Has the world gone mad….and when I say world I mean the British media?
I’m not condoning the actions of Russel Brand or Jonathan Ross, what they did went beyond an innocent prank and simply wasn’t funny, but this morning I’ve woken up the front page outrage aimed at the pair. What’s more, Gordon Brown has jumped into the furor blasting the pair, and Sky News informed me that the issue was likely to come up during Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon.
With two wars, an economic crisis, an entertaining yet globally relevant US election, Tory sleaze etc is the outrage caused by this practical joke really reflective of its severity?
I can’t help but think it’s all gone a bit to far a la Princess Di (oh no he di’n't). Perhaps Elton John should dust off his songbook.
While I’m on the point of the media: On Sky News this morning, after Noel Gallagher blamed the decline of Top of the Pops for youth crime, its newspaper critic responded – “I don’t know if it’s true but it’s a good point!”
A good point indeed, particularly if you step out of the realm of reality. As the old saying goes…why let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Rant over!
Another day another Internet meme doing the rounds.
MIchael Litman from LitmanLive and [EDIT 30/10/2008] Paul Stallard have tagged me in the Three for Three post where bloggers are encouraged to list their three choices across three categories before tagging other bloggers to continue the chain.
So, here goes…
Top three non-work websites:
- - Football365.com – The number one resource for the UK football fan. It isn’t the mecca for stats that the BBC is but its mix of irreverent comment, insight and humour makes it a winner in my book!
- - Digg.com – The ultimate time waster but an incredibly useful one. An instant snapshot of what’s hot on the web
- - TheOnion.com – Older than the WWW itself. One of the few US sites to do satire very well
Top three karaoke songs:
- - Don’t Stop Believing by Journey – “I love Journey, but I hate baseball cards”
- - We Built This City by Starship – Guarantee you’ll get groans when this first comes on but 2 minutes in you’ll have the entire bar singing it with you
- - Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi – For little over 3 minutes you honestly believe you are a rock star
Top three weekend cocktails:
- - Mojito from anywhere
- - Raspberry Collins from Lab on Old Compton Street
- - Old Fashioned from Match just off Regent Street
That’s given me a craving for a bit of Journey…”She’s just a small time girl….”
You are now tagged…
I was catching up with some friends earlier this week, most of which work in some sort of marketing / digital / interactive capacity. During the course of dinner we noticed the array of mobile phones on the table and in particular the fact that 5 out of the 6 phones were iPhones.
The conversation moved onto how to engage consumers on the mobile platform (seriously, we have some crazy rock ‘n’ roll dinners) with half arguing that brands need to engage users through iPhone apps and others arguing that the market share of the iPhone was still too small for it to warrant such a large focus. My view, for what it was worth, was that the focus should be on non-iPhone but there is no reason why this can’t be supported through the iPhone.
Anyway, it struck me, looking at the array of iPhones on display, how important it is for us to remember that as marketers we aren’t our client’s target audience – and we shouldn’t lose sight of what is the norm for us and what is the norm for the general population. I’ve see it so often, and I do it myself, when marketers presume audiences behave in a certain way based on their own experiences.
It’s vital when preparing comms. plans whether it’s PR, advertising or marketing that throughout the planning stage we engage and understand the audience we are trying to reach. We’ve (H&K) recently hired a planner and she’s already had us monitoring tourists at the British Museum or shadowing grocery shoppers in supermarkets!
Understanding our clients’ audience’s mindsets and behaviours more deeply allows us to better engage with them and ultimately achieve cut through with our messages.
I’m beginning to find some innovate ways brands are leveraging the Twitter platform. Two new services caught my eye this week!
The first, Qwitter, aims to help stop people smoking. As a non-smoker I haven’t tried it but it’s simple to get involved. Simply follow Qwitter and send messages to the user (@iquit) telling it how many cigarettes you have had. Qwitter will track how many packs you’re getting through and provide tips and advice to help you kick the habit.
The second is Tweet What You Spend which, like Qwitter, allows you to send messages and track how much you are spending day to day.
What I love about this is the fact that it’s such a simple way of engaging an audience through an existing and established platform. Both Qwitter and Tweet What You Spend are the start of brands engaging Twitter users with value-add services.
Many of our clients are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, using it as a simple comms tool. But, the examples above show that Twitter is becoming much more than a micro-blogging service and extending beyond comms and into a powerful web app for both brands and consumers.
So some of you will have noticed that the old blog hasn’t been in its best state recently. Between work, a holiday and work I really haven’t had time to show it the love and tenderness it deserves. But I am still here and remarkably have found 10 minutes to myself and thought I would post a note around a topic I was discussing yesterday on Twitter – The Great Drain Robbery, or, in non-Sun speak, the fact that Starbucks has been caught wasting millions of litres of water every day.
I won’t go into the story itself, you can read it here. What is interesting though is how quickly the flames of such a potentially damaging story have been doused. Yesterday this was a front page story and appeared across a number of nationals and online publications. Today though, not a whimper. More than that though, a quick search on Google News reveals less than 30 articles. On BlogPulse and the various Twitter trend trackers the story barely raises a squeak!
I’m not going to judge Starbucks on this as I don’t know the ins and outs of the issue however given how prevalent environmental issues are within today’s media, their PR and crisis teams have to be commended for a job well done. Yesterday’s news really has become today’s fish and chip paper!
It is worth pointing out that they did get a small helping hand with Palin misquoting one of their coffee cup quotes the other day. It may not have sold lattes but it certainly deflected some of the attention off the running taps!
