Every cloud has a silver lining and in the last few weeks I’ve seen the silver lining of the GEC with stories of people pursuing shiny new beginnings and opportunities after being affected last year.  If you’re a positive and creative thinker you can see silver linings everywhere - not just in your dark cloud but in the dark clouds of others too - and this week a couple of great examples came to light.

Grill’d v Nandos

Burger chain Grill’d recently published a 2-for-1 burger offer in the Uni Times publication meant to be exclusively for Uni Times readers, however this was not in the T&Cs.  Electronic versions of the offer did the email rounds and Grill’d were inundated with people trying to redeem. Grill’d wouldn’t redeem electronic vouchers which upset many customers and lead them to clarify the situation on their blog. Seeing the opportunity, Nandos released a statement titled ‘we don’t care where your vouchers come from just come on in’ and capatalised on the situation by redeeming any Grill’ed vouchers - printed or otherwise. Read more about it in Mumbrella or on Nando’s blog.  Props to poor Grill’d who openly admitted the situation was a ‘complete debacle’ on their blog. On the up side there’s now of bunch of people who have a new awareness of the brand.

City of Pocket v City of Sydney

The owners of Pocket Bar on Burton Street in Sydney have seen an opportunity to ease the pain of getting fined. The Pocket Optimism Act works like this: when you recieve a parking fine, a toll notice or any other stupid fine take it to Pocket Bar within a week of getting it and they’ll give you 20 per cent off your total bill.  Pocket Bar says ‘with Pocket Optimism we are bringing the fun back into living; breathing life into little annoying things.’ Great idea, a nice kicker for customers and a great incentive to drop in.

So there’s an opportunity that came from competitors and one that came from customers above.  What are the dark clouds of your brand’s competitors or customers and how can you be the silver lining?

Posted by Renee Creer

Is Monday too soon to be thinking about cocktails?  I say no.  This is PR and of course, all we crazy PR hedonists do is booze up.  So as I poured my first Hendrick’s cocktail of the week (respectfully 1 minute after 12 noon), an interesting article by Fi Bendall caught my eye.  It describes, among other really interesting points, the media consumption of her Gen Y teenage kids (16 and 14 years old).

“The teens are using new media at every available opportunity, always on in the background is the web, laptops sitting next to the mobile phone that is sms’ing and iPod plugged in one ear.”

This describes what I call a CONSUMPTION COCKTAIL.

It’s not limited to teens and new media.  All ages do this.  Have you noticed you do this yourself? 

You’re at home on the computer, flicking between Facebook and Google and you’ve got one ear tuned to the TV on the background.  If something interesting comes up you watch for a few minutes then it’s back to downloading a podcast for tomorrow’s bus ride, while you continue to sms your friend about the weekend.

That’s a consumption cocktail - everything is thrown into the mix at the same time.  We are, after all, media animals and as our access increases so does our appetitie for information and entertainment.

What are the implications? 

More channels = less time per channel = multiple channels at once = attention split between channels = smaller and smaller audience segments = marketing / PR / advertising hell?

Not really.  It just means we have to be smarter, faster and better at connecting with people via things that are relevant and remarkable.  Makes for thirsty work…

Posted by Renee Creer

I attended a New Media Conference last week.  By far the most entertaining speaker was Dan Ilic. His talk was more stand up comedy routine than conference presentation which at 9.30am on a Friday, was fine with me.

From his viewpoint the best virals are strong on character, content and narrative; they make an emotional connection and stay true to the idea.  Controversity, celebrity and comedy are obvious winners and his guide for time was between 45 seconds to 3 minutes, with about a laugh a minute (I know, easy for a funny guy to say).

Dan also mentioned the ‘T-shirt Economy’, that is, how viral content often ends up on t-shirts, making money for the creators - an example being Beached Whale on Cafe Press.  This reminded me of a post I never got around to posting. 

At the end of last year I interviewed my friend, Jarod Green from Currant Creative, one of the guys behind Beached Whale, a hugely successful Australian viral which has had over 4 million views on YouTube.  Jarod is a film director and social media analyst and as an aside, he looks like a very young, sandy haired version of Tom Cruise.  Sometimes when I look at him I imagine him in whites and want to call him Maverick.

Anyhoo - this is what Jarod had to say about his experience:

RC/ When did you realise that you might be onto something with Beached Whale?

JG/ I’d honestly have to say from the moment we recorded it.  It just made us laugh time and time again - so much so you can actually hear Macca (the seagull) laughing in the final video.

RC/ When did it get really big?

JG/ It took about four months to crack the first million hits.  We never really tried to push it, but when Flight of the Conchords posted it on their blog and Fairfax Digital added it to all their online publications last July it certainly got a kick along.  Today it enjoys around forty thousand hits a day.

RC/ Who was the first to approach you about buying it?

JG/ TV networks in Australia and New Zealand were keen to licence the film early on.  Since then we’ve had offers from stationery companies, toy manufacturers, ring tone retailers, jewellery makers, and of course, clothing companies (like Supre).

RC/ Who have you sold it to and how much money have you made?

JG/ Whilst I can’t disclose the terms of any contracts, I can say that collectively we’ve sold over $1 million worth of Beached Whale products globally.  That’s not bad considering we only began selling the brand in late August and the total overhead cost of production, distribution, marketing and maintenance to date is about $15.

RC/ What have you learned from the experience?

JG/ The plan for us was always to use Beached Whale as a proof of concept for utilising the free distribution channels of social networking tools with a financial return. If anything, Beached Whale showed us that the business theory we build was certain sound.  It’s an exciting time to be creating content as the media industry experiences a paradigm shift into new technologies and a globalised market, but with the Old World truth of ‘value in the idea’ stronger than ever.

RC/What’s next?

JG/ A sequel?  Probably not, but you can be sure the beached whale will be returning in some capacity in the coming months.  There’s plenty of other projects we’re working on and towards as we try and keep ahead of the curve and market leaders in unleashing the powerful and rewarding opportunities of new media channels.

Posted by Renee Creer / Photo by Cafe Press

There’s a scene in Zoolander when Mugatu says “Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigre? They’re all the same face!  Doesn’t anybody notice this?  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

Crazy pills indeed.  We recently lost a pitch because another agency came up with an idea that was like nothing the client had seen or hear of before.

When you lose an account for that kind of reason you think “well, fair play to them.” I appreciate the value of a great idea and I respect it when an agency nails a brief with something unique.

The problem is that the idea was like something we had seen and heard of quite recently in the press.  It had already been done by a couple of other brands and funnily enough by our own GM about a decade ago (but they were not to know that).

Then today I stumbled upon this on PR Warrior.  Umm, great result but sorry Scrabble, hadn’t anyone heard about Extreme Ironing which has been around for aggeessss?  Or did they know but not really care because this was scrabble and not ironing?

Julian Cole covers off other examples brilliantly in this blog and more and more I’m hearing about agencies who, let’s say, ‘borrow’ ideas, repackage and flog them (I’m assuming) to unaware clients and eventually to the masses.

Is it just me or is this a bit wiffy? Or doesn’t it matter whose idea it is as long as you change it slightly and the campaign achieves results?

And what about the creative souls who post their awesome ideas on YouTube only to have them turned into award winning campaigns attributed to major agencies?

For me it’s about credibility.  Everyone is influenced by ideas and takes inspiration from what’s around them, but how about giving credit when it’s due?  If you develop an existing idea, pay whatever dues are necessary to the creator and ensure the client is aware of the source of the idea if it’s not an original.

But maybe I’m naive - or an idea purist - I don’t know…?

Posted by Renee Creer