When run of site activity goes astray...

Solo, with cricket-themed creative pops up on the girls' mag Cleo website...

Link

Diagram: Apple's Tipping Point

Done by a gentleman called Paul Nixon - he seems to do a lot of infographics.

Apple diagram here
- at which he's place the new ipod Shuffle and mini-Mac at the centre 'sweet spot'.

In a cool idea, he also shows his Concept sketches (the first step at the bottom of the page is the best, but I would've liked to even see one more before that).

Greater Union online booking - flaws...

I wrote a few days about how Greater Union have dropped online tickets to $10, presumably to increase uptake of online sales.

So, where have they gone wrong? Well for a start, I just tried to book a ticket for a 12.15 session (it's now 11.30). Got all the way through to clicking 'book' or whatever it is that makes it final, only for the system to come back and tell me I'm too close to the session start time to book online.

It doesn't give me how far out I do to book online, nor can I find it that info anywhere on the site. A FAQ page on booking online would've been, say, sensible, especially since you would assume it be a way to reassure hesitant browswers and convert them to actually purchasing online...

Link to their 'online ticketing' info page (dubiously labelled)

Huh Corp

Found this site by way of Mick Stanic's Principius Blog:

Huh Corp.

A very nice pisstake on "e-marketing consultancies".

The Simpsons' Wit

"...and giving everyone an equal part when they're clearly not equal is called what children?"

[chorus] "comm-unismmm"





Remind me to tell you about my "spelling test" theory sometime.

Online bookings for movie tickets fall to $10

Greater Union cinemas have dropped their online booking prices down to $10 ($11 incl the booking fee) for their adult tickets. They are now the same price as pensioner and student tickets. I think adult online tickets were previously the same as the offline price of $14 (plus the $1 booking fee online).

Presumably they've dropped the online price to increase adoption of online booking, and my guess is there'll be TVCs, or maybe online ads, promoting the fact.

Of course, they could just wait for the news to spread via email between people - I know I've already let about 10 people know. Or how's about a 'tell friends' link next to the promo? Nothing major, just a simple form to fill in, say, 5 friends' email address? Users can already have their own account to view their favourite cinemas etc, so they have obviously have the capability to do things such as forms and data capture.

The offer expires in mid March, so they've given people a good month and a half to get used to booking online.

Link

Google Video Search

Google has released theirvideo search tool. How does it work? It indexes the closed captions of recent television programs.

Charlene Li from Forrester also points out that Yahoo have added a 'video' search tab to their home page.
Link: Charlotte's post, in which she gives the example of doing a search for Johnny Carson.

Business 2.0s Smart List

Business 2.0 magazine has released its annual 101 Dumbest Moments in Business. (I remember seeing a printed version in Borders a while back, before I properly knew what B2.0 was).

They've also started this year to compile a Smart List - including this year's Macca's turnaround with their Salads Plus range. (Subsciption required to view more than the intro blurbs for each list entry - which reminds me - Zinio where is my new issue download?!?!)

PBL head John Alexander negotiates $3million base salary...

...which could grow to effectively double that if he achieves performance targets.
The good news from a governance perspective is that those performance targets come in two forms: long tern and short term. Anyone got a gig for CEO of a successful large national media company open they wanna shoot my way?

Link: News.com.au story

Closer: one heck of a great trailer

I plan on going to see the movie Closer based on purely on the preview TVC that's currently screening ... It's an odd move for me (I've heard nothing about the film itself), but that song (looking around it seems to be Suzanne Vega's Caramel) coupled with the images just has something about it (oh, that and Natalie Portman:)

Update: It looks like the song I mean is actually the song 'Closer' by Jem.

Triple J now trialling podcasting

I have to really train myself of getting into the habit of actually posting to things I read about, and not just sending them via email to friends/interested people (those people haven't gotten into reading blogs or using aggregators yet, so I get the info to them first via email, then forget/can't be arsed replicating in a post).

Case in point: Triple J beginning a trial on podcasating some stories from its afternoon current affairs program.

Selling less but still becoming number one

Seth Godin makes the interesting point across at least the music and book charts, something doesn't have to sell as many copies as it once did to become number one.

Why's that?
   "Because the market is wider and flatter than any time in history"

And the result?
   "...the bestselling book, song, beer and car is 'other' ".

Link

Aust metro radio revenue up

News story in The Australian about commercial radio spend for the 5 capital cities growing 14.8% to reach $556.6 million for 2004. The data was put together by PricewaterhouseCoopers, for Commercial Radio Australia, the industry body. Unfortunately, I can't track down any CEASA figures that are similar (ie metro radio and for 12 months) to see how they compare.

The Australian Digital Marketing Forum is backup

The Digital Marketing Forum guys have now restored the forum (it was effected by that PHP worm/virus thing that was doing the rounds prior to Christmas).

This is a great forum that has (mostly) intelligent discussion about interactive marketing topics with an Australian skew.

Fairfax in "secret" bid for Ten?

Background: For those who aren't up to speed on Australian media ownership, Howard's Liberal Party's win in the Federal election last year will give them control of the Senate too come July this year. It's suggested that one of the items they'll push through is legislative change relaxing both cross-media and foreign media ownership restrictions.

This article from The Australian media section suggests the first big credible move will be Fairfax (a press & magazine publisher) buying up part or all of CanWest's 57.5% economic interest in Ten Holdings. It also considers the speculation that this will mean Nick Falloon will replace already-outgoing Fairfax CEO Fred Hilmer.

All of this speculation comes after Fairfax's (unsuccessful) attempts to buyout West Australian Newspapers and The Trading Post, leaving me thinking Ten's appeal to them is more from a financial perspective than simply to counteract Fairfax's older AB strength with Ten's strength in the 16-39 demo. It's hard to see, at least in the short-medium term what synergies there would be across the two organisations (compared with, for example, Seven buying out Pacific Publications a couple of years back). Perhaps it is all just about diversification and securing strong performers (Ten Holding's EBITDA for the 2004 financial year was up 33.4% on 2003 - Link to Ten's corporate site here).

Incidentally, how "secret" is a bid that's the top media story in The Oz?

No iTunes music store for Australia.

Its now of course obvious to all that there wasn't any grand announcement about the launch of the iTunes store for Australian residents. It appears the Sydney launch was just to back up the already announced iPod Shuffle and mini mac.

Who ever would have guessed that they hype surrounding an Apple event would be bigger than the announcements that weren't made? :)

I should just hold out till the Apple announcement lest I look foolish...

...but I can't help it.

AppleInsider has a report from yesterday indicating the Mac event that's just kicked off in Sydney will be to announce two Apple retail stores (one in Melb, one in Sydney), as well as Apple stands in Myer department stores - not to announce the Australian iTunes Music Store after all. Evidence to support this new theory: the event is for Apple 'business partners' only (whatever that actually means'), plus there's no noted "rock extravanganza" thats marked other music store announcements.

But we'll see in a couple of hours I guess.
I might bet both ways, or better yet, so I'd be pleased to see either (although the music store infinitely more).

Because there's not enough blog noise about Apple's new products...

The Mac mini itself
1. I agree with Om Malik (who also writes for Business 2.0) - its going to appeal as a nice media-centre-type PC. With apps like iTunes and iLife combining with the sexiness of the Mac 'ideal' and recent products such as the Airport Express, and of course the iPod in whichever permutation.
2. I also really like the comparative pic that the B2day guys have up (which I believe is straight from the Mac Mini official site).

Blog action on the new products
1. A Technorati search returns 1,075 posts. Not bad considering the keynote only concluded a few hours ago.

2. Blogosphere activity is heavily used to simply record people's opinions on things such as officially announced products, as per the Technorati results above.

But the blogosphere activity also seems to reverberate a rumour (no matter how cleverly insightful and possibly true) to such a degree that it seems to become a "how could it not be true, i've read about it on so many blogs" situation.

This certainly seems to the case with the rumoured launch of the Australian iTunes music store possibly today.

The problem is, all the posts (at least the ones Technorati shows) are based on the same two things:
1. the Fairfax newspaper story from yesterday (free regstrn required); and
2. Les Posen's deduction/observation about an Australian Mac event in Sydney just hours after Jobs' keynote.

The impact of those two things though is getting amplified by them being repeated and linked to so much by blogs - amplified beyond their original significance with respect to the accuracy of the speculation.

Oh, and just to say it one more time in the post in case I haven't used the word enough: blogosphere

Australian iTunes Music store to be launched tomorrow?

I know, I know, we've heard the stories before and they've been way off the mark (a year and counting for this one), and this AppleInsider report from October 2004 refers to a Financial Review article.

But we all know the US MacWorld is on now, and in what I think is pretty compelling evidence of something coming,
there is scheduled to be an Australian Mac event in Sydney (at The Westin), tomorrow (12th Jan). As Les Posen calculates, thats 9 hours after Jobs' keynote at the San Francisco MacWorld (and in his opinion it seems anything under 10 hours suggests its B.I.G. :)

Fingers crossed it is the iTunes store... and that tracks are AU99c (although would this amount to Apple making a loss given the dollar, assuming wholesale prices are the same?). This of course would undercut both Teltra's BigPond Music and ninemsn's current prices.

Update: The kids over at GadgetLounge point out that Paypal now support the Australian dollar. Another piece of evidence (albeit slim).

BoingBoing post: North Korea wages war on long hair

From the ever-amusing Boing Boing, a post on a CSA campaign entitled
"Let Us Trim Our Hair In Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle!".

RSS advertising thoughts from Mark Jones on the Gday World Podcast

Related to my post yesterday about RSS mainstream adoption, I finally got a chance to listen to the rest of the Gday World podcast where Cam and Mick talk to Mark Jones from IDG Comm (the IT-type magazine publishers), where Mark offers some thoughts (obviously from a publishers perspective) about ways advertising could be introduced into RSS feeds.

Moonlighting for Garden State

Finally got around to seeing Garden State the flick (saw it at the Moonlight Cinema in the Botanic Gardens here in Brisbane). Man, that Zach Braff is one crazy guy ... the sort of stuff that must go through his head is bewildering (either that or he's got a good dealer).

(movie verdict: great - definitely one I'll be getting when it comes out on DVD)

RSS adoption by the masses.

I've been thinking about the spread of blogs and everything related (namely RSS and podcasts) for a few days now, as I start (slooooowly) to put together a 'newsflash'-type update for our clients who are less in the know about such things. (We have seem to have a lot of those :)

I've also over the last couple of days added even more of the Jupiter Research guys' blogs to my feed list.

Which makes this post from Eric Peterson good reading. Its title,
'What will it take to push RSS into the mainstream?', pretty well explains the content.

I have to say I pretty much tried to avoid as much info as I could about the tsunami (knowing that would be impossible and I could get by on the still large amount that you can't avoid), but I still don't doubt Eric's claim that 'everything (he) read about the tsunami was more interesting than what he saw on the news'. Some pretty compelling evidence of that claim is a Phuket Tsunami blog Eric links to. I've only had a quick read, but it already sounds more ... (hard to select the right word here) refreshing than the stereotypical news stories that we are getting as sidebars and current affairs shows of the a) the 'miracle survival' story and b) the 'unlikely/ordinary heroes' stories.

ninemsn alerts trial

Thought I'd try the ninemsn alerts after all that, just to see how it works (I'm still looking for a proper RSS news feed though with an AU perspective). When thing I do like is how as an advanced setting, you can select what to do with alerts when you are not signed in to Messenger - you can get the emailed to you, or sent via SMS (if you're keen enough for news to pay the carrier costs). Its a nice option to have though...

Australian news RSS feed - anyone? anyone at all?

If you know of a decent RSS feed by an Australian publisher, can you drop me a line... pretty pretty please... News Interactive have their own alerts application (which I'm not downloading on principle), and Fairfax have a RSS feeds (that link is to the Syd Morning Herald page), but its far from superb (1. updates infrequently 2. categories are arbitrary given their lack of updating 3. I can only get bloglines to show me the headlines only - not even a summary - despite checking and doublechecking my settings). I can't see Yahoo AU news offering a feed, and ninemsn also seem to have gone the News Alert route, but at least theirs is tied into Messenger (which presumably most consumers have running continually in a similar way to an RSS aggregator)

From ipodder to doppler

Talking about podcasting software: Had only had ipodder installed for about two hours when I decided to switch to Doppler instead. Purely because of the recommendations from two blogs - yet another tiny piece to add to the "markets are conversations" argument pile. The crazy thing was, I hadn't spent enough time to learn to love/hate/use ipodder - it was purely a switch based on two recommendations (plus I didn't want to grow attached to ipodder only to have to give it up for a 'better' app).

Nerd-detail: went straight to version 2

bloglines - yay

Was right on the verge of paying my $41.04 AUD for the very very good FeedDemon - got to the "give us your credit card numbers now!" page and everything...

Thought I'd check out what was free though, with the goal really being a standalone app, because of how impressed I am with FeedDemon (a standalone app). Found Bloglines though, so that I'd give it a go (its web-based). Coupled with the small BlogLines notifier, thats a download that sits in the system tray, it so far seems pretty darn handy. I've only been using it for all of 30 mins though, so I'll keep reevaluating it I think. Its quite possible that FeedDemon might get me to part with my $40 yet (1. tax deductable 2. the ability to read the feeds when not connected)

Gday World podcast

Well, I downloaded a podcast app (ipodder) today - after having heard quite a bit about podcasting over the lasat few months, it seems in practice to be a pretty handy idea. We'll see after a bit ... my initial thoughts are that its a bit too troublesome (at least how it is at the moment) to make it out of the geek-slanted world.

And only just now realised one of the Gday World kiddos (Mick) is the same Mick thats organising the Blog Conference in Melb. Currently listening to their latest 'cast ( from 21 Dec ) .. interesting for the most part, but gotta be honest and say theres a fair bit of rambling to that's not particularly interesting (eg talking about msn search tricks as they're muckng round with their computers that we can't see ... a tad boring). It sounds like it might grow on me though...

Computer thinking

How a computer plays chess

I find this sort of stuff pretty interesting... Move a couple of pawns even and see the permeations grow exponentially, with the computer thinking through EVERYTHING far too many moves down the track :)

Jupiter's analysts blogging half-aversary

Gary Stein, an analyst at Jupiter Research, mentions on his blog today that he started blogging 18 months ago. I'm going to assume he means the specific Jupiter-blog that he does.

I really really enjoy reading his blog regularly, along with his colleagues, Niki Scevak (who happens to be an Australian), and Nate Elliot in particular.

Jupiter Research, to me, sit perfectly at the intersection of being a consultancy (think McKinsey et al) and a advertising/media technologist firm (by that I course don't mean they create the technology). They just seem to have the 'specialist consultancy' down to the exact right level.

(For a full list of their analysts with Jupiter blogs, its here.

------
and I imagine that's the final post for today for me ... nothing like making up an average count. ciao//

Triple J's Hottest 100 - 2004 open for voting

Vote here
This year, you can vote via the web page, or via SMS.
You can only vote for 10 songs via each method (I think it was unlimited number last year, but only once for each song)

(for those non-Australians, the Hottest 100 is the annual countdown of the year's songs (they countdown in Jan 05 the songs from 2004). Triple J is a bit like the Australian XFM...

And yes, for those who have been to it in the past, I'll be having another of my Hottest100 parties. Keep an eye out for the email.

Corporate blogging conference - in Melb early next month

(I can say that now, seeings how we're in Jan of the new year).

Links:
The conference's site
The proposed program outline

It's in Melbourne, over one fairly long day, and that this stage will cost $150 for each attendant. As far as I know, its being organised by a guy called Mick Stanic, who, so the story goes, quit his job as a producer at SingletonOgilvyInteractive to do this... (let me know if that's not quite right - I can't seem to find the source of where I heard that).

The other thing I can't relocate is where I picked up that the conference will focus on corporate blogging and what/how/when etc etc.
But it will :)

I'm v interested to see how much the idea of this conference will take off - particularly in terms of what sort of people go. Will it all be geek bloggers? Who/how many interactive agency people? Online publisher reps? Traditional agency people (once they find out what 'blog' stands for maybe, and after they've learnt about SEM/O?)?

A day of discussing the implications/uses of corporate blogging in Melbourne backing onto the weekend... life could be worse. Now, I'm off to draft a plan to get my employer to send me down ..

and so 2005 is here....

I'm conscious that I haven't been too prolific in my posting (perhaps if I thought they worked, that would displace my new years resolution of eating at least one piece of fruit a day).

I have actually accomplished something though since my last post - I've compiled the campaign reports for all of our agency's past campaigns. They're all in one spot, so now I can see how everything performed etc etc.

(Mechanics of it: In Excel: rows and rows of data in a few worksheets in a file, called on by a query sitting in a different worksheet, all with that most fantastical invention of a PivotTable)

(And if you haven't discovered PivotTables yet in Excel, do so - they let you cut up data however you want, and I think most importantly, dynamically switch it all around to compare different things)

So know, while it still has some tidying to do, I can, for example, see what day of week gets best response, and how campaigns I've done compare to an overall agency average, or campaigns in the same category etc.

What I can't get out of it (yet...) is much of an insight into reach metrics and performance. Give me time though.

It all took a lot of fluffing around (Excel can be a biatch sometimes, esp when features don't work like they say), but now it's done, I can just look back at the time as a way of the good ol' skunkworks theory (I think it was Chris Locke in the Cluetrain that said something about the first intranets being done in the skunkworks, with the long hours associated).

Anyway, here's to a 2005 that ... well... gets you one step closer to what you want.
Increments - perhaps its all about increments.