Category: Marketing

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Some videos what you can enjoy, y’hear?

Westpac logo

Here’s some moving images on the Internet for your enjoyment.

  1. You know how Westpac bank ATMs have that woman who gestures at you through the transaction? Does she annoy you? I especially hate how she asks whether you want a receipt, and then says you can’t have a receipt. Ignorant bitch. What about this version?
  2. Check out the most in-demand video editing crew in the entire Sunnyvale trailer park.
  3. A currently-running TV advert with a nice beaver. I encourage you to join the conversation there about the use of the word. Has the advertiser got it right for the Australian audience?

Now this is nothing more than links to things I found interesting. Should this be a full post like this, with a headline? A “Note” which, on the website home page at least, is shown without a headline but with a red line in the margin? Or should I just Twitter them as I find them?

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3 movies for a lazy Sunday

Image from Ballad for Worlds Fair movie

Three quick movies for you to watch on a lazy Sunday… things which I’ve been sent over the last week.

  1. The 15-minute promotional film A Ballad for the Fair (pictured) tours the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with an emphasis on communications technology since it was produced by Bell System. Marvel at the video-phone! Warning: there is folk music. Hat-tip to Paleo-Future.
  2. A creepy community service announcement about violence against women starring Australia’s celebrity criminal Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read. Chopper even has his own website. Hat-tip to Rhys McDonald via Five Thumbs Down. Check the latter for an amusing AFL players’ social guide.
  3. The US shoots down a spy satellite. Thanks, Richard. I won’t bother discussing the military-strategy and international-politics angles of that one, there’s plenty elsewhere.
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Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, final edition

It’s nearly a month since I posted my tacky Heath Ledger joke page. What have we learned? Truth be told, not a lot more than I wrote in the Day 1 lessons and the items tagged “heath ledger”.

But let’s look at the total traffic anyway, this time using a graph from Google Analytics which shows visits only visitors to the jokes page.

Graph of one month of Heath Ledger-related traffic

As of just now, there’s been 11,717 page views in total, representing 8,798 unique visitors who stayed on average for 3 mins 44 secs per visit — quite respectable!

Traffic took a couple of days to peak — the first day being fuelled by Google Adwords — with a secondary peak the following week when Ledger’s funeral arrangements hit the news. Google rates the peaks as about 1000 visits a day and even now, a month later, we’re still seeing 60 to 80 visits a day.

As for the jokes themselves, well… to be honest I really don’t want to read them again. Most of them were crap. If you’ve got any astounding sociological observations, feel free to post a comment.

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Sensis’ legal bullying revisited

On 19 January I wrote about Sensis’ lawyers sending legal “nastygrams” to small website owners. Professor Roger Clarke has received a response [PDF file], which we can’t copy and paste because it’s a scan of a printed letter.

Professor Clarke reckons the response is “reasonable enough (as far as it goes)”, and he won’t be taking the matter any further. His article on Lawyers’ ‘Nastygrams’ re Trademarks reminds us that lawyers’ letters often make inappropriate demands on behalf of trademark-owners.

It’s vital that people stand up for their rights, and resist corporations getting away with claims that go beyond the already excessive rights that corporate welfare laws in the ‘intellectual property’ arena grant them.

So, we all should say “the Yellow Pages® directory” to help Sensis prevent their trademark turning into a generic word. Sensis is our friend.

The funniest bit, I think, is that the lawyer’s response reckons the original letter was intended to “encourage the proper use of Sensis trademarks”. Lawyers must have a funny idea about “encouragement”: their “nastygram” was a three-page letter in pompous legalese containing veiled threats [PDF file].