10 June 2008

The UN has come together and decided to elect the first ever world leader. Only your vote counts.

Here are your three candidates…

Candidate A
Associates with crooked politicians and consults with an astrologist. He’s had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks ten martinis a day.

Candidate B
Kicked out of office twice and usually sleeps until midday. He used opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

Candidate C
Decorated war hero who is also a vegetarian. He doesn’t smoke, drinks only an occasional beer and has never cheated on his wife.

Which of these candidates would you choose? Decide and then scroll down without peeking.

Candidate A was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Candidate B was Winston Churchill.
Candidate C was Adolf Hitler.

First impressions are everything. Consumers jump to conclusions. And perception is reality.

Posted by Zac Martin

09 June 2008

You’d be a clown if you weren’t subscribed to TED presentations in iTunes. Not only are there some fantastic talks on marketing but nearly every single presentation offers something unique. For anyone ever doing a presentation of your own, there’s definitely something to learn.

Here‘s a great presentation I’ve watched just now by Al Gore…

 

 

When he talked about Kevin Rudd ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, fuck I felt proud to be Australian.
Posted by Zac Martin

07 June 2008

I think if you signed up for Plurk right now you’d still be considered an early adopter. Although there is a lot of buzz going around at the moment so get in fast.

I quite like the concept and it seems to out do Twitter in nearly every way.

The only problem is there are no banner ads. No forms of advertising what so ever. Sure in the short term that’s great for me and you but how are they going to pay their costs? This becomes particularly important with their exponentially growing traffic.

Like many social networks, they are going to struggle to monetise the site. And by introducing advertising now, you risk alienating your community.

Where does this leave them in the long term?

Posted by Zac Martin

06 June 2008

On occasion I work Reception. In fact I’m actually “working” right now so don’t tell anyone.

Part of my role is to sort incoming mail and then delivery it to the correct pigeon holes. Whilst sorting through the legitimate mail I find myself with handfuls and handfuls of tangible spam. Just now, I’ve thrown out 16 letters from the same organisation to different people who work here. And much much more.

I don’t even open the envelopes before turfing them into the recycling bin. I feel like writing to them to say that interruption advertising like this just doesn’t work. Especially when you can’t even get it through the Receptionist.

I did find one exception a few weeks ago. A small tin arrived which was clearly spam addressed to one of the managers. But I didn’t throw it away.

The instructions said to open it and water it daily while keeping it warm. So I took it home that night and thus began a two week relationship with the brand and counting. After a few days a plant sprouted and somehow on one of the leaves were embed the words Thank You. It’s still growing today. It’s somewhat similar to this.

What a great way to break through the clutter. I’m still interacting with the brand and I even feel like they are a little bit more environmentally friendly than I thought.

I guess the only problem is I took it home and failed to pass it onto the manager. Like the rest of the junk mail, it never got passed the Receptionist even if for a different reason.

Posted by Zac Martin

04 June 2008

Apple users are passionate. Windows users are not. Mozilla Firefox users are passionate. Internet Explorer users are not.

I’ll stay away from the almost cliché example of Apple and instead use Firefox.

Mozilla recently announced Firefox 3 will be launched shortly and have decided to involve their powerful consumer following. On what will be Download Day, they will be trying to break the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

You can actually pledge to download the software, where they will then send you a reminder email on the day. A fantastic idea and at the moment they already have 672,214 pledges. Not downloads, but pledges.

I think Internet Explorer might be in trouble. In fact, I wonder how many people would pledge to download their latest version?

Posted by Zac Martin

02 June 2008

Be sure to check out Marketing Today where Peter, Jules, Simon and myself discuss The Perfect Viral in Episode #64.

During this discussion a point was raised regarding the effective use of preview images on YouTube. Generally a hot female or a cleavage shot tended to give your video a higher view count. I also learnt, that this preview image is selected from the exact middle of your video.

Now take a look at Episode #1 of a fairly quirky series called Zeroes…

 

 

If you have a keen eye like myself you might noticed at 1:57 a flicker of a frame. You might also notice that 1:57 is exactly halfway between the video.

The frame is of a blonde cheerleader. The same one as the preview. This user has gone to the effort of placing a frame in the middle of the content just to get a certain preview image.

Interesting. How long do you think until this becomes a common practice?

Posted by Zac Martin

01 June 2008

Following on from a previous post, I recently purchased four items from Safeway. The receipt was 34cm long. For four items. 34cm long.

Seth Godin has a good post here showing two companies who could be perceived as being just as wasteful. Or entirely luxurious. Either way, I will never see Safeway as luxurious and such a long receipt only says to me they are not as green as they could be.

Again I recommend you head over to Idea A Day and check out Idea #2842 for another submitted by yours truly.

Posted by Zac Martin