37signals posted an excellent summary of Five marketing/business lessons from Harry Houdini: focus on the killer bit; judo big problems into small ones; beat copycats by innovating; give ’em a story; free samples build buzz. Worth a read.
Subtle Thai referendum poster
I like plain, straightforward communication. I therefore love this poster for the “no” case in Thailand’s recent constitutional referendum — the first referendum ever held in Thailand. Click on the image for a close-up.
Do you get the feeling they’d rather I voted “No”?
The referendum itself was on whether to adopt a new constitution, and the result seems to be that it’s a green light. Obviously the subtle poster didn’t work.
Thanks to One Plus One Equals Three for the pointer.
Stilgherrian Simpsonsized
’Pong and I have just let The Simpsons Movie and Burger King absorb an hour of our valuable attention in exchange for turning us into yellow-skinned characters. Simpsonize Me is a promotional tool for the film, but one which gives you a toy to play with — the ability to turn your photos into characters from The Simpsons — in exchange for a bit of brand reinforcement.
I reckon this is how “interactive advertising” has to work. A fair exchange of value. As opposed to Audi’s over-produced self-indulgent wank, where they get your psychometric profile and you get — well, nothing.
The question now, of course: How good a match for me is the character I’ve made? Comments?
What’s so special about the Workplace Authority?
Those TV ads for the Workplace Authority don’t work, do they? They’re another “official government reassurance” — so of course we don’t believe them.
“You can call (the) Ombudsman but you have already lost a house, your job… You are living on the street with your kids,” one respondent said. “Six years later you may get a reply.”
And who are the people in the ad? Barbara Bennett strides around comfortably — apparently she’s a public servant who’s risen quickly through the ranks. But key jobs like “General Manager Contact Centre” and “Chief Financial Officer” were only advertised in the papers on the weekend.
And why is the General Manager Contact Centre, who oversees just 180 staff, being offered $220k per annum, when this survey of call centre salaries (44k PDF) shows that the current range is $70k to $160k, with a median of $120k?
Black is the new black
Further to my post about Blackle and the current wave of fashionable shiny black website design, Janet Hawtin made the observation (in private email) that black is the new black. Well, indeed!
Blackle: a “green computing” furphy
On the surface it sounds great. “A given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen,” says About Blackle. So if everyone turns Google black we’ll save heaps of energy, because it’s such a widely-used website. At least that’s the theory.
And Sydney-based Heap Media is getting attention because they’ve created Blackle (pictured right), a website which provides that black version of Google.
But as always the devil is in the detail…
- It’s only old-style CRT monitors which use less energy when displaying darker images. Modern LCD flat-panels use the same power no matter what.
- Blackle is a front-end onto Google, serving out the adverts and all. So using Blackie adds to the total power consumption. As well as whatever Google uses, you’re also adding in the overhead of routing your requests via Blackle.
- Currently the Blackle home page claims “115,486.374 Watt hours saved”, up from 113,834.304 Watt hours around this time yesterday. That’s not a lot of electricity. 2kWh is enough to run a small server computer for maybe 4 hours — perhaps 6 if it’s not fully loaded. In other words, Blackle uses 4 or 5 times more energy than it saves.
Still, it’s a great way of getting attention for your business under the banner of “saving the planet”, eh? Plus, having a black background means your site can have that oh-so-current style of having everything look like it’s reflected in some shiny black surface.