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Opinion
The keyboard warrior of Twitter
In this guest post, NBN staffer Scott Rhodie writes an unofficial, personal view on his experience with a hostile Twitter critic.Last night I had a strange incident. While on Twitter I noticed someone saying that Australia’s NBN is already outdated. I wrote a small note back explaining they were incorrect.
And their response? The lovely gentleman (whose Twitter profile says: ‘Father of 5 kids, Loving Grandfather of 10 Grandchildren,and 2 Great Granddaughters. love to give heaps to Pollies and Poofters’) said to me: “Go and lick Gillards C*** out U commie Prick”
What's in a name?
In this guest post, Moensie Rossier wonders about the power of names for brands and marketers.
Brands have been having a bit of fun with names lately, not to mention a fair bit of success. Interbrand just named a headhunting firm Cloak & Dagger. And ‘Share a Coke’ showed how much power there is in a name.
The Coke campaign effectively short-circuited the usual mechanics of communication. It undoubtedly stroked people’s egos. But, I believe, its success stems from the fact that it directly and automatically affected people’s behaviour, rather than doing so indirectly by shaping attitudes.
Best ads from Super Bowl 2012
The Super Bowl is all done and a team from North America won. But as well as some sort of sporting event, it’s the world’s biggest advertising showcase. See the best of them right here… and please tell us what you think.
How to debunk media myths
In this post, UWS’s Ullrich Ecker, John Cook and Stephen Lewandowsky argue that cognitive science can help PRs form strategies in managing media misreporting.
A growing cohort of commentators has bemoaned the descent of contemporary political “debate” into a largely fact-free zone.
How about simply focusing on what consumers want?
In this guest post, Peter Mountford argues that brands should think more about what is really going on for consumers
Who here is hoping their favourite brand of toilet paper is going to be organizing a flash mob on their way home from work today?
What the Optus web copyright victory means
In this analysis first published on The Conversation, RMIT’s Marita Shelly examines the implications of Telstra’s defeat over the online rights to the AFL broadcast deal
This week’s Federal Court ruling that Optus customers are able to view sporting matches minutes after they are streamed live without breaching copyright is a landmark decision that alters our understanding of copyright law, and has significant implications for the AFL’s broadcasting rights deal.
Does Gina Rinehart’s bite of a chunk of Fairfax make her an oligarch?
In an article that first appeared in The Conversation, Mark Rolfe wonders whether the mining magnate’s move could turn Fairfax into something resembling America’s Fox network.
Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart has moved to increase her stake in Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and a number of radio stations. Rinehart has already shown her desire to play a role in public life, campaigning against former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s aborted mining tax. She has also demonstrated a willingness to make media investments to ensure her pro-business worldview is promulgated.
What does this latest move by Rinehart mean?
Gillard's Australia Day crisis
PM Julia Gillard’s media adviser Tony Hodges has been forced to resign over the Australia Day tent embassy debacle.
It came after it emerged he had revealed opposition leader Tony Abbott’s whereabouts, leading to both politicians being rescued by police in ugly scenes.
Mumbrella editor Tim Burrowes and advertising practitioner Jane Caro debate the topic on Weekend Sunrise’s masters of Spin segment:
The biggest cock-up I made in business
In this guest post, Chris Savage urges agency staff to live the brand.I still shudder when I think about how incredibly stupid I was when I made the biggest stuff up of my career. And then, 18 years later, I did it again. Do not make this mistake with your clients. Ever.
Hey Groupon. Thanks for fucking up email
In this guest post, Daniel Monheit warns that group deal overload is devaluing email marketingEmail marketing used to be fabulous. Back in the heady days of 2010, brands would work hard to build up well qualified databases, upon which they’d bestow carefully crafted correspondence filled with information, offers and incentives. The recipients, of course would be delighted: “Oh look! An email! From one of my favourite brands! And it’s 40 cents off at Woolies this week!”.
The staggering sway of Harold Mitchell
The Power Index today names Aegis Media chairman Harold Mitchell as the most powerful person in Melbourne. Andrew Crook profiles him.
Harold Mitchell takes pride in dispensing with the niceties. When The Power Index visited his South Melbourne private office before Christmas, fresh remains were scattered all over the boardroom table.
Share a Coke with… the moronic masses
The most-read story on Mumbrella last year, with not far off 100,000 page views, was a fairly humdrum yarn about the launch of Coca-Cola’s name-on-a-bottle campaign.The headline, “Coca-Cola puts people’s names on bottles in ‘Share a Coke’ campaign”, though hated by any self-respecting sub-editor, was loved by Google. And in rushed what can be politely described as the public.
Assumptions kill creativity
In this guest post, Gual Barwell disagrees that the sales success of the Old Spice social media campaign was overstated.Yesterday’s post from Cathie McGinn suggested the Old Spice campaign failed to connect with consumers. Based on the facts and figures, I disagree.
What Old Spice and Wieden + Kennedy has done and done phenomenally well is to create a franchise.
The SMH's readers (are wrong) editor
We are now about five months into the reign of Australia’s first readers’ editor. And I don’t think it is working.
It struck me at the time of Judy Prisk’s appointment to the Sydney Morning Herald that the fact that her boss was editor-in-chief Peter Fray was not going to be ideal if she was going to be the independent voice of the reader.
The emperor's new fragrance: Old Spice’s campaign failure
In this guest post, Cathie McGinn slays a sacred cow of 21st century marketing – the highly awarded Old Spice campaign.One of the biggest myths of recent times (by which I mean a story of great heroism and triumph we’d all like to believe but deep down know to be untrue) is the Old Spice social media campaign. It’s been much lauded and awarded as an example of outstanding content, a creative and collaborative way of connecting with consumers and driving a record increase in sales.
Naked hires psychologist to help drive consumer insights
Naked Communications has hired the agency’s third psychologist, Brooke Ward, previously a research fellow at Deakin University.
Brooke Ward
Adam Ferrier, Naked consumer psychologist and founding partner, said: “There isn’t that much insight in this business, lots of stating the bleeding obvious with an enthusiastic power-point presentation – but not much genuine human insight.
“We are obsessed with ensuring we do communications that result in behavioural change, and psychologists learn scientifically validated frameworks that help us not only understand, but predict human behaviour.”
Brooke will be working on a number of clients in Naked’s Melbourne, as well on the agency’s insights products.
She joins Simon Thatcher and Ferrier who are both consumer psychologists.
Cricket Australia recently appointed Naked Melbourne to handle its brand strategy and consumer insights. The work covers at all aspects of cricket in the country and how the various forms of the game are communicated.
March 24th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
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Comments
24 Mar 10
3:08 pm
Insight is more art than science. I’m yet to meet a psychologist (reductionist and mechanistic trained thinkers) with an original insight not out of a text book or based on a pathology. Sure you can packaged it up with some “enthusiastic power-point” and make it look good but.
24 Mar 10
3:49 pm
@Adro
Wasn’t Einstein a reductionist?
24 Mar 10
4:17 pm
Naked cricket. Finally the ladies will tune in!
24 Mar 10
4:58 pm
No, integrative and holistic….his best ideas came from day dreams not logic and thinking about the big picture.
24 Mar 10
5:40 pm
Here is a quote from Einstein’s 1905 black body radiation or ‘Light Quantum’ paper that he won his Nobel prize for. Please respond with a quote from a marketing psychology report that is more reductionist.
3. On the Entropy of the Radiation
The following considerations are contained in a famous paper
by Mr. W. Wien and are only mentioned here for the sake of
completeness.
Consider radiation which takes up a volume v. We assume that
the observable properties of this radiation are completely deter-
mined if we give the radiation energy p(v) for all frequencies.t
As we may assume that radiations of different frequencies can be
separated without work or heat, we can write the entropy of the
radiation in the form
S = VIO* (NP, V)
dv,
where 4 is a function of the variables p and v. One can reduce cf,
to a function of one variable only by formulating the statement
that the entropy of radiation between reflecting walls is not
changed by an adiabatic compression. We do not want to go into
this, but at once investigate how one can obtain the function 4
from the radiation law of a black body.
If the temperature of a black-body radiation in a volume u = 1
increases by dT, we have the equation
or, as a4/ap is independent of V:
dS = !
? dE.
aP
As dE is equal to the heat transferred and as the process is
reversible, we have also
1
dS = 2 dE.
T
Through comparing, we get
84- 1
ap T*
—
This is the black-body radiation law. One can thus from the
24 Mar 10
5:56 pm
woah
24 Mar 10
10:58 pm
@PeterW—a bit off topic, albeit you hammered home your point.
Personally, I don’t think physics and psychology are quite the same thing, as much as many would like to think it is. perhaps down at a sub-quantum-level, there will invariably be links between all sciences, but that’s still now a work in progress.
Powerpoint presentations are always good to impress bored execs in a meeting, especially if their own IT skills don’t reach those dizzying heights.
25 Mar 10
9:29 am
@peter williams….very dull and you missed the point….you can only cut something up into smaller bits if you see the whole first
25 Mar 10
9:33 am
i reckon it’s the right approach … would much prefer to listen to a psychologist than a hysterical rambling ‘strategist’ telling me the sky is falling.
25 Mar 10
11:18 am
we’ve got ‘hysterical rambling strategists’ as well!
25 Mar 10
11:52 am
Will clients also lie on a lounge for agency meetings?
26 Mar 10
10:56 am
All Psychology does is package complex human constructs, such as behaviour, into neat little constructs so that they are easy to understand, can be used in research and used to predict human behaviour. Most psychological research gathers information from “real people” – it just surveys a lot of them at once or interviews them and then summarises these findings into an easy to understand way. For example, “conscientiousness” is a construct that is used a lot in personality research – but underneath that construct is a number of different behaviours – such as always getting somewhere on time, organises time etc. Conscientiousness has been found to be a good predictor of job performance (just after cognitive ability) so if you are looking for a new person to fill a role you will ask them or give them a valid and reliable questionnaire about conscientiousness. So instead of flying blind – Psychology gives the job hirer a construct to focus on when judging a new job applicant and knows that this construct is a good predictor of job performance (based on research).
26 Mar 10
1:06 pm
As a marketer who has an undergrad degree in psychology and post-grad in marketing, I think this is a very good step in the right direction.
I think there is a danger of marketing taking what I would loosely call ‘pop psychology’ as fact.
For example, I remember in my marketing classes being taught Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as if it was fact. However in psychology, and even the ‘reliable’ source of Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.....y_of_needs – under ‘Criticisms’ ), although it sounds like a good logical idea, there is little to no evidence that this happens in real life. I think this is a good example as to why a greater level of scientific accountability is required in marketing.
26 Mar 10
1:24 pm
“we’ve got ‘hysterical rambling strategists’ as well!”
Mike – I thought Baxter had gone?
Boom tish!