ask if she can send me a soft copy of the claim form (it didn’t sound like HBA even made soft copies of the online forms available for their operators) but the lady was very helpful, however I suspect I shall have to wait to receive some claims forms in the post.
Admittedly I’ve been a little fluey off late and my tolerance is low but oh my lord HBA in the days of digital communication and electronic efficiency, you guys absolutely suck. Further to this, the fact that I pay such a ridiculously huge amount each month in health insurance (a preventative style anxiety I probably inherited from my mother), and you can’t provide me with a branch or an online service that works.
Health insurance has always been difficult to understand, impossible to negotiate and now, they’re making it near impossible to even make a claim. I don’t know about any of you but the health insurance industry is one space which is crying out for a new competitor to cut through the crap and offer real value, easy access and efficient effective service.
I was just flicking through some old newsletters from Australian Anthill when I came across this article about Quirky. Quirky is the brainchild of 22 year old Ben Kaufman and it’s a really interesting site worth checking out. So here’s the deal:
Entrepreneurs and other creatives can submit a product idea to the Quirky community. The community picks one product idea every seven days and then everybody gets busy on that one idea to see whether it could fly. Basically the idea is that you get a whole bunch of creative people involving themselves in the ideas from the very beginning, the product positioning, packaging, naming etc right through to the marketing and selling of the product which happens via the quirky online store. Once the product hits its pre-sales threshold, the product goes into the production and delivery stage. Thirty cents out of every dollar a quirky product makes goes back to the quirky community, with 12 of these 30 cents going to the person who originally suggested the idea.
An interesting idea, especially for those of you who are itching to get out of your advertising careers and make a million selling widgets all of your own. Stop by and take a look. Check it out here quirky
HP has launched a campaign for small and micro-businesses with the theme of “the office tool”. The idea is that small and micro-business owners and employees often escape certain stereotypical colleagues that are common in large businesses. The cartoon portrays an example of this – the annoying guy that takes credit for your work and brags about it to the boss, portrayed as the “tool” you don’t need. So, what is the tool you do want? Well, in this instance, it’s the HP Officejet Pro 8500 printer.
Here’s a link to the cartoon “The Office Tool“
What the?
I assume they’ve created it as something that can be passed around to get down with the peeps who run their own businesses and might be in the market for a new printer. They obviously don’t know those peeps very well. This has to be one of the worst executions I have seen in a long time. Not only is it really simplistic, they also explain it to you just in case you’re too dumb to get the joke.
The irony is that it’s so crap I’ll probably pass it on. Or not.
Filed under: Advertising, Social media | Tags: My RB Opportunity, Reckitt Benckiser
Quite some time ago I received an email from a lovely account executive over at Shiny Red in London about a new social media campaign they’re developing for Reckitt Benckiser.
As a part of said new campaign they have developed an integrated social media strategy to raise awareness of the global opportunities that exist at the company. At the centre of the campaign is a new blog, ‘My RB Opportunity’ which aims to offer a window into the world of work at the company. The blog is written by nine graduate trainees from Reckitt Benckiser’s offices around the world, who are sharing their thoughts and experiences to offer prospective employees a real understanding of the diverse environment and reflect what it’s like to succeed in the company.
If you don’t know Reckitt Benckiser, they make all kinds of products like Detol, Veet, Strepsils etc. I understand from the email I received that “this campaign has been created in order to demonstrate Reckitt Benckiser’s commitment to engaging with social media and that the blog is one part of an integrated campaign that encompasses everything from Linked In, to Facebook and Twitter”. I also assume that the email was sent to me so that I could review the blog and perhaps post on it. So I went to the blog and I checked it out.
My first question is: Why?. My second question is: Who?. Why does it exist and who do you think is going to read it? I know that there are countless reality shows on cable at the moment which chronicle the lives of interns at Vogue or Marie Claire, young guns attempting to crawl up the Master Chef ladder or become the next apprentice. I guess the factor that makes those shows work is entertainment. Great script writing or strong polarising characters or great filming [and editing].
We do want to watch the interns at Vogue scratch eachother’s eyes out over who gets to go to the latest fashion show because they’re bitchy New Yorkers and that’s funny. We love Master Chef because it has some moderately big names and who doesn’t love cooking? And just maybe, we imagine that it could be us one day. We love to watch the Apprentice and others like it. But who would want to read the musings of a real intern at a large multinational corporate?
They’re not going to write anything too interesting or be doing much except towing the line because they have jobs they want to keep. If they had hired a comedian or a particularly articulate journalist to write the copy, maybe I would read it. But as it is now, it’s a big black hole of corporate commentary about nothing much in particular. I appreciate that they’re trying to do something different and commend them for that. I’m just not sure what the point of it is.
Anyone>?
I’ve been in NZ which is one of the reasons why I haven’t posted in a while. The other being that there are times when I have a lot to say and others less. But right now I’m good for a little conversation.
I like NZ a lot. I like the people, they always seem friendly to me. I like the country, I like it’s landscape and I’ve always had this notion that NZ is a very innovative country. After all, they brought us Sir Edmund Hillary, they had a female NZ prime minister from 1999 to 2008 and let’s face it, their lamb is good.
I had also heard that NZ was a particularly innovative country for it’s size and that it had one of the largest numbers of patents both registered and pending, per capita. Where I heard this from is akin to the ‘my teacher told me’ adage and I have not found any robust statistic that proves this to be correct.
The unique demographic, economic conditions and geographic location makes New Zealand an interesting case study for understanding the processes which foster innovation. New Zealand is a small and isolated economy which, at least in a textbook sense, is institutionally almost ideal for promoting local entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet, in spite of a macroeconomic and institutional framework which should be ideal for promoting innovation, if you wade through the NZ Govt collected data and the latest innovation measures, the observed innovation performance of New Zealand is poor, and this is particularly noticeable in comparison with other small isolated countries such as Israel and Finland. However, I do know that some companies [Australian and otherwise] have used NZ as a kind of test market due to its size, isolation and the propensity of its residents to be receptive to new products. I also know that there is some great product development coming out of smaller NZ manufacturers as well as the big dairy cohorts like Fonterra who continue to innovate within their sectors and export around the world.
Anyway I digress. I simply wanted to share with you how much I enjoyed my local wanderings through the NZ supermarkets. Row upon row of interesting packaging, product positionings and use of typeography, colour, material and language. Tree hugging aside, I’m a big sucker for great packaging [if it's environmentally friendly all the better], but I love a bit of imagination and design goodness, especially when applied to the mundane things that we all need to buy – like toilet paper or peas.
So if you’re in NZ. Stop by a supermarket. You’ll be glad you did.
A little slideshow from Katie Chatfield over at Get Shouty I thought I’d share with you
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Gregory Page, Lazy Grazing, poltzy, steve poltz, sydney
Two mates of mine are very much into Steve Poltz and yesterday, they brought him to our place for a Lazy Grazing. He played with Gregory Page and the two of them were absolutely fantastic. He’s been touring round Oz for the past few months and apparently always does a couple of house concerts in each city that he visits. Yesterday was our turn. He came with his band and joined us for a long boozy lunch and a couple of sets and it turned out to be an absolute cracker event. Thanks to Mads, Poltzy made a cameo appearance just about everywhere. There was plenty of food, even more wine and lots of people united in their love of the Lazy Graze. Poltzy sang an original song for little Archie [pictured] for his first birthday and that was it, the little guy was mesmerised for the rest of the day. The idea behind Lazy Grazing is basically just to get together with a few peeps and listen to some music. As it turned out, it was quite the event. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Stev Poltz you can check him out here or here.
