mUmBRELLA

In this guest post, Tim Riches reckons that the rise of supermarket home label brands may not be such bad news for established brands after all.

Retailers will always need strong, established mainstream brands to drive sales. The key to survival for manufacturers is to look at the market from the retailer’s point of view. Brand managers must show retailers how their brand can grow a category. Retailers don’t care how your brand might take market share from a competitor’s brand. They are only interested in growing sales volume in each product category.

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With investors more interested in platforms and broadcasters happy recycling existing content, Ben Shepherd asks what the future holds for the production of online video. 

In this anonymous guest post, a media agency has some advice for media owners on the sort of gifts they like – and do not like – to receive.

I came into work on Sunday to discover the result of a media owner’s promo gift gone wrong – a dead gold fish.

On the side of the bowl containing said dead fish was written: ‘Be the big fish in a small pond and come test the water’. Not a good look for Advantage SA, which is trying to promote South Australia as an attractive place to advertise.

We get a deluge of gifts this time of year, although not all smell quite as bad. As agency folk, we are forever grateful for the generosity of media owners. But here are some helpful tips on what we see as the good, the bad and the useless corporate gifts.

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Just over five years ago, I had an unexpected phone call.

How did I fancy moving to a country I’d never visited, to edit a magazine I’d never heard of, for less than half the money I’d just been earning in Dubai?

Fair to say, a move to Australia had not been my plan at the time. But, Sydney had looked good on the Olympics, and B&T magazine sounded like an interesting challenge.

But on paper, it just didn’t make sense. It was a lot less than I could earn in the UK, where I had just returned after my Middle East stint.

But then, over a couple more calls, B&T’s publisher explained to me LAFHA, the Living Away From Home Allowance. Read more »

In this guest post, Jaid Hulsbosch finds lessons for marketers in controversial performer Lady Gaga.

One of the leading brand innovators in global business today is a young woman called Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – also known as Lady Gaga.

She is an artist and a brand and her team are clever marketers. They are showing businesses how to build a successful global brand in record time in today’s fragmented media environment.

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In this guest post, Tom Donald reckons advertisers should wake up to the fact that their audience is often high on marijuana.

From Cheech and Chong in the 1970s through to recent Judd Apatow films, we all recognise there’s a cinematic genre best enjoyed under the influence: “stoner movies”.  And we all know that most music genres – from jazz through psychedelia, metal, hip hop, house and electronica – sound best when your mind is altered by booze, blunted by weed, or tweaked by a chemical substance.

Yet we never openly talk about ‘stoner ads’, which is curious as they are some of our industry’s most successful.

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In this guest post, Peter Miller argues that banning junk food advertising on TV wouldn’t make our children thinner

Late last year I attended a presentation by Roy Morgan Research entitled ‘Australia’s changing demography’. I was unsure about attending. But then I noticed there was alcohol involved, and Gary Morgan is the kind of guy who can make the world’s dullest statistic sound interesting.

My eye was caught by the significant rise in the number of Aussies enjoying a tertiary education, up from 15% in 1998 to 24% today. No wonder new recruits are so annoying.

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So what to make of Nine’s upfronts?

First, there were few surprises. Big Brother we knew about. A new series of The Celebrity Apprentice was a no brainer.

And of course, the network’s main commercial focus will be on The Olympics.

So what was unexpected?   Read more »

Kyle nearly got away with it.

Almost exactly 16 hours passed between his nasty attack on journalist Alison Stephenson and the world beyond his listeners noticing.

And the way that this eventually became a news story was slightly more random than you may realise. Here’s how it happened.   Read more »

In this guest post Alicia Kennedy of online monitoring service Meltwater argues that Qantas failed to understand customer sentiment before launching its disastrous Twitter contest to win pyjamas.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen the latest social media debacle erupt over #QantasLuxury.

What started out as an act of goodwill to improve weeks of negative publicity, very quickly went south when thousands of people hijacked the hashtag to fire relentless comments about the recent Qantas grounding.

Just two hours after the competition was launched, #QantasLuxury reached ‘breaking trend’ status in Australia and was averaging approximately 130 tweets per 10 minutes.  Overnight, there were over 14,700 social media mentions not just in Australia but in the US and UK too.   Read more »

In this guest post, Lou Hayward, a student in the market for a job at an ad agency, says how well she thinks agencies in the Mumbrella Creative Agency Review are set up to take in new blood. 

In alphabetical order, she recounts her experiences after approaching 13 of Australia’s top shops.

BMF. Take a look at the long list of ‘fun’ in the ‘join us’ section of the BMF website and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at some sort of holiday resort. Pinball machines, two full-time massage therapists, pilates classes, BBQs. I’m sold!

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If you want to see why newspapers still have a point, refer to today’s Sydney Morning Herald and its report on the powerbrokers of the NSW Labor party.

First, Kate McClymont’s investigation contains the sort of detailed, legally challenging material that newspapers are among the only outlets capable of investing in researching.

And second, when I say newspapers, I mean newspapers. Read more »

Thanks very much for asking. Yes, as it happens, I have been busy.

Mainly I’ve been falling back in love with print journalism.

You see, a while back, we bought a magazine called Encore. And for the last few months we’ve been moving it closer to Mumbrella world.   Read more »

For the seven people who are intensely interested in the activities of Australia’s marketing trade press, this one is just for you.

You may have noticed that there’s been something of a furore over anonymous comments this week. Read more »

Yesterday, it was reported that the Communications Council wants the trade press to ban anonymous comments. Mumbrella editor Tim Burrowes argued that appropriate moderation is a better approach. In this guest posting, Communications Council chairman Anthony Freedman argues that the issue still needs to be addressed

It seems the article that Simon Canning published in The Australian yesterday has really put the cat amongst the pigeons in suggesting the intention of The Communications Council is to outlaw all anonymous comments.   Read more »

In this guest post, Ben Lilley responds to ‘ageist’ comments made about him after he pronounced that the traditional ad agency model was dead.

I’ve recently been accused of being ageist. Again. This last happened several years ago, when I was running a younger agency with a handful of youth brands requiring, not surprisingly, young people to work on them.

I was a bit younger then myself – not too much though. I’ve still yet to hit the ripe old age of 40. But now that I’m back in the multinational agency realm, it’s been suggested I only want to populate my new agency with ‘young people’ all over again.

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Here are some comments you haven’t read on Mumbrella in the last month:

“This guy is a douche”

“Xxxxx is a prick.”

“I think we all know what she really needs.”

“Boring work.”

“Smug little suit…a nasty performance from the pommy bastard. Self-satisfaction is the order of the day!”

“Same old shit from the Xxxxxx team.”

“He was useless in his last job. He’ll be useless in this one.”

“Moron”

“He really is a sad, abusive, supercilious twat.”

“He seems like a little worm” Read more »

The character of News Limited is about to change.

The opening words used by John Hartigan when he gave the Andrew Olle Media Lecture in 2007 give the clue why:

“My name is John Kenneth Hartigan. Occupation: journalist. A journalist is what I am, who I am, and what I will always be. When you wanted to be a journalist as fervently as I did, took as long to become one as I did, and love it as much as I do – you are never anything else.”

It used to be that a key point of difference between Australia’s two behemoths was that News Limited was run by a journo and Fairfax by a suit. In almost exactly a year that has reversed.   Read more »