Pigs Don't Fly by Zac Martin

19 February 2009 2034

The year television will die.

I know Ben loves it when I make claims like this but here’s why…

+ The current older generation will pass on and their media consumption habits will go with them.

+ The next age bracket down has been through computing and Internet introduced into mainstream life. Having already gone through this change, a small portion of this generation will be more likely to again adapt their behaviours.

+ The next generation, probably looking at young Gen X’s and old Gen Y’s will be the most resistant to this change and will suffer the most with television’s death, although their own won’t be too far off.

+ Young Gen Y’s and iGens will change their behaviour or will have grown up with television already playing a very little role in their life.

Check back in 25 years and if I’m wrong I’ll give 5% of my print media start up to who ever comments here first.

Posted by Zac Martin 17 Comments

07 February 2009 She’s A Tweeting Beaut

A week ago, I was followed by @TheBogan on Twitter. After slowly building momentum over the past seven days, his follower count is building and I’ve seen his tweets retweeted a number of times. I’m not sure if it’s because myself and Stan have engaged with him a fair bit, but he seems to be fairly involved with the Australian marketing bloggers.

It only occurred to me this morning, but could this be a cunning marketing campaign for VB?

While I doubt that’s the case, wouldn’t it be incredible if it were so? I love the creativity. I love the brand tie in. I love the audience engagement. I even love that it’s completely non transparent, and Julian agrees sometimes it’s appropriate to break the so called “social media rules”.

It could also be some guy who just wants a creative outlet. It might even be Stan himself. But maybe, just maybe, it’s a genius piece of work by Droga5.

Posted by Zac Martin 22 Comments

05 February 2009 What Brands Can Learn From An Oyster

Today I’m going to talk about Daniel Oyston and his entry into the Australian marketing blogosphere.

It started early last year when Oyster first sent feedback to the Marketing Today podcast. He followed that up with further comments over the next few months, adding value to the conversation each time. In October, he started his own blog.

He was soon commenting on a number of different blogs, adding insight and thought to each post. Building up his online presence, he established networks and from that his own posts started receiving a lot of attention.

He contacted me personally and we had a number of emails back and forth about beer and funny internet memes. He still sends me random shit he thinks I’ll like. And he offered to host some images on a server he had access to.

In less than six months, he’s been able to do what I’ve been trying to for nearly two years. In just this short a time, he’s blog is held in incredibly high regard. I believe that while his content is remarkable, his community driven approach and the rules of engagement he followed have attributed to his success.

I think if you asked Oyster whether this was a strategy he set out to do or if this was just what he thought was common sense, logical and how a decent friendly guy would act, his answer would be the latter.

Brands can learn a lot from this.

The way Oyster first monitored the environment, began to put out feelers and ultimately engaged with the right influential people was superb. Brands should use this example when conducting social media response and broadcast.

Posted by Zac Martin 2 Comments

03 February 2009 Graduate Like A Rock Star #1

Kate Kendall from Marketing Mag kindly asked me to start writing for them. The first article is up, the first in a series on how to graduate like a rock star. Check it out here.

Posted by Zac Martin 6 Comments

01 February 2009 The Internet Slums

A month back, JC wrote a post that inspired some digging. The topic was the Footscray of the Internet as I described it… 4chan /b/.

The thing is, I’ve been around, not heavily involved, with a subset of the 4chan community for a number of years, long before social networking was even big. Over the years I’ve been subjected to many memes, most of which I probably didn’t even realise at the time were memes. I’ve seen the birth of some of these Internet phenomenons and possibly taken part in developing them into mainstream memes. It wasn’t until Julian’s post that I started thinking about the importance of this community on Internet culture, even more so about a possible marketing application.

Julian said there was too much to cover in one post, and I agree. So here I’m simply going to suggest you check out the two biggest slums on the Internet…

+ 4chan /b/
+ Something Awful

Both communities are incredibly strong, even if they are based entirely around the anonymous. After spending a fair bit of time in these slums over the past month, I can easily say they are the best and worst places on the Internet. They are social in a disgusting yet brilliant manner. And they are responsible for 90% of the memes on the Internet and have had an impact on culture many couldn’t comprehend.

So as marketers, how can we use these communities?

Posted by Zac Martin 5 Comments

01 February 2009 iZac

Based on the results of the 2006 census, the ABS has revamped the previous way we classified generations. The new chart looks like this…

0-19 __iGeneration
20-39 _Generation X and Generation Y
40-59 _Baby Boomers
60-79 _Lucky
80+ __.Oldest

The newer generation characterisation relies not so heavily on random age demographics, but rather characteristics of each segment. iGeneration, most specifically, focuses on interweb usage and have been named aptly so because they have no memory without it.

Two things to note…