Chupa Chups no longer suck?

In perhaps one of THE most bizarre match-ups, Chupa Chups - those people of lolly fame - are offering a Tooheys Extra Dry 'UncharTED'-style prize experience for you to take your unsigned band from nothing to everything.



This confuses me a lot. Where are Chupa Chups taking this? The prize pack is a bad TED copy, but probably for any aspiring band, hardly a fame-breaking moment. All-in-all other than the average publicity, the band is winning 2000 pressings of an EP and a new guitar. Everyone forgets about the drummer.

And more importantly, where is the link between Chupa Chups and live music? The main area for purchase of Chupa Chups is the petrol station cash desk - the main area for unsigned live bands are dark and sweaty nightclubs. The distance is a stretch. Even if the primary aim of this promotion is to be some sort of Uncharted Lite, there's still a big gap to overcome. The winning band get to play at Odyssey NYE festival - what if they're not let in because they're underage??

This smacks of a comms company selling this to Chupa Chups as an innovative and great brand-building exercise - two things it will fail to be. Maybe it is purely a branding exercise, using the simple concept that bands will promote the site for you because they want to win. But how many will really try that hard for 2000 EPs and a one-off gig?

Whilst I haven't checked, it will be interesting to see if as part of this promotion Chupa Chups develop new and innovative ways of selling their lollies, or there is additional point of purchase in those venues where it sells well.

If they haven't done either of those, they've missed a massive trick. If they have, I could be eating my words. And their lollies.

Western Digital MyBook

I'm about to smash it up.

I am trying to back-up huge amounts of data from my computer to the external USB hard-drive and I keep getting the message 'cannot copy:path too deep' when I reach certain files.

All of the searches I have done on Google suggest that the problem is one of a number of things - all of which I have checked. I've even swapped the drive out and got a new one. So really the problem is probably elsewhere, but it makes it far more satisfying blaming it on the little black box rather than the big black box.

Just emailed the manufacturers to see if they can shed some light on it. If they can't, I'm taking a hammer to it. Or taking it back to Hardley Normal. The latter option would probably be more constructive and save me $200, but the former option would FEEL SOOOOO GOOD.

Can one book change your life?

Well, there's obvious testimony that throughout history, one book can change your life. The Bible and the Koran for example. I'd probably say Harry Potter changed JK and Daniel Radcliffe's life a little. Then there's such greats as Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey', Plato's 'The Republic', Aristotle, Dante and so on. And not to forget Viz's Roger Mellie's 'Profanasaurus'.



Roger Mellie: 'Hello, good evening and bollocks'

I read a book by a guy called Justin Herald over the last couple of days entitled 'How To Grow Your Business Without Spending A Single Cent'. Justin is an Australian 'entrepenuer' who made his fortune on the back of his clothing label Attitude Inc (something he feels the need to keep putting (R) after just in case after having spent $20 buying his book, we feel the need to rip-off his idea and copy his logo), a label I can honestly say I'd never heard of before reading the book.


Anyway, the book is fairly lightweight in its content and depth, but does help you channel your efforts into concentrating on...well...doing exactly what the title of the book says.

The point of this post is that it has triggered me into action into another area I've been looking at for a couple of years - a clothing label - that could be used to demostrate and boost my efforts with my own marketing company. After all, what better testimony for clients than actually putting your money where your mouth is?

I believe I already have the name and ideas behind it, and I registered the web name last night. I'm also putting plans in place for the first designs, which may take a few weeks. I've looked at some other places/websites for inspiration and so far, haven't found anyone anywhere near anything I have planned. But I still need to look some more. I have also found a potential manufacturer too and I will hopefully go and see them today and brief them with what I want.

The point of this post, which I'm rapidly running away from, is that sometimes it's the strangest of places that you find inspiration. As I said before, some people have life changing experiences via religion or family. I find an added direction and boost from a $20 book I bought randomly in the airport on a Tuesday because my flight was delayed for two hours. Go figure.

Either way, I'll hopefully have an update sooner rather than later.

Star Wars Simpsons Intro

Very clever and very funny. Enough said; you just need to watch before it gets deleted!

Virgin Blew it?

Crikey that's a corny title. I have to stop saying 'crikey' too. I filled out my application for Australia citizenship the other day and for some reason I feel I should start saying 'crikey' and 'strewth' a lot more.

Anyhow, I travelled to Sydney yesterday on Virgin Blue. I didn't even bother to check other carrier prices because I like Virgin Blue, and the fare was fairly reasonable anyway - $125 in either direction.

There was a mad dash to get to the airport, mainly because the wife was unorganised and decided that morning was a good time to sew up her trousers. But I checked my email at 7.15am and got to the airport at 8.15am to check in for a 9am flight. As I arrive at the desks, I find out my entire flight has been cancelled. Gone. Vanished.

Get to the desk and talked to the girl who straight away informs me the earliest available space is on the midday flight. Hmmm. Three hour wait at Brisbane domestic terminal to fly to a meeting that will be starting when I'm taking off? "No," I said. "That won't do." Or some other words communicating the same sentiment.

Eventually she gets me on the 11am, and I reschedule the meeting for 1pm and other than spending $50 on books to pass the time, everything works out fine.

Then we have the trip back the next day and my flight is at 3pm. Except I finish early and get to the airport about 11am. So I ask nicely if I could move to an early flight without incurring the usual $40 fee, to which I get the reply "I'll have to check with my boss." Not a problem.

I go and see the boss...or at least the gate-keeper to the boss who, after I explain my two hour delay the day before and my unhappiness at having to wait, naturally says "I'll have to check." Two minutes later - and via a brief chat with a famous female TV presenter who jumped the queue as she had 10 minutes to catch her plane and I can't remember who the hell she is - he comes back.

"You're lucky," he says. "She's in a good mood and she'll move the flight for free for you."

Now this is the second time in two weeks that airport staff have used the line "you're lucky" with me, both for doing something that should naturally be part and parcel of what they do - customer service. Am I lucky to get customer service? Am I lucky that they have taken a little bit more effort to right a wrong that they had caused the previous day?

Customer service isn't about 'luck'. How different would my attitude have been if he had replied something like this:

"That's fine sir. We're happy to do that and we apologise about the cancelled flight the next day."

The result with my flight is the same; the result with my attitude is immensely different.

Did he think with his original response that he would be 'teaching me a stern lesson?' so I'd never ask again? What exactly was the message he was trying to get across to me there? Was he pissed they lost an extra $40 in revenue?

The 'you're in luck' expression should be removed from any customer service manual.

Airlines are transparently all the same - they fly you from A to B in a vehicle with too many seats and charge you too much. If they can find a way to offer you a benefit to improve your experience, then they are the ones that should consider themselves lucky to have had that opportunity to effect one of their customers.

Crimes against music

I've blogged about this before but today I was watching Voyager on the Sci-Fi channel - the one where they find the planet that's made-up of nothing but ocean and Paris manages to get himself court-martialed and reduced in rank through the most tenuous of plot-lines - and during the show they ran a commercial for their other sci-fi shows. The travesty was that the theme being run over the commercial was The Only One's 'Another Girl, Another Planet' - one of my top three songs of all time.

Having Blink182 butcher it I thought would have been enough...but no, we had to find it being used in an advert. Still, at least they used the original version. If you've never heard the song, and it wouldn't surprise me if you hadn't, the video is below.



Incidently, Paris did 30 days in the brigg, during which he wrote a letter to his father, whose expectations Paris never seemed to live up to. We never found out what happened to the ocean planet. I'd imagine they never made it onto Leve 6 water restrictions.

Compromise

The word of the week this week is 'compromise'.

Last weekend I picked a couple of films to watch from Blockbuster - 'Hot Fuzz' and '300'. '300' was excellent, and other than the King Leonidas's slightly camp Glasgow-accent dialogue in places and the hugely excessive visions of blood and gore, it was a great film. '300' was also filmed with a comic book edge to it, almost pulling the actors out of real life and making them look and feel like animated cartoons. 'Hot Fuzz' was slightly funny. I was a never a huge Simon Pegg fan and that did little to convince me otherwise.

Anyway, this isn't about the films, it's about compromise.

So after it was pointed out that I had made my partner sit through '300' - she didn't; she fell asleep at several points - I agreed to sit down and watch a film of her choice: 'Failure to Launch'. The most apt way to describe it is 'chick flick'. I won't digest the plot synopsis here - there isn't really much of one to digest - but suffice to say it was pretty mindless sugar-coated stuff with lots of pictures of Matthew McConaughey doing action sports or taking his shirt off and showing his six-pack. All the guys are called 'Tripp' and 'Ace' and 'Demo' and other such punky American slang.

So the point that I seem to be wandering far from here is the need for compromise. The need to accept that someone made a sacrifice for you and that you need to make one back. Whilst I admit I may have over-dramatised that last statement when simply referring to sitting through a film or two, and that perhaps I could have used an example more significant to demonstrate the need for more understanding in the world, you get my point.

At some point today we'll find ourselves in Ikea. The understanding of compromise will well and truly be put to the test again there.

Finally the trailer for '300' if you haven't seen it:

RoboSweep

Sweep returned, after 2 and a half weeks away, with a shock look in her eyes, half the whiskers missing on the right side of her face, and a smashed up leg. Vet thinks someone kicked her. Anyway, original vet diagnosis was wrong, and we took her back in Tuesday to get her fixed up properly. Bone at top of her leg was shattered and she needed a metal pin going through the middle of it. OUCH.

So vet does job and I pick her up this morning...we have RoboSweep. A cat reborn from an old cat plus reinforced skeleton. With a gun. And a cool helmet. No...that's the film. Easy to mistake the two.

Anyhow, she has to stay on the ground for the next four weeks. Can't jump up onto and off anything. This is not going to be easy. This cat would climb on a....erm...something if it were there to be climbed upon. I was going really well with that example until I actually had to come up with the example itself.

Other news, I still can't stand Will & Lemo. Dan & Ken don't really do a whole lot better. I want to play some poker but I can't face going out in the rain. I also want to go and get some dinner from the supermarket but am facing the same issues ala the poker. And I had lunch with Steven Bradbury yesterday who is a very nice man and gave me a signed copy of his book. The chef also gave me lots of chips. All-in-all a win all round on the lunch front. Today's lunch was markedly different. A dry turkey sandwich.

O O O....O Brien

By the fact that I wrote that in the title would suggest that potentially the advertising campaign has worked. The incessant call from the jingle has lodged itself firmly in my head and convinced me that should I ever get a chip in my windscreen, I will know where to go.

So job done. Let's just keep repeating the same ad and eventually have everyone in Australia humming the tune while they lay in bed at night.

Except I would suggest that the advert itself is self-destructive in its communication. Let's look at the reasons:

1) It's a long advert for radio. The 30 seconds actually SEEMS like 30 seconds. It seems like a lifetime. Two jingles and a bloke talking trying to scare you into getting your chip fixed is not engaging me.

2) The guy they have voicing it is one of two things: an actual O'Brien employee or the worst voice over person in the world. Either way, he is doing the brand NO favours by sounding tedious and boring. By the end of the advert, you're so depressed from listening to him, you want to top yourself because your windscreen has a crack in it.

DO NOT USE EMPLOYEES - EVER - unless they have such a strong personality or some USP that makes them stand-out above everyone else - think the speccy bloke from the Good Guys.

3) As mentioned before, the jingle. Think Crazy Frog for windscreen repairs. You want to take a nail gun to your own head to try and rid yourself of the obsession.

The long and the short of it is the advert has done what no radio network wants any advert to do, it has made me switch channels. Coupled with the AMI adverts, the O'Brien adverts and the nails-down-a-blackboard advert that is Diamonds International (which I will dissect at a later date), the state of radio media advertising is currently appalling.

How do you improve then?

Running a bad advert over and over again isn't the answer. Creating a full ATL and BTL promotion which incorporates web, radio, TV, magazines and so on and targeting it at your specific demographic is the proper way to do these things. Analyse the message you're trying to get across and look at your target market, and find out where these people like to be talked to.

Sure O'Brien have probably got it right in that their target market - car owners with chips in the windscreen - are probably sitting in their cars, listening to the radio and looking at the chip, but there are a million other ways to make this stand out more.

Messages without a creative approach are just messages. The average consumer gets hit with 300 of these a day. O'Brien is just number 216.

When is a scam not a scam?

So AMI are the 'Australian Medical Institute' and run hundreds of adverts on all local and national radio stations in Australia encouraging men to call in and discuss the problems they may have with premature ejaculation and not being able to perform long enough in bed.

They invest literally $100,000s into their campaigns, all of which change style, content and approach frequently and all of which continue the same theme - that men who can't perform longer than a few seconds, aren't really men at all. The scare tactics and generally belittling of guys pulls on the strings on inadequacy and convinces men to make that call to AMI.

According to previous AMI adverts, 1000s of men call them a day (which as a side note would have meant the entire male population of Australia being impotent in about 20 years time) and improve their performance with the fantastic 'nasal delivery technology'. You sniff something and your cock gets rock hard for hours. Sounds simple, and obviously quite exciting for all concerned.

Except its not quite like that. Whilst I might point out that this problem doesn't occur with me, I suspect everyone will nod and say 'yeah, right' under their breath. I actually got this information from someone in the radio industry who had found out how AMI generate their money.

Apparently, when you visit an AMI consultant they do various tests to work out what the problem is, which of course, reveal that the basic and cheap course of medication won't achieve any results for you, and what you need is the longer and far more expensive course of treatment that will inevitably cost you $1000s.

Now don't get me wrong, this sort of 'condition' is obviously very worrying for men - we've all be on the receiving end of a bodily part that refuses to co-operate when the time is right - but when is a scam not a scam? When it appears on a national radio campaign? When it has a glossy website? When it has 'Australian' and 'Medical' in it's name?

Playing on people's basic weakness is an age old way of selling something - insurance companies base their entire livelihood on general human fear; Nigerian 419 scams prey on greed to do the same - but where do we draw a line? Scientology has built a worldwide religion on exactly the same scheme as AMI. Bring someone in at the bottom level, tell them they need to spend a lot of money and time to improve themselves and keep adding goals for them to stretch further and further to, whilst keeping the ultimate goal - if there is even one - well out of sight. It is the basic premise of many modern day businesses and institutions.

The answer is transparency. If we actually saw what was waiting for us at the end of these schemes, would we be so willing to throw our money at them? Or course not. But this may cause more problems that it solves. Some people LIKE the idea of Scientology and AMI telling them they have a long term problem that needs expensive help. Some people need a 'professional' to tell them what to do and where to do. The vast majority of the global population are sheep, and sheep need rounding up. If they didn't spend their money on expensive placebos, they'd be worrying and fretting that something was wrong and they weren't doing anything to fix it.

The sad reality is that people enjoy the sancity of being scammed. They feel safe and warm in feeling wanted and feeling a sense of belonging, even if that safety, warmth and belonging is artificial, over-priced and fraudulent.

Scammers exist because people need them.

Carbonators

I must admit to a bit of confusion about the new advertising campaign from NRMA about the 'Carbonators'. The premise behind the campaign is that if you move your insurance from another supplier to NRMA, they will off-set one tonne of your vehicles emissions for you for free.

On the face of it, that sounds great. Except in my opinion, the whole campaign raises more questions than it asks. Sure, NRMA want people to be engaged with the concept of 'doing your bit for the environment' and they want to make their product eco-friendly, but this is still just car insurance. Its great that we have this secondary feeling of well-being, but the most important thing to anyone hunting car insurance, is that its cheap and it covers you for an accident. All-singing and dancing it doesn't need to be.

The detail that you only get to see if you access the website and click through the right areas and onto two more '?' buttons that aren't very well displayed, is that NRMA will invest in purchasing carbon credits in a number of different ways. One of those is 'sequestration of forests as certified under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement scheme.' I mean, what??

I'm all for campaigns that make you think, but in this case they really should have followed the advice of the word K.I.S.S - keep it simple, stupid. I'm postively disposed to doing something about the environment but I have no idea how much one tonne is, what the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement scheme is or exactly how I check that my investment in growing more trees is actually investing in growing more trees. Someone could be charging 3 different customers for the same tree for all I know.

Sure it sounds cynical, and the website and the adverts with the images of 'trusted' Broncos players should develop some faith in you that NRMA can be trusted, but would it be too much to maybe simplify the message a little? Maybe explain to us up-front how much our cars produce in the way of emissions, without us having to go into the website and mess about entering all our details?

Either way, I'm not sold. I've just forked out $4000 to make my house save gallons of water should it ever decide to rain again. Sure I want to help reduce greenhouse gases, but pay more to do so?

Maybe later. Maybe when I've paid for the water tank. Or maybe I'll just pick the cheapest quote. Tough call.

First Post

So really this is just the first post to test out my page...I don't have a great deal else to add other than that. Other than I didn't sleep much last night. That has nothing to do with marketing or communications but so what? Neither do fags hanging from chains but they're in there.