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Opinion | Features
Why is advertising so much better in New Zealand than Australia?
Ok, so this isn’t a new observation.
But it really hit home after I watched some TV ads for a kiwi supermarket yesterday that advertising in New Zealand is so much better than much of the crap that is being served up in this country at the moment.
Why is it that Colenso BBDO Auckland can turn something as bland as a supermarket chain into a brand I almost like, while Australian agencies succeed only in either irritating me (Coles) or passing me by unnoticed (Woolies) because the ads are so average?
My memo to your boss
So let me guess?
You really want to come to Mumbrella360, but you’ve got to justify the time and cost to your boss?
Good news! I think I can help.
Woz not great
In this guest post Tony Prysten argues that the thousand dollar price of seeing out-of-touch Apple co-founder Steve Wozniack on his Australian tour was a waste of money.
This week, for the cost of two iPads (yep, two) I went to the Woz Live conference in Melbourne. I was not impressed.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
According to industry experts Encore spoke to, the key elements that define transmedia can be summarised as follows: platform, time, audience, adaptation, and creative collaboration.
Innovation is the remedy for the ailing magazine industry
With magazine circulations plummeting, FHM closing and rumours rife on future ownership of ACP Magazines, Paul Merrill says the only way forward is launching new titles.Eight years ago in the UK, nearly a quarter of all magazine sales came from magazines that were less than four years old. In Australia, the figure was slightly lower, but still significant. Today, the situation is very different. For a start there are so few new magazines. Yes, Masterchef briefly flared, and Top Gear made an initial impact. But Grazia and Alpha fizzled, and now ACP has shelved their plans to launch Elle.
More than a game: broadcasting the Olympics
The 2012 London Olympics will be the biggest televised sporting event of our time. Brooke Hemphill discovers the logistical challenges and technical requirements of producing the event.
From July 27 to August 12, the Australian media will go sport crazy as the Games of the XXX Olympiad, aka the 2012 London Summer Olympics, unfold. The games will be the most televised sporting event of our time as broadcasters look to master every manner of technology at their disposal.
The Voice - Australia's best example yet of social TV
In this guest post, Sputnik’s Rodd Messent has a theory on why audiences have taken to The Voice .I am an addict of Channel Nine’s hit show The Voice. Such is the extent of my addiction I seriously think my housemate might kick me out of our apartment for the semi-frenzied yelling and tweeting that ensues in our lounge room each time the show airs.It’s the first time in almost three years that such disagreement has resulted in less than civil behaviour towards one another, and it’s made me think it might be a microcosm of the large volume of online debate about the show and, correspondingly, an explanation for its success as a social TV experience.Why brands are the US Army - and culture jammers are the Viet Cong
In this guest posting, Dave Burgess, who painted ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House, claims that ‘amoral’ advertisers have copied his idea.
Culture jamming is a 28-year-old term coined by the San Francisco-based band Negativland, who declared that the ‘Studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large’.
Branded content is dead. Long live branded content
In this guest posting, Anthony Freedman argues why branded content is making a comeback.
A few short years ago, probably concurrent with the advent of the PVR, a new term emerged within the marketing communications industry; branded content. This was really synonymous with advertiser funded TV shows where programming was created by brands and deals struck with networks to broadcast them.
There were varying degrees of success with this model.
Shock advertising: 30 ads that would give Australia's ad watchdog a coronary
Is shock an underused weapon in Australian advertising, asks Robin HicksToday, Sydney agency The Cabana Boys used an image of a mouth sewn together to shock people with the idea that problem gamblers lie to conceal their habit. Is it the most disturbing image ever? No. Will it get banned by the Advertising Standards Bureau? No. But it did make me wonder why shock is not used more often in Australia – and not just by charities and government bodies. (WARNING: NSFW)
The making of ratings blockbuster The Voice
Jason Mountney goes on the set of Channel Nine’s talent search series, The Voice, to see how the format, based on an international franchise, has come together. What ingredients have gone into making this certified hit that’s rated more than two million viewers on three consecutive nights?
Mike Goldman has one of the toughest jobs on the set of the Nine network’s new talent show, The Voice. He not only has to narrate the show, but also keep the audience from losing their enthusiasm as they realise shooting TV programs takes a lot longer than the one-hour bursts they see in their lounge rooms. A lot longer.
Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience
While it’s a shame The Global Mail has failed to make an impact on the media landscape, the signs have been there for some time.I love the concept of a well resourced, philanthropically-funded independent news site. Anywhere in the world, that’s a rare and wonderful thing. In Australia even more so. So I hope that Grame Wood gets to see his investment make a difference.
And I have no inside info on whether Monica Attard’s sudden departure is linked to the site’s failure to find an audience so far.
Regardless, here are nine areas they can easily start to address:
Journalism’s new model?
Does the launch of philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail signal a new era for journalism or is the model destined to be a passing fad, asks Cathie McGinn in this article first published in Encore magazine.With little fanfare, philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail launched in February this year.
The online-only title received a generous five-year funding commitment from businessman Graeme Wood, founder of accommodation website wotif.com, who donated $15million.
Five things that make a great suit
In this guest posting, Gareth Collins argues that the role of a great account manager is to make the work betterI’m surprised at how many suits I meet who don’t know their role in the advertising business. The question ‘what does an advertising account manager or director do?’ is frequently met with answers such as project manager, relationship manager, plate spinner or go between … and those are the nice ones.
Success is judged on the ability to manage a process, be strong administratively and get stuff done. And while a good suit needs to do all of these things brilliantly, if these are the traits that define a great suit, then I’m in the wrong job.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
Ten’s Hugh Riminton wins Fairfax apology over Sam De Brito column
Ten’s political correspondent Hugh Riminton has revealed that he took legal action after being defamed in a column by Fairfax writer Sam De Brito earlier this month.
Writing in today’s edition of The Australian, Riminton said that De Brito had alleged that he had used the words “Don’t you know who I am?” in a bust-up with airport custom officials.
De Brito’s column – All Men Are Liars (Except Sam De Brito) runs in both the Sun-Herald in Sydney and Sunday Age in Melbourne.
But Riminton said that the incident never took place and he was not even at an airport at the time De Brito claimed he’d uttered the words.
In his item for the Australian, Riminton said: “My faith in the management of the Fairfax press has been dented and I would rather it had not happened.”
August 16th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
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Comments
16 Aug 10
12:20 pm
So, All men are liars (including Sam debrito)?
16 Aug 10
12:21 pm
Ironically, it seems Sam de Brito doesn’t actually know who he is.
16 Aug 10
12:25 pm
Hard-hitting affair.
16 Aug 10
12:55 pm
Nice one Hugh! Now maybe Fairfax will think seriously about scrapping DiBrito’s awful column. One of the worst in Australia – and that’s saying something!
16 Aug 10
1:37 pm
Retch! Can’t stand thin-skinned journos who threten legal action, particularly over something so trivial.
16 Aug 10
1:40 pm
Hi Pooten,
It’s worth a read of Hugh R’s piece on The Australian. He makes the point that he never expected to be one of those journos…
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
16 Aug 10
2:25 pm
As a fan of Sam’s blog I don’t remember this one – have you got a link?
It does sound poor and sloppy, and a shame that once something like that is in print, no amount of apology can retrieve it.
16 Aug 10
3:05 pm
@malcolm Disagree with your assessment of Sam de Brito. As a leftleaning femonazi, I love his column – he’s not one of the namby pamby PC commentators. Always a bit of fun, honest (usually) and irreverent.
16 Aug 10
3:05 pm
Completely agree with Malcolm. Sam’s column is truly awful and I won’t print an apology for saying so. He is a smug bastard.
16 Aug 10
3:08 pm
Probably one of the nicest and most respected journos in the business. He has a great reputation that’s worth defending.
If Hugh was a muck raker for a tabloid or 6.30 program you may have a point Pooten but he’s about as far from that as a TV journo can be without being on ABC. Good on you Hugh.
16 Aug 10
3:15 pm
I might have missed something here…but hasn’t The Australian’s media diary (formerly by Amanda Meade, now by that gawd-awful vain Caroline Overington) gone downhill ever since Overington took over? It’s puff, it’s soft, it’s all hot air and souffle…all the substance and meat has gone out of it. What a shame. It’s no longer even worth reading, what with all its anti-ABC bile and pro-Sky guff.
16 Aug 10
3:22 pm
Finally there’s a deluge of the public’s opinion on Sam de Brito – his arrogance and smug attitude makes me feel ill, and it brings down the intellectual atmosphere of both papers he appears in – get rid of him. No-one is interested!
16 Aug 10
3:24 pm
Fair play Hugh!
I am an online journalist and was shocked that one journo would sue another.
But I was wrong. It was not another journalist, it was Sam de Brito.
Perhaps this will break down the ‘throw it up and fix it later’ approach of some online scribes.
16 Aug 10
3:44 pm
Couldn’t agree more with Kate and Malcom. Sam de Brito is a complete hoax and how he got a gig as a journalist is anyone’s guess. His column is extremely mundane and his books are even worse. Get rid of him. Stat!
16 Aug 10
3:47 pm
@Claudia Don’t you mean irrelevant?
16 Aug 10
4:04 pm
The column in question appeared in Sunday print editions only – not in de Brito’s online blog.
This was an elementary mistake by an experienced journalist, a real shocker. No alarm bells heard by the editors either.
Which is ironic – de Brito’s online work is frequently outrageous. Sure, it can be self-serving and smug, and like all opinion writing tends to be, well, opinionated.
But he’s been mining a very interesting vein of Aussie male self-analysis, and if the columns aren’t always entertaining – they usually are – the comments they provoke make for fascinating anthropological study.
16 Aug 10
4:56 pm
Look, I declare my interest and say I am a friend of de Brito and work with him. Whatever your take on his column, let’s be clear – he’s been a journo for almost 20 years and this is the first time he’s been sued, and only the second time he’s ever had to publish an apology.
How many times has Riminton been sued? So much for the “confidential settlement” eh, Hugh?
16 Aug 10
5:04 pm
Hat trick Jones,
You’re right about the Australian’s Media Diary under Caroline Overington. Take today’s:
Item 1: Talking up News Limited; Item 2: Talking up a friend (or it certainly sounds like it); Item 4: Putting down News Limited rival Fairfax; Item 6 Talking up News Limited; Item 7: Talking up News Limited AND putting down Fairfax; Item 8: A disguised correction to a knocking piece about the ABC from last week; Item 9: Knocking piece on the ABC; Item 11: Snide swipe at Fairfax.
16 Aug 10
6:14 pm
Craig, sometimes it’s who you know, you know? Sam de Brito only got a journalism gig because his daddy was a well known journo. As a writer, he’s about as talented as a turnip. The funniest thing is the man’s ego is so enormous he probably thinks it’s his brain that got him where he is today. He’s an uneducated swine.
16 Aug 10
6:54 pm
Thank you all for your interest.
For the record, the Sunday Age also ran the de Brito article but edited out the false references to me.
The Sunday Age was plainly awake at the wheel, where the Sun-Herald editors were not.
My appreciations to Gay Alcorn and her team.
Hugh Riminton
16 Aug 10
6:55 pm
Oh, and to “The Lurker”, I have never been sued.
16 Aug 10
7:02 pm
+1 to the brito-bashing, maybe he is actually reasonably smart but I don’t know how he willingly publishes such generic, meaningless topics. quote from his latest blog synopsis: “How’s this for a theory? The more obsessed a woman is with clothes, shoes and handbags, the more utterly barren her interior life.” I think there are a few other issues here especially the way The Age has let their weekend supplements turned to s—.
If anybody deserves a column it’s Schembri or David Cameron tbh.
16 Aug 10
7:44 pm
go Hugh
16 Aug 10
8:14 pm
Good on you, Hugh. This may seem trivial to some but most of us know better – an outright fabrication, and such a personally damaging one at that, is where you gotta draw the line. I don’t care who was the journo at fault. You did it right.
16 Aug 10
8:31 pm
Jesus Jack – journos get let down by their sources. I very much doubt de Brito fabricated anything, it sounds like he just had bad information.
16 Aug 10
9:49 pm
Sam de Brito is a bit like the big-mouth drunk who gives lectures at the bar to anyone who will listen. He thinks he knows stuff. He never shuts up. If people disagree with him in “his” bar he abuses them, and he goes home every night thinking he’s proved himself the big man yet again, when all he’s done is shown how sadly limited his thinking really is.
16 Aug 10
9:59 pm
Oh, and Sam, I don’t work in a call centre.
16 Aug 10
11:38 pm
I could not agree more with the sentiments expressed above by both Hat trick Jones and Anonymous about the decline of The Australian’s Media Diary under Caroline Overington. This week’s attempt to talk up a fellow journo’s chances of landing a new gig was embarrassingly transparent. Sending out public cheerios to your friends… isn’t that what Facebook is for? Certainly fails to make for interesting reading for the general public in a newspaper
17 Aug 10
9:02 am
Hi Brett,
While that’s fair comment, one thing to bear in mind is that I suspect the reason they’ve put Caroline Overington on the diary is that she’s a good writer. But what she doesn’t (yet) have is the detailed knowledge of having been on the beat.
I suspect that in six months it will be a much better offering.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
17 Aug 10
10:52 am
The problem isn’t DeBrito, although he did get it wrong.
The problem is with Fairfax, which has laid off so many subs that basic standards of fact-checking are no longer observed. Once upon a vanished time, a sub would have read the copy and asked the reporter, “You sure about this? He could sue.”
Sam, presumably, would have responded that he got the info second-hand, and the sub would have changed to “a well-known” media personality.
The real problem with Fairfax is that there are no longer any decent backbench editors to ask the right questions.
Does anyone know if the column was subbed by PageMasters? If so, it makes my point: comma crunching, not editing.
17 Aug 10
1:59 pm
Bold Type: the Sun Herald article would have been subbed by Pagemasters, but I believe the Sunday Age copy is still being subbed in Melbourne.
17 Aug 10
3:58 pm
French maid: Thanks for that info. If the Sunday Age is subbed in Melbourne or elsewhere, it is very hard to tell.
17 Aug 10
4:08 pm
Can anyone show me what was actually said? and with context?
It seems Sam has pissed a few people off (he’d like that) but I expect from the amount of hate he cops on his blog most of this predates the Hugh issue.
Personally I read his threads each week and find them equal parts of interesting, amusing, entertaining and insightful.
Oh and I really enjoyed his novel “The lost boys” judge me on that as you will its probably not destined to become the literary classic of our time but I don’t know anyone who has taken more than 4 days to read it.
17 Aug 10
6:40 pm
“Writing in today’s edition of The Australian, Riminton said that De Brito had alleged that he had used the words “Don’t you know who I am?” in a bust-up with airport custom officials”
OK, so the implication here is that Hugh is a “tosser”.
By reacting with “legal action” doesn’t he more or less validate the implication rather than completely ignoring, and therefore, downplaying the issue.
17 Aug 10
8:40 pm
The funniest part is that by writing his little get square for the Australian, he’s ensured the phrase “Do you know who I am?” is now linked to Hugh Riminton on search engines. I’ve Googled the original column and it looks like Fairfax aren’t putting it online, so he’s given it life on the internet where it would have died with the print version.
18 Aug 10
6:42 am
Ah yes the typical online over reaction, under cowardly anonymity. Easy isn’t it?
I really enjoy Sam de Brito’s AMAL blog. It’s entertaining. I suspect the detractors here find him equally entertaining to read, or they wouldn’t know his work.
18 Aug 10
8:21 am
Maybe Belinda Neal could sue for plagiarism. Isn’t that HER line?
18 Aug 10
8:27 am
That’s a fair point, In A Perfect World.
I find his column preachy and annoying – and read it every week.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
18 Aug 10
8:55 am
#38 mumbrella
I know.
Thanks for entertaining us Sam.
18 Aug 10
9:14 am
Can someone explain this to me?
In that link to the Australian article, Hugh Riminton says “the paper offered an apology and the rest is covered by a confidentiality agreement.” And then he goes on to write about the whole thing? Isn’t that “covered by a confidentiality agreement?”
I read the piece and find his line that “commentary on my character followed. It was nasty stuff,” rather amusing.
The commentary was “Do Hugh Riminton’s neighbours even know who he is?” I believe. Sounds like someone’s rather large ego got wounded more than anything.
18 Aug 10
4:26 pm
Sam who?
18 Aug 10
7:21 pm
I think “Hugh who” sounds better, especially if you are trying to attract someone’s attention.
27 Aug 10
3:12 pm
give sam a break, sure h’s got an ego, but who doesn’t in media these days.
I enjoy the good natured banter on his blog each week. I’m sure he would be the first to admit if he was wrong. Elen, how do you have time to be on this blog, aren’t there phones that need answering?
2 Sep 10
1:12 pm
Ahhh so easy to be a hater, especially an anonymous one!
I can understand why Hugh would be pissed at the misquote but by reacting this way he has proved himself to be a bit of a tosser.
I personally enjoy Sam’s blog and style of writing, does he come across as slightly arrogant? Maybe, but he is also a smart, funny and a talented writer.
Sam seems like the sort of bloke you could have an intelligent converstion with, but also a beer or two.
2 Sep 10
4:59 pm
Poor Sam blah, blah, blah… HE WROTE BULL$HIT! He didn’t check it. Are you lot also members of the “But Matthew’s a really good actor” club too? Moving on…
3 Sep 10
6:23 am
DeBrito’s column is great. He made a stupid mistake, but he’ll no doubt be a better journalist from it. Move on, people.
3 Sep 10
4:51 pm
Be interesting to see what columns / blogs those who hate De Brito’s column actually do like. Those who know the least about a subject invariably shout the loudest about it. Maybe they’re just spineless trolls who find it gratifying being nasty and anonymous.
As for De Brito’s dig at Rimington, he admit he made the mistake. He’s human. Flawed like the rest of us. And I’ve never found his tone smug. Glass houses n all that.
6 Sep 10
8:36 pm
@Albers 42 – best comment of the blog.
“Tristan 35 – I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The old PR saying that “any publicity is good publicity”?
There mere fact that only one of these journalists has found it necessary to comment on this blog speaks volumes.
Hooroo x