FRANKthoughts

KeepCUP, originally uploaded by FRANkVizeum.

We all have degrees of environmental engagement exemplified by Tamir’s excellent slideshare .
An easy environmental new year’s endeavour is to buy your own KeepCUP .
For years there has been the guilt of tossing out the used ‘disposable’ coffee cup each day. No longer. We bought five medium cups @ $12.20 each.
Chucking some numbers around….we now pay 50c less per coffee per day so in 25 days the KeepCUPs will have paid for themselves. Great.
From an environmental point of view the collective impact of the five of us (assuming 1 x coffee per day) over a year will be to save

* 1600 paper cups
* 4kgs plastic lids
* 23kgs landfill
* 76 KeepCUPs-worth of plastic
* 0.2 of a tree…

Not bad for just five people. So let’s kick off 2010 in a sympathetic way. I feel 2010 is going to be good to us all so let’s be good to 2010.

I’m not overly optimistic about the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. In fact I don’t believe the answer will come from politicians. I think it needs to come from economists, entrepreneurs and the market. We need to change the debate from “saving the world” (which unfortunately doesn’t carry enough punch) to “making money”. What does this has to do with branding?

At the moment, all countries (brands) are more or less the same. Everyone is looking for someone else to lead or to come up with the best excuse for not cutting emissions. This is the chance to leapfrog. If I was pitching for the brand called Australia I would pitch a strategy taking the lead on environmental AND economic growth for it to become Australia’s next export in terms of knowledge, products and services. Investing in new sustainable energy solutions, social entrepreneurship and green collar jobs is not a “pie in the sky” anymore – New York is already committed to a greener buildings and better energy use: “New York City Council voted overwhelmingly to pass the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan – a package of bills aiming to reduce New York City’s carbon emissions by almost 5%, create more than 17,000 jobs, and save New Yorkers $700 million dollars a year in energy costs.”

In five years the Australia brand can be recognised as a global leader in sustainable housing solutions, environmental living, bio-fuels, and more. This move will have a positive effect on wild life (therefore tourism dollars),  Education (therefore more money from overseas students) and improved health care with huge benefits to the economy (less money spent on health = more money spent on other things like education). What do you think? Can we do it?

As a marketing communications company we owe it to ourselves and our loyal clients to stay abreast of the ever evolving communications-shift that is in play. One of my solutions to appear knowledgeable is to surround myself with people and companies who are pioneering change.

One such company is Lookout Mobile who make iphone apps, jointly managed by Patrick and Daniel. One of their hero app is Aussie Rules Live and they are one of the leaders in this emerging market.

I was talking with them yesterday and they remarked that app development is now in its third-wave, which intrigued me. Wave One…all the way back in July 2008 largely came from 3G backyard developers and in hindsight were kind of crude, but fun. Wave Two emerged with 3GS. The “S” is for speed and gave birth to funkier apps such as the compass, improved gaming and augmented reality. A great example of the latter is in this clip.

Wave Three is capitalising on “second-mover advantage” which revisits existing apps and simply improves upon them. Weather apps are a good example with Pocket Weather emerging as one of the most popular.

From an iphone owner’s point of view there are so many new apps emerging and that awareness of the best apps is largely through friends and “have you seen this app?” conversations. It occured to me that aside from itunes there is no destination which provides independent, user generated, reviews and views. Apps are currently ranked in the app store by 1-5 stars which is fine but limited. I thought such a site might be called iphoneappreview.com.au. To my surprise i was able to register this url, which i did yesterday. Dot com was taken and takes us here, a site developed by doshdosh and the wrong advice  it has over 14,000 app reviews and currently ranks 328,000 on alexa.

The iphone app market is in early stages of development and penetration and i figure with the right collective attitude and experience now is a good time to explore the opportunity to provide a UGC app-review platform as a destination in a market that is destined to grow dramatically. So is  there anyone out there who agrees with the opportunity and would like to contribute at this formative stage in the life-cycle of apps? Please let me know.

Back in June we first spoke about Guvera . Well  it’s finally launching in a few weeks…15 December we’re told. The Guvera model is based on engagement in favour of the classic advertising-interruption model. From their eDM “Instead of advertising being perceived as disruptive or annoying, Guvera allows the advertiser to align their brand with their customers passions, allowing the brand to become the hero that provides new ways to find and get music, for free.”

If you think about your own experiences in meeting people you’re more likely to end up talking with someone who is approachable and listens rather than someone who just wants to talk about themselves.

 The Guvera approach allows brands to be able to fast-track engagement via an understanding of consumer preferences across a range of crieteria. Registering with Guvera is like speed dating for brands. To register you’ll be asked about your prefences on holidays, sport, music, gadgets & things, web activities, countries, books, films, food and charities. Just the kind of topics any one might ask in getting to know you.

I’m currently reading Mike Walsh’s excellent book, Futuretainment. In this he says “The challenge/opportunity for brands to benefit from an engagement-approach is to shift their brand strategy focus and to start behaving like media companies. Great brands engage consumers through telling stories. By learning more about the stories that surround a brand we can form our own impressions of their products/services and what they mean to our own lives and experiences. As audiences fragment one of the few ways for brands to achieve mass awareness is for their message to be compelling enough for consumers to do the distribution for you.”

It’ll be interesting to see how brands manage this opportunity with Guvera. In this emerging era of brand engagement it is clear that some brands (just like some people) are socially inept and there are likely to be degrees of sensitivity between the one-night stand approach and building longer term relationships.

As Mike says “the future of entertainment is not advertising- the future of advertising is entertainment.”

It’s been about 3 months since Vizeum launched in Australia through FRANk media, in Melbourne, to become FRANkVizeum. Finally we have Vizeum’d up the building with the global yellowness and the tree as seen here on the London site.

We’ve put our own spin on the ‘look’ with an intricate stencil on our walls thanks to signaction who have done an awesome job. Here’s a short movie using our new flip video camera which gives you the general idea. Enjoy.

Yesterday i made it to Marketing Now @ the Sofitel in Melbourne. The flavour of the event was “How to use Social Media and Online Marketing to reach customers directly, and keep them.” Here’s Dave and myself courtesy of David Armano, as are all these shots gratefully borrowed from his twitpic

Some spectacularly credible speakers sharing their wisdom yesterday were Gavin servant of chaos Heaton, Laurel silkcharm Papworth and Darren problogger Rowse.

As someone who is hungry for social business learnings i found Laurel and Darren (unfortunately i missed Gavin) both generous and inspiring. I came away enriched and wondered why every seat wasn’t filled. The entry price was a $100 donation, $50 of which went towards thankyou water so it was all very affordable and worthy. One of the concepts Laurel touched on was COI, the Cost of Inaction…worth bearing in mind.

I would say that the majority of marketing directors out there are tussling with the concept of infusing social media into their businesses and brands. With a few exceptions the results so far are indifferent and yet if they’d broken away from the slavery of emails and meetings their understanding could have been mightily accelerated. I wonder if in 12 months the same speakers are assembled there will be a queque to attend?

Moving on…i took the opportunity to promote Nuffnang by stickering the venue at strategic points as in the photo…nicely spotted by Mr A.

For those who missed the event here’s Darren talking about how to promote a blog. This is from his blog not yesterday’s session, but similar content. Laurel’s presentation is available here. Many of her slides are minimalist and need Laurel to do them justice but my favourite slides are 18-24 inc. Judging by the comments flying in on twitter David Armano’s session is along these lines.

The social business challenge as we see it here at FRANkVizeum is to take social to market pitched at a level that integrates a brand’s current investment in paid for media activity and does not leave marketers thinking “What are you talking about?” and “How is this possibly relevant to my brand(s)?”  We have our social media infusion process, some case histories and we run our free FRANkademy session each month to introduce social thinking within a traditional media context. It’s working for us and our clients and i would encourage any brand with just their toes in the water to dive in and splash about.

Anybody who went to MarketingNow (or didn’t) want to add their thoughts?

A year ago, I hadn’t heard of Nuffnang and yet next month I am very honored to be on the judging panel of the inaugural Nuffnang Asia Pacific Blog Awards.

All thanks for our partnership with Nuffnang must go to David Lee, my fellow Director in Nuffnang Australia. Dave approached Ming and Tim, Nuffnang’s co-founders, about our potential involvement, about 11 months ago and since November 2008 we have been building Nuffnang’s blog advertising community in Australia. Today we have over 1,000 bloggers who have signed up to our network with ads seen by 90,000 people daily.

However our numbers are dwarfed by the collective might of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines who have over 100,000 blogs with ads seen by 3 million people daily.

The awards have created a frenzy with over 400 bloggers, plus partners, being flown to Singapore for a grand Gala Dinner and accommodation at Nuffnang’s expense. The sponsors are Pringles and The Singapore Tourism Board.

There are 12 blog awards in total Best Blog Shop, Best Food Blog, Best Fashion Blog, Best Parenting Blog, Best Travel Blog, Best Geek Blog, Best Celebrity Blog, Best Entertainment Blog, Best Original Blog Design, Most Influential Blog, Best Hidden Gem and the top award of Region’s Best Blog.

Nominations have closed so now it’s down to the serious job of judging.

As the need for sound social business strategy becomes more apparant in Australia its fascinating to observe how brands are trying to engage with bloggers. Australia is at a relatively early stage of development in terms of engaging the blogosphere and it’s good to be at the forefront of the understanding process. The key consideration in social media is to originate and sustain a healthy dialogue with the view of building a long term relationship.

The challenge for many brands is to recognise this and not to approach the blogosphere with the intent of ‘taking’ or ‘using.’ The opportunity is to give and share, as with any healthy relationship.

The inaugural blog awards is part of Nuffnang’s commitment to our blogger community and i can’t wait until i visit Singapore for the first time in October to witness first hand the raw energy of our Nuffies.

In the most recent October Issue of Harpers Bazaar you will notice a certain change to the style and tone of magazine. Reason for this is Edwina McCann, who is a former fashion editor of The Australian and moved into the new role of editor, replacing Jamie Huckbody after 15months at the magazine.

Edwina saw the original tone as “very cold”.  She has since brought more colour, photos, people and conversation throughout the magazine and has included more first person stories.

However it’s not an easy category….magazines saw a *22% decrease in agency ad spend from jan-jun 08->09, and in the latest circulation audit, Harper’s BAZAAR saw an 8% drop in average monthly sales (jan-june09) = 51,567 copies.  They are however focusing on their dedicated audience and keeping it real for the readers. Don’t expect to see anything in the magazine that isn’t available to buy in Australia. I look forward to seeing the progression over the next few months…

*Source: The Australian, Monday Sept 7th

Andrew Mudgway (no “e”) joins us today, 17 years after he began his career in advertising with George Patterson Bates. Mudge (with an “e”), as the industry knows him, has worked his way through Patts, DDB, OMD, Zenith Optimedia and latterly Austereo. Now at the sagacious age of 37 he has seen the wisdom of joining FRANkVizeum.

Clearly a smart guy Mudge’s forte is marketing communications and brand strategy. In addition to being responsible for the Carsales Network portfolio of sites including homesales.com.au Mudge will also have a senior role in helping to run the FRANkVizeum business.

We’re very happy to have Mudge onboard and we’d ask you to join us in wishing him every success.

Now i’m the first to admit i find the whole professional swimsuit debate incredible. To my understanding world records are being broken because of the advantage for those swimmers not under contract by wearing full polyurethane suits. A couple of weeks ago FINA, the sport’s international governing body, announced that it would have a full set of rules in place by January 1 2010. FINA has muted that among other things it will outlaw most of these suits, the very suits that have set the majority of the 35 world records at last month’s World Championships in Rome.
So now we have Polyurethane World Records and non-polyurethane world records? Could ‘PB’ morph from Personal Best to become Polyurethane Best?
Can you imagine the climate at Speedo as headlines such as this appear? “Outdated swim suit delivers bronze.” Here’s a case of brand strategy backfiring. From their site The world’s leading swimwear brand, Speedo® is passionate about life in and around the water, creating revolutionary new technologies, designs and innovations.
Speedo has been synonymous with swimming for decades and i’m sure will continue to be. When world class, massively high profile, swimmers such as Michael Phelps and Libby Trickett are deemed to be disadvantaged by wearing Speedo suits however it must like a smack in the face with a wet fish. Brand strategy gone wrong.