The wee folk have invaded your head

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday November 18,2011

In life, and in business, you have a constant battle with the little people. Those wee folk who inhabit your head and keep nattering away at you, pushing and tugging and trying to nudge you off course.

With me the most persistent imp is Prue Krastinator. It's she who says "This can wait until tomorrow" or "You've got a week before deadline, leave the job ‘til Friday." Boy she's got me into trouble over the years.

If I let my guard down and neglect to write up my to-do lists for a couple of days I get rapidly landed in the soup. Has she ever come your way? From what I can see she has a lot of siblings in this town.

Another troublesome inhabitant of my cranium is Shootya Mouth, who is forever tossing dumb quips into the breech and urging me to fire indiscriminately without first engaging the brain.

Fortunately as I've got older he has become easier to control. But you can't afford to let your guard down because this one's as cunning as a cat, slipping in when you're stressed, excited or otherwise engaged - like in the middle of an important meeting.

His sister is called Weakas Water who won't say a thing until it's far too late to speak out. She worries she might offend or ask too much or otherwise sour the atmosphere.

Consequently she sets up situations where matters which were small glitches to be smoothed out, are left until they become major problems to be unravelled. She thrives on the fact that we all like a peaceful life and will keep putting off saying that most difficult word: "No".

Then there’s cousin Lazy Daisy whose favourite posture in life is stretched on the couch with a box of chocolates at the elbow and a remote control in hand.

Hours and days can drift past unnoticed until you suddenly realise that you’ve run out of customers, or the deadline's tomorrow, or the competiton’s sprinted past.

If you can keep her from stealing more than a few minutes or hours at a time, you're doing well. I know people who have let her have weeks, years - their whole lives, even.

Finally let's not forget that master contortionist, Indy Sision. Boy can he gum up the works! He's the one who keeps whispering in your ear, "Yes that looks right - but what if you’re wrong? Hadn't you better wait ‘til you're sure?"

Or "If I did this I'd get six of one, but if I did that I'd get half a dozen of the other - I can't decide." Or the real clincher - "If I leave it another week something will happen to make the decision easier."

Sure - someone else walks off with the account or the girl or the bargain or whatever it was you were indecisive about. And then isn't it amazing how clearly you can see what you should have done? Crystal clear, you were just in time to be too late.

So how do you deal with this tribe of monkeys on your back? The only way is eternal vigilance. Let your guard down and they grab the controls.

With a daily to-do list you can keep track of your activities - but make sure everything is on the list, in priority.

Though of course our friend Prue can turn writing a to-do list into an art form. So keep checking. Right now are you doing what is most productive with your life? (Of course at the moment you're reading this newspaper which I can assure you is a most virtuous, highly productive activity.)

ray@ebeatty.com

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

China Dictates Entertainment

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday November 11, 2011

There are certain advantages to dictatorship. Take China, where authorities have instructed TV stations to sharply cut back on shows that are "overly entertaining and of low taste," according to a spokesman with China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television last week.

When we look at the hit list and see dating shows, talent contests, talk shows and reality shows, we have to register some sympathy. There are a couple of quiz and reality shows here which would not be missed if dropped into the China Sea.

The statement said, “A number of entertainment programs are simple reproductions of other popular shows and some have tried to attract audiences through vulgar content such as gossip and exposure of privacy”. Well that does sound familiar.

I’ve found that many Australians still don’t understand how big and modern China is. Did you know the country has 34 satellite channels at the centre of a vast media network? The stations will be limited to broadcasting two “entertaining” programs each week, with a maximum of 90 minutes every day between 7:30 pm and 10:00 pm.

But one part of the statement spells problems for advertisers: "All broadcasting, TV and relevant organizations are not allowed to conduct ratings rankings.” So how do you evaluate a program without ratings?

Well for a start, commercials will increase in cost as marketers chase a smaller number of popular shows.

Just this week the bids were in for advertising on China Central Television, the country’s national broadcaster. The system is, you bid for ad spots for the coming 2012 year. In recent times, the prices have increased by double digit percentages each year. Last year advertisers pledged nearly two billion dollars.

The audiences are big, and so are the rates. A thirty second spot on a good show can cost $60,000. Come to think of it, on a per capita basis, that could be a lot cheaper than Australia.

In the bidding are multi-nationals like KFC and Kraft, and the big media buyers like Starcom MediaVest Group and Aegis Media’s Carat.

London-based Aegis is one of the world’s biggest media agencies, turning over $1.5 billion a year. Just last year Australia’s Harold Mitchell merged his Mitchell media group into the organisation making him their second-biggest shareholder and a member of the international board.

These days business success is so much harder if you don’t have solid ties to China, so all the big advertising agencies are there and many are flourishing.

The analysts do see some positives come out of the new regulations. For one thing, the stations may be forced to produce more quality programming rather than endless copies of copies of overseas shows.

The directive specifies scripted programmes, concerts, events and quiz shows that rely on knowledge rather than pure luck.

Of course in China the political cadres are never far away. A Chinese ‘Idol’ type of show was enormously popular with the singers attracting audiences of 400 million, when all of a sudden the plug was pulled and the mikes went dead.

It was found to be too entertaining, though speculation said the real reason was that the popular voting for winners was a bit too close to democracy for the Party’s liking.

There are difficult choices for Chinese authorities, if people watched less TV they might do more blogging or tweeting - much harder to control.

As an example of popular tastes, a year ago a Japanese porn star called Sora Aoi went to Shanghai and opened her microblogging account. Within a day she had 220,000 followers and now she is a celebrated personality - a sort of Kim Kardashian of the Middle Kingdom.

Is that what the authorities envisaged?

ray@ebeatty.com

Remember the Eskimos, Arabs and Australians?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday, November 4, 2011

Long ago the three jokes in marketing were: selling ice cream to Eskimos; selling sand to Saudi Arabia; and selling water in bottles.

Well Eskimo ice cream really does exist. Mind you it’s made from fish, reindeer fat, berries and seal oil so it must be an acquired taste.

Perth’s GMA Garnet really does sell sand to Saudi Arabia. It’s a special alluvial sand used in sand blasting, but that’s still a great sales tale.

As for water in bottles - well we’re all drinking it now aren’t we? And who would have thought it a few years back?

As a kid on European holidays I drank bottled water - because, they told me, the local water was not suitable for drinking: “aqua non potabile” said all the taps on Italian trains.

But back home everybody praised the purity and taste of our water. Here in Melbourne the Board of Works boasted the finest water in the world straight out of our taps.

So what has changed to turn bottled water into a $500 million industry, and discarded plastic containers into an ecological problem?

The main driver has been health consciousness. We need to drink more water, say the health and beauty articles. We should drink less sugar water, the plain is best. It’s the slimmest drink there is.

Add to this our changing climate. As the planet gets hotter and our summers seem to get ever longer, our drink consumption soars. The growth of the gym and running movement contributes. Did you see how many water bottles get drunk and discarded during a marathon or bicycle tour?

The past two decades have also seen some very sophisticated advertising to put a gloss on a very plain product. It is the perfect example of how to transfer personality to a product that has absolutely zero to start with.

The French do it beautifully as you’d expect. The Perrier commercial that showed water surging up from the bowels of the earth; more recently a girl walking through a summer day so hot that the cars are melting in the street.

Evian have created commercials that get remembered after just one viewing - in fact their “Roller Babies” are a top pick on YouTube. Locally Mt Franklin has featured children playing in water, while Hepburn Spa paints a historic picture of Captain Hepburn.

All very little to do with the reality of huge production lines filling millions of plastic bottles, often with filtered tap water.

There’s an illogical side too. The hatred for the plastic bottles - so much so that the town of Bundanoon in NSW has banned all bottled water. So has the University of Canberra and just recently the Victorian College of the Arts. No doubt more will follow, with the first school - Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney - showing the way.

I’m afraid the logic of a bottle of water being sinful while a bottle of Coke is not, escapes me. The difference is a spoonful of sugar. But you see no protests against Mother or Red Bull, with much less savoury reputations.

The industry is taking this seriously. Just last month Coca Cola Amatil loudly announced that it is moving Mt Franklin water into new, eco-friendly bottles that use 35% less plastic and won the environmental award from the Australian Packaging Covenant. This is a joint body between governments and industry to reduce and recycle packaging in products.

Of course there is nothing to stop people from bringing along their own bottles and filling them from the tap. But for the fashion conscious this is as appealing as fish-flavoured ice cream.

ray@ebeatty.com

For marketing the future’s on the wall

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday October 28, 2011

The new world of marketing is on the wall. The subway wall.

We are being hit by profound changes and five years from now your business will have to have adapted or face extinction. You’re in a fight for the survival of the fittest.

I don’t have to tell you how rapidly business, media and leisure are changing. It’s as if every day we discover something new we didn’t know existed, and have to change our behaviour.

From booking tickets for the movies to buying a book, from visiting the bank to checking the encyclopaedia, from filling a government form to applying for a job. We do things differently now, and the changes will come faster.

The accelerator will be the National Broadband Network.

Now that it is getting over its stuttering start, we will see it spread like oil on a pond. Already the navvies with their orange jackets and blue cables are appearing on corners in every state.

Let me give you an example of what could happen.

Two months ago in Seoul, South Korea, commuters discovered that the walls of one of the busiest subway stations had been covered with illuminated pictures of shopping shelves. Row after row of cereal boxes and detergents and soup packets, just like in a real supermarket.

Above the displays were the instructions. Use the application on your smart phone (if you haven’t got it, call this number and it will be instantly inserted). With the phone’s camera, take a photo of the QR code on whatever product you want.

Oh that’s a Quick Response code. The funny square dots that keep appearing on products and newspapers and look like a bar code on steroids. Which is precisely what they are.

They link your smartphone into the web and exchange information. One snap and you have just bought that item.

Walk the length of the wall and its pillars with shopping list in one hand and phone in the other, clicking off the week’s groceries. By the time the train gets you home, the order is already with the supermarket, being picked and packed for delivery.

The Koreans have the world’s fastest and biggest national broadband network, are the biggest consumers of smartphones, the highest users of QR codes. So they are leading the world in this new technology. Have no doubt about it, we will be following the same road.

Just this week our sister newspaper The Australian questioned 15 of the country’s leading advertising buyers about the opportunities that will come from the NBN. All agreed that they will be considerable.

They counted off internet television and movies, online e-commerce like Korea’s, better information delivery and feedback, greater connectivity with country areas.

“There’s a million opportunities,” said Aegis Media chairman Harold Mitchell.

“Speed will accelerate changes in retail behaviour...and open the door for new models,” says Mindshare Australia’s James Greet.

“Any brands enabled...to build deeper relationships through content and genuine dialogue will win,” adds OMD’s Peter Horgan.

And MEC’s Peter Fogel concluded: “The brands that will win are those able to attract and engage consumers more often and for longer periods of time”.

In other words, your relationship with your customers will be closer, faster, more intimate. You will know them better - but in turn they will know you better.

This is an opportunity to develop a real dialogue with your customers, like speaking to each of them face to face in your office or shop. The combination of fast broadband and smartphones gives you that interaction any time, any place.

What a brave new world we are stepping into. How ready are you to cope with it?

ray@ebeatty.com

Don’t trifle with the male shopper

Melbourne Herald Sun, October 21, 2011

The advertising brief was simple - write a TV commercial launching new Foster Clark’s Instant Trifle, and show how easily a trifle could be made thanks to fast-setting custard and jelly.

My idea was, “it’s so easy that even dad and the kids can make it”. So I wrote a script where mum is out on Saturday morning and the family decide to give her a treat - make the dessert themselves. Quick cuts show ingredients prepared, end with look of delight on mum’s face when she arrives to a lovely trifle and beaming hubby and kids.

Nothing offensive or contentious? So I thought until the storyboard went in for consumer testing. It came out shredded.

Mums regarded the kitchen as their territory and did not want the family in there without them. The response was, “they’d only make a mess and I’d have to clean up after them” or “there’s no way my husband would do any cooking himself” - the script was spiked and we went back to pretty pictures of tempting desserts.

Now this all happened some 30 years ago. How the world has changed since the 80s. But just how different is it really?

One thing research can measure is the gender of grocery buying. We all know, visiting our supermarket, that there are more men pushing trolleys than in the past, The amount of food in the basket shows there is a family to feed.

To get figures, I asked Geoffrey Smith, Industry Director for Retail at Morgan Research in Sydney. They continually survey Australian trends, questioning 16,000 people a year.

“From 1997 to 2003, the number of male grocery buyers rose from 35% to 40%,” he explained. “But then it flatlined, stayed at 40% right up to 2011. And we don’t know why, really.” Obviously men have hit their supermarket ceiling.

The change has worked both ways. Women supermarket buyers fell five percent between 67 and 02, and have remained at sixty percent ever since.

Still, four out of ten men is a sizable number - not that you would notice it in TV advertising. In most commercials it’s still mum who pushes the trolley, cleans the toilet, cooks the dinner, as it has always been.

In most of the advertising world, the only time we see a man in a supermarket it is as a bewildered twerp.

Boyfriend is sent to the supermarket to buy one item - but then forgets the brand. However then he sees a girl bending down at the dairy counter, ogles the bareness at the top of her jeans, notices she has a black thong. Aha - Black Swan dips!

In a Keloggs Crunchy Nut commercial a young couple take a romantic balloon ride, but when they urgently need altitude, they jettison all their possessions. The final item is the pack of cereal. Cut to girl enjoying her breakfast, and boyfriend tossed far below.

There’s also a belief that men know nothing about periods. Recently a commercial for Libra showed boyfriend playing with a box of pads, sticking them on his arms and head, pretending to be a robot - till girlfriend and her parents walk through the door.

Now presumably such an expensive ad by a major company would have been solidly market researched before being made. Which leaves me scratching my head - what exactly do our Gen X and Y girls think about the men in their lives, and their own menstruation, that it can be such a joke? To understand I’d have to be much younger - and female.

However marketers had better start understanding that the nowadays the market is both male and female - almost equally.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Goodbye Steve, and thanks

Melbourne Herald Sun, October 14, 2011

A million words have been written and spoken since last week’s death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. But how could I not acknowledge the passing of this column’s idol, the greatest Marketeer of all?

More specifically, let’s take a look at what Jobs can teach you about your business. What did he get so right, so consistently?

Back when he started as a 21 year old in his family garage, he had marketing in mind.

Looking at the interest of geeky hobbyists for self-constructed kit computers, he could see a market for a real personal computer. He did the marketing, and brought his friend Steve Wozniak - a real electronic hacker - into a partnership to do the designing and programming. They built the Apple II.

Always Jobs insisted on simplicity of use. And a great deal of the Apple II’s success was achieved by tramping into the schools of America, and later the world, promoting it as an ideal educational tool. The kids could quickly get up and running without having to learn programming first.

There was another advantage to this marketing strategy: get them young and you’ll keep them for ever.

Then came the Macintosh, the computer that transformed how we all communicate. From Xerox he took the GUI graphic interface, from Stanford Research Institute, the mouse. All aimed at making computers simple, tactile to use, hiding the immense complexity within.

The fresh marketing drive aimed at the visual industry. Designers, advertising agencies, newspapers, architects - who also happened to be the opinion leaders in what is new and trendy.

Then came his decade in the wilderness. He could never see why everybody was not like him - driven, perfectionist, creative, demanding - which made him a terrible boss. In 1985 the board, made up of more conventional, button-down men, voted to effectively push him out.

Undaunted he formed a new computer company, NeXT. By 1997 Apple realised that they needed their dictator and bought NeXT. Jobs was back in the saddle.

Now began the greatest marketing tour de force we’ve ever seen. First came the iMac. Who would ever want a strange, coloured, transparent computer? Answer: everyone.

Jobs knew that marketing is about creating desire. He didn’t just get an engineer to design his products, he made the brilliant English artist Jonathan Ive his Senior Vice President of Industrial Design.

Ive conceived the off-the-planet iMac, and then the MacBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad. In other words, everything that makes an Apple an Apple.

Jobs understood image. Look at his advertising. An Apple commercial is unmistakably Apple. Smart, slick, clean, just like the products.

To market his iPods, Jobs created iTunes and before long became the kingpin of the music industry.

For the iPhone he created the Apps market - where other people did all the work.

His showmanship was legendary. All the secrecy behind new Apple products, right up to the moment when Jobs would stride onto a stage and unveil the new invention like a rabbit from a hat.

Also dazzling was his ability to generate waves of publicity for his products. Think of all the hype over the iPad. Five years before, Bill Gates had introduced his tablet computer as “the next great thing in computing.” He was right, but smart as he is, he just did not have the chutzpah that Jobs could bring to launching the product.

What were Jobs’ secrets? Brilliant concepts. Willingness to pay for the very best people and designers. A sense of timing. Persistence. And the one thing you may find difficult to learn: sheer genius.

Goodbye Steve, thanks for all the music.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Bad rep? Call Web Dusters!

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday October 7,2011

What do you do when you’re browsing through Google, checking yourself out as you like to do every now and then, and you discover that someone has written something about you, or your company, that is untrue. Or even worse, that is true but you didn’t want anyone to know?

What do you do? You call Web Dusters!

Well that’s my name for them. They call themselves “Reputation Defenders” or “Online Reputation Managers”. These are companies you hire, either per task or on retainer, who look out for nasties in the woodpile.

It can be a pretty big woodpile, too. It’s not unusual for a medium-sized company to come up with a few million references when they’re searched for on Google or Bing.

The Web Dusters vacuum their way through this and winkle out unappealing references.

Of course this is a labour of Sisyphus - the bloke who spends eternity pushing a boulder uphill every day, only for it to roll down every night. It’s a job without end.

The dusting reaches far and wide. Wikipedia is a huge reference where a person or company can be misunderstood. It’s nice to be in an encyclopaedia, but not if the reference points out wrongful or unflattering events.

Even worse, Wikileaks waits for any secret tit-bit to slip into its grasp. And we all know what a hard time that has given the world’s governments.

Two years ago a YouTube video showed two Domino’s Pizza employees doing gross things to their pizzas in the back room. It was a sensation viewed around the globe and the couple was actually prosecuted. But not before it had done millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the company’s sales.

Reputation Manager Australia is a local company that offers its watchdog services. They give the example of a web search on a businessman who quickly became their client.

The search of his name had brought up, in the first three responses, a reference to an ASIC investigation report. It was harsh and recounted the agency’s prosecution of him, leading to his being banned for a time.

Owner David Cannell boasts that he was able to push the client’s reference down the queue to oblivion.

Another rich vein of business is our sporting world. Working with sports clubs, he has ways to keep their champions’ antics out of the public eye.

Of course there is also a do-it-yourself element in the black-blogging trade. Company staff are encouraged to write glowing reviews about their restaurant or hotel - incognito of course. And then they go on their opponents’ sites and complain about bad food and poor service.

These too can be dusted out.

But you have to be careful not to get caught. Recently the PR goliath Burson-Marsteller was sprung when they were asked by client Facebook to do a little internet spying on their rival Google. Unfortunately whoever was given the task asked the wrong person. He turned out to be a whistle-blower who blasted the story across the web.

Mind you, considering that the US online advertising market is now worth $28 billion, you can understand a little frisky competition.

There is now official interest in all this skullduggery. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission prosecuted a PR company, Reverb Communications. They had a side business writing glowing reviews on video games, and charging the developer for the service.

The FTC slapped the company on the hand and warned everybody else not to post fraudulent reviews, either for themselves or for their opponents. No doubt the industry looked up from their monitors, nodded acknowledgement, and went back to writing reviews.

Call out the Web Dusters!

ray@ebeatty.com

Cash bells ring for the marriage market

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 30, 2011


If your business has been running a bit slow in its profits or growth, maybe you ought to look at marriage.

No, I cast no aspersions on your current relationship - rather, the money to be made out of splicing the knot.

Marriage seems to be one of the armour-plated, recession-proof products in this world and believe it or not, Australians are marrying more than ever - with ever-increasing cost.

This year 119,000 Australian couples will tread the aisle, a percentage point up from last year. Historically the marriage rate has been steadily falling, so any increase is a surprise.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics records the current annual marriage rate at 5.5 per thousand population. In the seventies it was close to eight. The record was set in 1942 when it hit 12. Mind you they had good reason to be in a hurry.

Today’s couples are much older than in the past. The median age is now 32 for men and 29 for women, whereas in the seventies they married five or six years earlier.

Is this the sign of new wisdom and maturity? Certainly they have had time to develop careers, their incomes and savings. So when it comes to the wedding, they splurge.

Researchers have placed the average cost of a wedding at $36,000. And much of the money seems to come from the savings of the couple. Manager of the research group IBISWorld, Karen Dobie, pointed to couples regarding the wedding as “A high priority expense”.

Couples save for a long time, tightening their belts to raise the bank balance, and no doubt doing their waistlines no harm either.

Each Saturday as you pass your local church, think about the cost of those gowns and flashy cars. This is a $4.3 billion industry.

The biggest winners are the hotels and reception palaces that rake in $1.4 billion of the takings. And that does not include the food which brings in another $670 million. Flowers also generate a hefty $760 million. All these categories are expected to grow by more than 10 per cent in the coming five years.

Photography and film production is the only category not doing so well. No doubt it’s because of so many friends and uncles offering to film the event with their newly-acquired expensive equipment. Mind you, seeing some of the results of these efforts makes me think that the prudent couples will double-up by hiring a professional too.

Of course, who could forget the wedding dress. Now you don’t have to buy the world’s most expensive - that record is currently held by Renee Strauss who created a dress with 150 carats of diamonds, valued at $12 million.

But possibly if you are the father of the bride, you may feel that hers is not so far behind. Especially when you throw in the bridesmaids’ custom-designed frocks and the groomsmen’s Armani dinner suits. At the end of the year you are looking at close to a billion dollars spent on clothes.

Progress is effecting printers too, as more invitations are done by email, with DVDs replacing the mountains of photo sets sent to the guests.

However there is another ray of light in this story, for the wedding industry. Around the world a whole new gold rush is evolving. From Argentina to Sweden, from Canada to South Africa, the phenomenon of same sex marriage is spreading.

And when gay couples pledge their troths, you’ll usually find a high-income couple, older and wealthier, surrounded by friends who insist that this must be the best bash since Princess Di.

Ah, there’s a whole industry here waiting with bated breath for our legislators to get in on the act and give gay marriage a go.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Fred Schepisi and the art of storming through

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 23, 2011

Last weekend we saw a wonderful movie, The Eye of the Storm, Fred Schepisi’s interpretation of Patrick White’s novel starring Charlotte Rampling and Geoffrey Rush. And it set me off thinking about advertising creativity.

I remembered, as a junior writer in one of the big agencies, when Fred learned the film business through making TV commercials.

In the agency we would meticulously hone the script, each word and visual hammered out between the creatives and the clients, till we had a script - dry and typical of a committee effort.

Fred would be called in, as the hottest young director in the country, and be drilled about the requirements word for word.

Then he would disappear. No thanks, he didn’t want the agency or the client at the shoot or edit. The first thing we saw was the rough cut, when the commercial was 95 per cent made.

Client and agency would gather in the darkened boardroom to view. Surprise - the film seemed to have little connection to our careful script. The voice-over had been cut from fifty words to five. He at least allowed us to see a pack shot at the end.

Anyone from client or agency who objected was met by a torrent of expletives from the director, who then asked: “Is this better than you wanted?” And we all had to agree, it was brilliant. He had captured the real meaning of what we wanted to say and delivered a powerful message for the product.

He was quite unreasonable in ignoring agency protocols. But as I quoted in last week’s column, “All progress depends on unreasonable people”.

One of the greatest ad men of recent times, Britain’s David Abbott, built his agency AMV-BBDO through outstanding creative work. He showed how to turn the slowness of Guiness pouring into a virtue, and even made a supermarket classy through his Sainsbury’s ads (alas a feat that has never been emulated here).

In the process he made his millions, but refused to compromise. As he recently said in an interview with American adman Rance Crain, “Most of the talk in the advertising business is about clients picking agencies. I think it's just as important for agencies to pick clients."

He wanted clients who respected and listened to him. "Every client we picked and agreed to work with - it was not only that we wanted their money, but we wanted their company as well. We chose people we liked, for whom advertising seemed to be an important, upfront part of their business."

This was the philosophy that made The Campaign Palace a success, first in Melbourne and then also in Sydney. Founders Lionel Hunt and Gordon Trembath made a reputation for not compromising on the creativity. So they needed clients who would trust them.

The ads they made were risky. “Some day you’re gonna get caught with your pants down” showed Dunlop’s Pacific Brands that saucy ads could attract the public’s attention far greater than the media spend available.

The ads that followed like “I’m wearing No Nickers” and “Antz Pantz (sic ‘em Rex!)” proved the point.

In the early years clients like Just Jeans and P&O (“Heron Island - Just a drop in the ocean”) were successful because people remembered the ads.

Says Trembath: “If you're clearly presenting memorable uncompromised work that's so obviously going to brand that client a hero, you're going to be loved forever for your uncompromising stance."

However the hard part is getting to that point of trust.

Once you’re as famous as Schepisi or Abbott or Palace, you can persuade the clients that bending to your will is going to make them rich and famous.

But until then the major job to be done is selling yourself.


ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Gutenberg: death of an unreasonable man

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 16, 2011

One of the most important men in modern history died last week and nobody seemed to notice. There were no stop-press headlines around the world, no chance of a burial at Arlington Cemetery, only a whisper around the web and a few newspaper obituaries.

Yet Michael S. Hart has changed the world, education and business forever. He also changed your life and the way you look at, and use, knowledge.

Forty years ago he created Project Gutenberg and in the process invented the ebook. If you don’t know what Project Gutenberg is, you should, so keep reading.

Hart invented it on July 4, 1971, after returning from the fireworks with a hand-out copy of the US Declaration of Independence. He was working with computers at the University of Illinois and typed the document as a computer file which his friends could access and share, on an early academic version of the internet.

Then he had his insane idea. Let’s put every book ever written, in whatever language, onto one huge world database. In honour of the genius who transformed the world through the invention of movable type, he named his project after Johannes Gutenberg.

For more than two decades he did most of the work himself, starting with the likes of the US Bill of Rights, the King James Bible and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Painstakingly copying 20 books a year, by 1987 he had 313 books on the database.

Then help finally came. Through the magic of the rapidly expanding internet, thousands of contributors volunteered. Scanners changed the task from typing word by word, to editing the OCR files.

Today there are more than 36,000 books in 60 languages. They are in the public domain and available free to anyone anywhere. So a Uigur in western China can read the 2010 CIA World Factbook; Austen, Dickens and Joyce are all available, and the current favourite - no surprise - is The Kama Sutra.

There would be a lot more, but the publishing industry has lobbied hard to extend copyright. In 2006, under the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, coverage was increased from 50 years to 70 years.

Hart disagreed: "One thing about ebooks that most people haven't thought much, is that ebooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air.”

His ideas sparked the revolution that is happening continuously, right round us. Think how much you rely on the web for your daily work and information. The collapse of our biggest bookstores, the screws that internet marketing is putting on retailers.

Hart’s concept led to other great inventions. How many times do you use Wikipedia in a week? Jimmy Wales created it only ten years ago but already it has 13 million unique visitors every day. Its breadth and coverage dwarfs the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It has 19 million articles in 270 languages. How many bookshelves would that take?

How we value knowledge has also changed. Gutenberg doesn’t charge for the downloads. If it did, Hart would have become a multi-millionaire like the Gates, Jobs and Dells of the computer revolution. Instead he lived frugally, fixing his own house and car and building computers from second-hand parts.

For 40 years he stayed focussed on his mission: the spread of literature, learning, knowledge to everyone who cared to reach out and pluck it.

He was fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw: "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

Michael S. Hart died as unreasonable as ever, and the world needs more like him.

ray@ebeatty.com

Do you side with the yeas or the nays?

Melbourne Herald Sun, September 9, 2011

In my experience the world divides into two camps: the nay-sayers and the yea-sayers . Which one are you in?

You know a lot of nay-sayers. You may be one, or be married to one, you will certainly work with one somewhere in your life, you’ll immediately know what I mean.

The nay-sayer automatically answers “nay”.
“Let’s go out tonight!”
“No.”
“Do you like my new product idea?”
“No.”
“Give us a kiss.”
“Not tonight.”

With a nay-sayer you have to learn strategy. Never rush them for an answer, never thrust an idea at them, let them come round to it.
“Would you like a chocolate?”
“No.” Then later: “Well maybe just one.”

You learn to telegraph ideas in advance, preferably let them think it was their idea in the first place. Which works fine, but can be very cramping to spontaneity. They don’t get swept off their feet, their hooves are firmly dug into the soil.

On the other side is the yea-sayer, you’ll know many of these too.
“Fancy a movie?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go out to dinner tonight.”
“Ok.”
“What do you think of this product?”
“Let’s put it on the shelf and see if it sells.”
“No-one seems interested in that house.”
“So put in a bid and see if we can get it cheap.”

The yea-sayer will instinctively jump into things feet first. But it also means they can land in hot water or worse, it doesn’t always pay to leap before you look.

I’ve been on the yea side all my life and it has cost me a lot of money. Great ideas that seemed so certain and ended when I ran out of money before the idea actually made any. If you’re in business you’ll have experienced that at some stage. It comes with the territory.

But on the other hand there have been opportunities and successes that would never have happened had I waited and held back till I was sure they were safe. Someone else would have jumped in before I made up my mind.

The smart, successful yea-sayers combine careful attention and judgement with a fearless reaction speed, so when a good idea comes along they can recognise it and grab it fast. Of course it also helps to have a bit of luck.

The nay-sayer is conservative, protective, adverse to risk. In business this is a fine, reliable position to take. But once changes start to happen in the market - the constant change in the public’s likes and dislikes, even whole generational changes - trouble hits.

Look at the loss of our beautiful bookshops. The shops didn’t change, the public did.

Mobile communications, e-books, internet, eBay, iTunes - the whole market changed but Borders would still have been familiar to Mr Pickwick.

Now our retailers are finding that their competition is not just across the street but coming from California or Milan or Bangalore. They can’t sit back and say nay, they have to find new strategies and be willing to try products or sales methods that will severely rumple their comfort zones.

Sometimes the yea-sayer can have wonderful results come out of their willingness to risk.

“I’ve got tickets to a show but I’ve got nobody to go with.”
“Let me fix you up with a blind date.”
Pause. Yea or nay? Risk an evening with someone you won’t like, or take the chance?
“Ok, set it up if you can.”

The last time I made that decision I ended up being married for 20 years, so be warned - the consequences can be very long term.


ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Advertising for free: the Top Ten Virtual Videos

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 2, 2011.

In the advertising business the two most frequent sentences you hear are: “I need a big advertising campaign” followed by, “But we don’t have much money to spend”.

You try to explain that any advertising costs lots of money, but then the client wonders what’s your worth if you can’t fix a little matter like that.

Which is why I’m fascinated by viral advertising. After all if you hit the right buttons, you can win millions of viewers. They do much more than notice your commercial on TV - they have had it recommended, selected the web site, found the ad and then elected to watch it - usually a couple of minutes long.

A Boston company called Visible Data specialises in measuring and recording the top choices in video sites like Youtube and puts out regular hit parades. Now they have published the Top Ten Viral Videos of All Time, together with US trade publication Advertising Age.

So far there are only two ads which have achieved over 100,000,000 views. You have probably been sent the links by your friends already.

Blendtec makes a high powered kitchen blender which its inventor, Tom Dickson, demonstrates by blending - unusual things. These productions, cheaply filmed, are called Will It Blend and the objects have included mobile phones, Nike sneakers, broomsticks, SLR cameras - so far 107 videos with the latest featuring a Justin Bieber doll and CD.

Do they work? To date they have been viewed 170 million times and Dickson claimed: “Will it Blend has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.”

Another one you’ll have seen is the break-dancing babies spot by Evian Water. This was an expensive technical production with its mixture of live babies and digital animation, but the company has received 158 million free peeks.

I’ve already written about Old Spice and their handsome hunk who tells the ladies that while their partner may never look like him, he can smell like him. Now into its third campaign, the ads have generated over 180 million views, not counting the free air time they received on news shows. All three campaigns made the top 10.

Other top views are VW Passat’s The Force at 60,000,000; DC Shoes with nine minutes of manic driving by Ken Block, watched by 60 million petrolheads.

The incredible motion-sensing powers of the Xbox 360 have fascinated 54 million viewers, while a Doritos commercial set in a church funeral was actually made by the Mosaic Church of Los Angeles and scored 47 million.

You can also spend a squillion on your commercial, like the 2004 Pepsi Gladiators - We Will Rock You which starred Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyonce Knowles as the warrior amazons and Enrique Iglesias as the Roman emperor.

That would have had the budget of a small movie, complete with a Colosseum stage set and very skimpy armour for the girls. Seven years later it’s still on the web, having clocked up 53 million hits.

The point is that it’s not the amount of money you spend on the commercial - it’s the cleverness of the idea behind it. What these winners have is wit, originality and charm. So a tabletop with the client using his food processor can be more watchable than a team of magastars on a million-dollar set.

Australians haven’t been left behind in all this. While we currently don’t have the huge successes generated by CUB’s Big Ad five years ago, there is still some local content.

An “investigation” made by two guys and a cameraman, showed how easy it is to get into Sydney clubs, for free, if you look like a DJ. It’s three minutes long and the sponsor Sprite only gets a look-in at the opening and closing titles. But it did clock up a million.

ray@ebeatty.com

Make sure your brand is well backed up

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 26, 2011
We all know brand advocates. Apple has built a billion-dollar industry out of them, those annoying friends who can’t hold back from showing you their latest iPhone app or iPad game that they are convinced are life-sustaining possessions - they’d be dead without them.

Another company built on fanatics is Harley-Davidson. Here I’m not talking about the Hell’s Angels but the city stockbrokers and suburban businessmen who relive their Marlon Brando fantasies, leather jacket and all (even though they now look like the Brando in his later years).

It’s not just boys and toys either. I remember some years ago when the passion for Clinique non-allergenic cosmetics swept the consciousness of our well-heeled eleganzia. I would blink at the prices of my wife’s purchases: “They charge this much because there’s nothing in them?”

The brand advocate can do much of your marketing job for you, at a fraction of the cost of advertising campaigns.

There’s still word of mouth in the coffee room or supermarket aisle, but these days the reach is so much wider. There’s word of twitter and word of Facebook, endless mobile phone conversations, so now there’s no reason why the advocate ever needs to stop talking.

But they have to be given ammunition. This is where you come in. They want to be in the know, to be that step ahead, so they can lord it over their followers.

Clubs and support groups are so much easier these days with web sites and Facebook pages. Those who are true believers will lap up any information you can provide. So the smart marketers will leak just enough information to incite curiosity and excitement.

Once more, look upon the master’s example: Steve Jobs can squeeze out information on his new product drop by drop till his masses are salivating and queuing up at the Apple store.

You probably have less resources than Jobs, but a lot can be achieved through sampling. Give your product to the key advocates and let them try it out and spread the word.

Ah but where do you find these devotees? Well start by following the social sites, put out questionnaires periodically, rummage through the guarantee cards.

Give someone the task of maintaining a positive engagement with these fans. Newsletters, tweets, Facebook entries, shopping centre presentations - they are all time-consuming.

Make the process a two-way street. Listen to their whinges and complaints, and let them know you’re listening. Silence is the greatest killer of relationships.

Software companies are notorious for this. They put out a new release and leave it there for six months or more as the bugs and complaints emerge, unanswered. Then they will release version X.1 with many of the problems fixed - but meanwhile the users have turned elsewhere.

How much easier to say, “We know about your problems in these areas and are working on them, they will be fixed in our new service pack release”.

Which brings up the point: stop selling, rather converse and engage.

Too many companies treat their web sites and Facebook pages like electronic brochures. They should be more involving and allow the customer to feel that there is someone out there listening. Apart from anything else this can be very cheap and efficient market research.

With new products, while it’s important to keep up the excitement and expectations, in the long run you should aim to under promise and over deliver. Cause the other way round can be disastrous.

If your advocate receives their sample and then discovers something more than they expected, you can be sure it will be quickly communicated all down the line.

So treasure your brand advocates, inform and reward them. The returns will be far greater than the cost, they can even be the difference between success and failure for a brand.

ray@ebeatty.com;

The most boring place on earth

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 19, 2011

It’s amazing how different things look from the other side of the world. I’m currently in Italy - hot mid-summer, but even with the holidays Europe is in turmoil.

Every bar has a torrent of news coming off the big LCD screens and it never seems to be good. Politicians scurry from meeting to meeting followed by swarms of camera crews.

The Greeks have been virtually written off and now the serious talk is should they jump or will they need to be pushed.

Italy is not far behind in the economic stakes, their politicians are also dashing from conference to crisis meeting and now it’s started affecting France.

President Obama is caught in a gridlock and even the shock therapy of the AAA downgrade is not enough to move the Tea Party, who New York Times columnists have compared to self-destroying terrorists.

In all this turmoil, in all the 24 hour news broadcasts, there is never a word about Australia. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we don’t even exist.

There are no reports of the Australian Stock Exchange, our dollar is never mentioned, our politicians never get a look in.

And no wonder. We’re so boring, we just don’t rate on their seismic scales. We’re not about to default, our currency and credit rating are not in trouble, we don’t have a deficit that’s bigger than our GDP.

Our cities aren’t being burned down by disaffected youths and while there are always cries that unemployment is too high, ours is half of anyone else’s.

Our politicians are so boring too. Here in Italy with Berlusconi you have a string of corruption allegations, sex and scandal. But back in Australia I don’t think we could picture a bunga bunga party in the Lodge. Let’s pause that a minute... No, can’t picture it.

Where Republicans, Democrats and President are tearing each other apart in Washington and the knives are being sharpened in the Roman forum, all we have to look forward to is whether the PM or Tony Abbott will score more points in today’s schoolyard debating scraps.

History seems determined to keep us out of the news. I’ve been working on the report of a recent conference called Future Fuels for Australia, at the University of Queensland. Delegates pointed out that with the world already at “peak oil”, there is a frantic search for alternatives.

Biofuels are already here and growing, literally, as ethanol.

Liquid fuels will have to be extracted from coal – and guess who has some of the world’s greatest coal deposits? The Northern Territory has vast shale gas fields which will give up enough gas, to be turned into liquid, for a couple of centuries.

When you see Europeans paying two dollars a litre for petrol, it’s obvious that new technology is going to come galloping in.

We finally have a Carbon Tax coming, to finance development. It will even put money on the table to finance solar, wind and thermal projects. Though we have enough heat and wind already: turn on the nightly news.

Then there is the whole world’s most unsolvable problem: immigration.

Now I don’t want to get religious here but God gave us a dirty great moat which acts as an effective filter. Some Italian friends asked how bad was our illegal migrant problem? Gravely I replied “6000 last year”, with which they burst out laughing. “We’ve had that many in a day!”

On the other side of the world, it’s very difficult to impress the natives when you come from the most boring land on earth.


ray@ebeatty.com

The day Deep Throat called to open up

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 12, 2011.


“Good morning, Washington Post”
“Bob Woodward please”
“Sorry he’s out, can I take a message?”
“It’s private, I can only talk to him, what’s his mobile?”
“Sorry we don’t give out mobile numbers.”
“His email then?”
“Nor email. What is your name?”
“Tell him Deep Throat called, but not to worry, I’ll call the New York Times.”

All right, so they didn’t have mobiles or email in the days of Watergate, but you can still see this scenario happening in today’s offices. Maybe there is an important, life-changing call looking for you, that can’t get past the gate keepers.

I had this argument the other day, with a young reporter who does not allow the switchboard to give out his mobile number.

“So what sort of journalist does that make you?” I snapped. “Journalists always have to have their antennas out, listen to everyone, know what’s going on. If you close off your lines of communication you’re a fool.”

But I’ll say this applies to my readers too. My first advice is, even when you get a job with a corporation that issues you with a phone and email address - don’t give up your own private ones.

As much as possible, when you deal with customers and suppliers, give them your personal details to put in their address books.

The fact is, the average time most people will hold a job is less than three years. But I’m sure you expect your working lifetime to be much longer than that.

These days the phone and email are your identity. They are who you are, where people call you, how they can find you.

How often have you dealt regularly - every few months, say - with a company representative, and one day when you phone, they have gone.

Now this rep had grown to understand your business, you liked them and got on well together, you knew they could be trusted to charge you fairly. But the phone is cut off, the email bounces, to all intents and purposes they have disappeared off the planet. When you ask the switchboard, mysteriously nobody knows where they went.

This is when you wish you had their private contact details. Of course companies are well aware of this and they are very happy to bury their ex under a load of concrete.

They actively discourage personal contacts, so when you are passing on your true identity, you’ll have to be discreet and not let the boss notice.

What, you’re worried that your number will be passed to some huge Bangalore call centre? Certainly the world is full of spammers and nuisance callers. But they will rarely be the people you gave your number to. My ISP has an efficient spam-catcher and there is one in my Norton anti-virus so between them they weed out most of the Russian brides and Viagra sellers.

There will always be a number that sneak through, but it’s an easy enough task when you download your email to winkle them out at the start. Better to put up with that little bit of nuisance than to risk missing out on the one caller or message that could make all the difference to your career.

Oh and to put my money where my mouth is: my phone number is 0409 174 565 and my email is ray@ebeatty.com. Call me.

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Rebranding jihads or banks

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 29, 2011

Whether you’re marketing jihads or mortgages, so much depends on getting the name right.

Take Osama bin Laden. Towards the end he was struggling to come to terms with modern marketing. Like many a corporate CEO he had to weigh up the value of his brand, suffering as it was from the loss of key management people, decline in market-share, and too long between headline-grabbing atrocities.

As has been discovered from the computer-loads of documents and emails brought out of his Abbottabad lair, he was seriously thinking about re-branding and re-naming his franchise.

He was concerned that they were getting bad PR from killing too many Muslims rather than infidels, and the name al-Qaeda was losing its political and religious significance to the punters.

Even more concerning, his market was being attracted away by the exciting new people power revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Lybia. He had become old-hat and came to the conclusion that they needed a makeover.

My Arabic being non-existent I could give little assistance to the re-naming think tank. But I can certainly point to the importance of getting the name right.

Here in Australia we’ve just seen a classic example of how the wrong turn can lead you up a dead end.

In 1997 Westpac bought Bank of Melbourne at the time when all the little banks were being swallowed up. Seven years later, in a fit of corporate uniformity, then chief David Morgan dumped the Melbourne name and painted the whole show red.

Too many customers responded by going elsewhere, and Westpac never achieved that “Melbourneness” that it desired.

So now the rebranding is on again under another the new boss, Scott Tanner. This time all the St George branches in Victoria will become Bank of Melbourne. The process has already started, as you’ll notice next time you saunter down the high street.

The plan has been costed at $578 million. It’s a lot of money to take you back to where you started from.

But they have made lots of promises which Melburnians will watch with a skeptical eye. Within the next five years they will add 100 new branches, and 300 ATMs, they say.

There is also talk of their opening on Saturdays again, as the old BoM did in the past. Already they have set daily times at 9:30-5.00, five days a week.

Changing the brand and the corporate colours is never cheap and not always effective. In 1995 another new boss, Frank Blount, stamped his branding on his company, renaming Telecom Australia to Telstra.

Once again it was a mightily expensive exercise, millions of dollars. Just imagine replacing all the phone boxes for a start!

However he found himself in a hide-bound structure going back to the PMG’s Department and he needed the huge workforce to look at itself differently, and be willing to change. Maybe a change of name would make the old rose smell sweeter.

The Telecom empire was run by divisional war-lords who only towed the line if it pointed the way they wanted to go. The new image helped Blount to fight his new-broom skirmishes.

Much has changed in the past 16 years, not all to the good. But there is no denying that the modern Telstra has no resemblance to the old model of the past. There are benefits, there are losses, but looking back they seem to have been inevitable.

Such is the gamble you take with these huge organisations. Reality is, much of what goes on within the walls is outside senior management’s knowledge or control. So they fall back on a lick of paint and extended opening hours to show the public that something has really changed.

Let’s hope that Westpac’s changes work out - and that al-Qaeda’s don’t.


ray@ebeatty.com

Carramba! Does Spain have the answer to our rag trade pain?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 22, 2011

A winter weekday in Bourke Street can be deathly quiet as shop assistants lean on the counters of fabulous department stores hoping for business. No wonder their managements are bewailing the drop in retail sales this past half year.

But wait a minute. One store is bustling with customers. Young and old, women and men, dart in, check out the racks, pick an item, try it and buy it. The card swipers hum with warmth as the transactions flow through.

Can it be? Ah yes. It’s Zara. The newly-opened store that proved from its first day that there’s nothing wrong with Australian retail that good products and marketing can’t fix.

Zara is smart marketing, nothing more. The designs are fresh, current - but not over the top. The manufacturing is good quality, both fabrics and finish, but nothing exotic.

The prices are: “Hmm I like this - and I can just afford it”. Not Swanston Street bargain basement, but not Collins Street boutique either. They fit comfortably within the paypacket’s disposable income segment.

Since he started in 1975, Amancio Ortega knew his customers intimately. He understood what they wanted, how much to charge, their desire for freshness and innovation - without theatrics. He now provides this to 5157 stores in 81 countries. And that’s not counting online.

But you don’t get the feeling that your item is off the production line. Zara make their garments in fairly small batches, for example 30,000 jackets with blazer buttons. By the time they have been divided between 5000 stores worldwide, you’re pretty safe to think that you won’t run into another one at tomorrow’s event.

Styles are changed quickly. Customers learn that if they don’t buy it now it won’t be there next week. This creates a “grab it while you have the chance” spirit in the store.

Staff are encouraged to report requests. There is a system that passes the information to their huge design section at company headquarters in Arteixo, north-west Spain.

Sometimes the choices find their own fame, like the $75 blue dress recently donned by Dutchess Kate and instantly flashed around the world. In fact Ms Middleton is very much the typical customer Zara are targeting. Or was, until a couple of months ago.

So what is it about our Spanish newcomer that causes other retailers so much grief? It’s certainly not million-dollar advertising campaigns. Most of what they have achieved in the past few months in Sydney and now Melbourne has worked through word of mouth. Which was enough to have crowds on the pavements waiting for the first opening day.

It’s not innovative design - a big world-wide complaint has been that they cherry-pick the best ideas of other designers and quickly created their own versions.

But speed is important. They can spot a trend and hit it quickly. What would take other designers half a year, they get done in two months. Draw up a design, find the fabric, cut, sew, and put it out into the supply chain to stores all over the world.

And having done it once, they discard the design and start working on the next one.

This store has pinpointed the modern soul. They have understood that these are the days of instant gratification via the web. Instant communication through twitter, “How do you like my new dress?” on Facebook with photo taken minutes before with the mobile phone.

Today’s consumer is fed a continuous tide of entertainment, concepts and visuals through phones, freeview, cable and internet. Fashions change with the blink of an eye.

Businesses, too, have to learn a new speed and nimbleness in what they provide and how they respond. Maybe Zara is telling us that the prep-a-porter fashion showings six months ahead of the season just aren’t on any more. There’s a whole new product cycle coming through.

Certainly if you are looking for an example of who’s doing it right, you’d better go loiter in the Zara store for an hour.

ray@ebeatty.com

Here come the winners in the carbon tax debate

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 15, 2011

The winners have already started emerging from the carbon tax debate - and as usual, it’s the advertising agencies.

The slush funds are stirring on both sides. The Say Yes coalition already made a stir recently with their commercials featuring two of our favourite actors, Cate Blanchett (right) and Michael Caton.

Ironically they were attacked as being too rich to understand the pain we would feel. Now of course they will also suffer the pain of being too rich to attract any compensation.

The Government also has its own $12 million carbon tax campaign in production, soon to launch. Up against it is a coalition of miners and manufacturers. The Australian Trade and Industry Alliance brings together the likes of the Minerals Council of Australia and the Australian Coal Association - who have already spent $10 million to date.

Of course we already know that none of this is going to make any difference. The carbon tax is here to stay even if the opposition win the next election. On victory night Tony Abbot would announce that “Finally this cruel carbon tax is gone and dusted.” And then a week later he’ll be announcing “Australia’s exciting new carbon trading scheme...” or whatever name the spinners will invent for it.

The point being that we have to do something, to be seen to strive against the calamity coming at us, even though the reality is that we have very little real control.

Our planet is getting hotter, and there’s little we can do. Cutting emissions to 2000 levels is not a big deal - there was a hell of a lot of carbon emitted in 2000, and for that matter 1980. And I’m sure you’ve heard of London’s pea-souper smogs in the century up to 1960 - so we’re probably already too late.

However, putting a price on carbon and cutting emissions will make us feel better and we can pretend we actually have some say in the process. But unless there is some truly revolutionary technology devised in the next few years that can spectacularly slash our emissions, we’ll just be tinkering around the edges.

Interestingly, already this week we are seeing attitudes change. Geothermal companies like South Australia’s Petratherm that aims to generate electricity from volcanic rocks, or Victoria’s Greenearth Energy that promises to turn carbon dioxide into fuel, have instantly seen their share price lift its head. All this promise of a new major industry just around the corner is not mere fantasy.

Shakespeare talks of “a tide in the affairs of men” that sweeps all before it. So it is with our politicians and their pretences.

The fact is that the tow-current of world events is far far stronger than any feeble government we can elect.

The United States is going to be swamped by the tide of unbelievable debt and its blind inability to create an equitable society, as the greedy keep getting greedier. Europe is at a loss with its newest Greek tragedy and, yet again, the unwillingness to bite that bitter lead bullet.

The Chinese and Indians have taken their feet off the brakes on their downhill racers, and are hoping that whatever is at the bottom, the landing will be soft.

Here, our politicians strut the bridge of the ship of state, barking out orders, consulting their sextants, and pretending to steer.

Whereas the reality is that they are being dragged along behind, by national and global movements - economics, history, nature, the tides of events - that they have no control over whatsoever.

But there’s no point in you and I worrying ourselves silly - it were ever thus and always will be. Let’s enjoy the sparring matches, and carry on with business as usual.

ray@ebeatty.com

Put the lycra on, it’s time to Tour

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 8, 2011

It’s that time of year when winter blusters us here, yet the sun shines brightly over Burgundy and the Pyrenees. And we shivering south-landers huddle at midnight around our TV sets watching a couple of hundred madmen push their bodies through some of the cruelest torture ever devised.

Yes it’s the Tour de France again. That strange hypnotic sport that can root you in your armchair for hours watching massive thighs pumping men up mountains with the camber of a skyscraper and then flying down the other side on twisting ribbons perched on a precipice.

The years that SBS has been programming this race have paid off with an annual ratings-grabber. Much more - it has definitely inspired us, with two million Australians now riding regularly. And bicycle shops have changed from dark oily side-street workshops into smart, trendy, high-street showrooms.

In the past six years the number of cyclists on our roads has increased by 15.5 per cent, reports IBISWorld research group.

But it’s more than the French inspiration that has done this. In all our cities there has been a rapid growth of cycling paths and traffic lanes. These have transformed our summer weekend mornings as daddy drake, mummy duck and line of ducklings pedal around the beaches and parks.

Things are different this time of year, though. Getting to the office on a dark wintry morning still calls for more courage than I could ever summons, but there are plenty who do it, wrapped in plastic, carrying their suit and shoes in a backpack.

They are encouraged by the constantly rising cost of fuel and cars, not to mention the ability to thread their way effortlessly through the choking traffic jams. They can even claim improvements in health and fitness - if the traffic doesn’t get them first.

This is a problem pointed out by the Queensland Centre for Accident Research. Each year some 35 cyclists are killed and 2500 seriously injured, especially those idiots who set off without lights.

The bike industry now tells a story I seem to have been repeating regularly in this column. Revenue has been down in recent years, particularly after the body blow of the global financial crisis, but is has begun to bounce right up again.

The industry is worth some $2.6 billion and this year is expected to sell 1.2 million cycles. If the figures seem a bit at odds with your perceptions, remember that there is a high end where bikes are sold for thousands of dollars each. All that carbon fibre and rare alloys.

So it’s not unusual to pay thousands for a good bicycle, as opposed to the $500 job you picked up at K-Mart last Christmas.

In fact there are more cycles sold in Australia than motor vehicles. A million cars expected in 2011 as opposed to those 1.2 million bikes.

Plus of course, what sort of a cyclist would you be without a wrapping of garish brightly-printed lycra covering you from duck-bum shaped helmet on top, to impossible-to-walk-on locking shoes at the bottom?

These cycling costumes may be all-over outdoor billboards in their advertising messages, but nobody pays you to carry their ads. In fact you can pay quite steeply for them - nearly 30 per cent of the industry’s revenue comes from clothing and accessories.

Meanwhile you face another couple of weeks of late nights watching heroes with names like Liepheimer, Schleck, and Galimzyanov. By the end of it companies like Omega Pharma-Lotto and Euskaltel - Euskadi will roll off your tongue like perfectly regular business names.

Much as I like to watch, as I huff and puff my Malvern Star to the milkbar and back, I thank heaven I don’t have to make a living this way.

ray@ebeatty.com

Morning meditation on a razor blade

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 1, 2011

A mystical Hindu fakir will meditate in lotus position, sitting on a bed of sharpened nails. Personally, I do much of my meditation on the edge of a razor. Mind you, the blade is well protected by Mr Gillette’s inventiveness and it’s wielded on my chin rather than on my nether regions. But the deep state of contemplation is otherwise much the same.

It is the meditation of the shower, shampoo and shave, a half-hour of quiet, solitary time behind a closed door.

So the other morning I got thinking about you, and your business, and about your advertising and marketing. Specifically: why would you need an advertising agency?

As the cost pressures mount and the competition intensifies it's hard to justify that seemingly big-corporation luxury. Especially when it's so easy to do so much in-house.

Sure, an agency will handle the choice and placement of media, which involves knowledge and experience. But let’s face it, you could do it yourself - perhaps hire one or two extra staff, or pick up the phone for one of the excellent media services around.

No, there has to be more. There’s the marketing advice and assistance an agency offers, specialist knowledge in the advertising area. But then most medium-sized clients these days have several marketing graduates on staff who can draw up a marketing plan, and specialist information can be found from research. So that’s not it either.

In the end it comes down to one thing: the creative. The campaign that is going to stand out, the ad that is going to portray your product as never before, the phrase that will hook itself into a customer’s mind, the picture that makes your product irresistible. These are the fruits of creativity.

You can look at any publication - do it now, with this one - and you can tell the difference between the ads compiled by the client’s staff, or the commercial thrown together by the TV station, or the brochure produced by the printer - as against an ad created by a good advertising agency. There’s a professionalism, a gloss, a wit about the work of good agencies which stands head and shoulders above.

Creativity does not come easily. Many more people believe they have it than really do. The fact is that talent is not abundantly distributed. On top of this, the skills needed to produce highly polished advertising only come after many years of work and practice.

Being skilful with Photoshop places your products on the page, it does not create compelling advertising. An exchange that sounds witty in the office can be totally flat in the camera.

Of course there are the clients who would not know quality work if it grabbed them by the throat and throttled them. For such a client the ultimate and only criterion is price.

“Never mind the quality, show me the width!” they cry. Then there are those who know what they’re looking at, who appreciate creativity and artistry. Ah, these are the good clients to work for.

If you choose an agency, take a close look at the work they have done for others. Ask yourself, could these folk make a difference to me?

The work will need to increase your sales, or make your product look wonderful, or give it a truly professional edge. If the work is good enough, these criteria all follow each other. Insist on wonderful advertising - and then allow them to do it.

There, now for the after-shave and off to work.

ray@ebeatty.com

Is the sky really falling, Henny Penny?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday 24, 2011

I well remember reading to my little ones the tale of Henny Penny. Poor nervous chook, she feels an acorn drop on her head and starts running around crying out that "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

These days this is known as political rhetoric, and commonly found up on the hill in Canberra. Right now we seem to have a whole farmyard of neurotic hens.

When Four Corners revealed sickening mistreatment of Australian cattle, that raised an uproar (though mind you, a vegetarian might point out that the cattle are destined to be killed and eaten, whatever the method). Live shipments were banned.

In return, there are now dire predictions that Australia's cattle trade and its farmers are also about to die. However the research company IBISWorld quietly points out that live exports only made up six per cent of the industry revenue, and were contracting.

The real damage was done by drought and the strong dollar, and even so the industry is surging ahead with a growth forecast of 1.8 per cent per annum over the next five years. No falling skies here.

The carbon debate, of course, rouses the chorus of cockerels from dawn each day of the week. The Australian Coal Association warned that the carbon tax will cost some 4,000 mining jobs in three years. Mind you, at the same time, the Bureau of Statistics reported 8,000 job vacancies in the industry just in one month this year.

And let’s not forget that our currently-debated scheme was pitched based on suggestions made by BHP’s Marius Kloppers. After a half-year profit of $10 billion, he knows that the sky is well and truly in place, and is more interested in the long-term future of the industry – and our planet.

If you read the latest OECD report you’ll see that we came out of the economic storms with barely a ruffle. Unemployment is below five per cent, even as the mining and construction industries scream for more labour and implore the government to increase its migration quotas.

Inflation is below three percent, interest rates are stable (remember the days of double-digit mortgages?)

I can testify that our health system is one of the best in the world after a month of back problems. Weekly doctors, physios, scans and bags of medications later, if I added it all up it might have cost little more than $1000 personally. Compare that to the nose bleed I had in New York 14 years ago, that cost over $1000 for one outpatient visit.

Two months ago I wrote that never in history have we been richer, safer or more secure than this nation is today.

Now I know that I stand the likelihood of being branded a Polyanna. But let me tell you, while all the feathers and claws fly in the front sections of the newspapers, here at the back our topic is business.

We are businessmen and women talking with each other and we need to be rational, see clearly, not get panicked and flustered by all the flag-waving.

Our businesses have long lives ahead, a lot of people depend on us, we can’t afford to make daily changes of course in response to the latest squawk.

So after you have absorbed the day’s news, sit back, sip a tea, and take a clear thought about what the reality is so far, and what is likely in the future.

Make this the basis of your decisions. Don’t listen to Henny Penny, be a bit more Foxy Woxy in your perceptions.

ray@ebeatty.com

Out of the closet, steps the "pink dollar"

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday 17 June, 2011

Living in St Kilda and shopping at Prahran Market in Commercial Road, you’d better believe that I’m aware of the “pink dollar” - which is what they call the market segment populated by gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and other exotic variations from what the missionaries would accept.

Once a taboo subject that would never have graced the pages of this paper, the fact is that changed social standards have been rapidly followed by ever-questing marketers, never slow with their arithmetic.

In America they have already calculated a $750 billion market. Apportioning it to Australia’s population, that’s still a lot of bucks.

And let’s face it these LGBTs (yes, that’s the official term in US marketing circles) have certain advantages over their more conventional brethren. Like, few or no kids, or school fees, or families to support, feed, clothe and take on holidays. So what they earn they get to keep for themselves.

I’m talking in the third person here, but if it should be second-person, read “you”, with my apologies.

A couple of years back, the Sydney Star Observer surveyed their readership and found that they had an average income of $55,234, and that 54.7 per cent were managers or professionals.

In addition, 9.9 per cent owned businesses, only 8.2 per cent had children, more than half were in a relationship and that more than half had a tertiary qualification. Sounds like a dream target market to me.

In addition, a Queensland Pride survey found that 87.3 per cent of respondents were more likely to buy from companies which they perceived to be gay and lesbian friendly. So hang out the discreet rainbow flags.

Australian gay and lesbian marketing firm Significant Others says that the gay market is a good prospect for investors.

They score highly in many areas like automotive, alcohol, financial services, health and wellbeing, and particularly travel.

The gay life favours exotic destinations. With nearly half living in Sydney and Melbourne, a break means getting up and away.

Four years ago a Roy Morgan survey found them spending nearly a billion dollars on leisure travel. With the booming dollar pushing more and more adventurous holidays, you can be sure that the figure will be higher today.

The other side of the coin, however, is a lingering prejudice. Especially in some of Australia’s good ol’ boys destinations which also happen to have glorious beaches.

Recently Sunshine Coast Destination, the tourism authority, was criticised for not taking advantage of Sydney’s Mardi Gras.

Kelly Choong, a University of the Sunshine Coast advertising lecturer who is doing his PhD on ways of marketing to subcultures like gays, said the Mardi Gras should be particularly appealing to SCD given it was the low season.

However, he feels the local tourism operators may be dragging their feet because of community reluctance to invite gays into their midst.

"I think Sunshine Coast tourism authorities should be looking at this," he said, "It doesn't seem to have a welcoming feel."

So how real a problem is prejudice? Well just this year the Advertising Standards Board ruled on a TV commercial made by Westpac, where two very obviously camp lads talk to camera about slow payers in their clothing business.

The sucked cheeks and hand-waving were pretty obvious and drew complaints that they were portrayed as stereotypes. But in return the bank claimed the commercials went down well in the gay community.

In the end the Board found that: “The men are presented in a manner which, although somewhat stereotypical, focuses on their frustration as business owners and is not negative." Case dismissed, back to the carnival.

ray@ebeatty.com

It’s not new technology, it’s a whole new world

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday June10, 2011

This week the genius of computer marketing planted his flag on the future of human communication. No wonder ranks of cameras were there relaying the historic event around the world.

The genius, of course, is Apple's Steve Jobs, looking cadaverous but still alive after his battle with cancer. The future is The Cloud - remember three years ago when I advised you that this was a term you would do well to remember?

Well the result is iCloud - Apple's mega-computer in the sky. A vast data bank that will hold every song and picture you possess, and deliver them to you wherever you are, on whatever device you are using.

But the same technology will also manage a corporation's entire stock inventory or bookkeeping, or trade or financial activities. Variations of it have already been implemented by Google and Microsoft. Before long, business will never be the same again.

This is what frustrates me about so many of our political and business leaders. They spend their days arguing and fighting and scoring points, not realising that there is an earthquake tsunami bearing down on them that could sweep these petty issues all away.

They think the future will be much like before but with the aid of some clever machines. In fact the whole world is rapidly changing beneath their feet, at a bewildering speed.

Ask the disappearing bookshop chains or record stores. They are the canaries in the pit, the first to fall off the perch before the whole mine blows up.

You are aware, of course, that there is a big increase in the flow of information technology. But do you realise how much?

Last week IT author and columnist George Skarbek pulled up some figures during a lecture. Take a minute to contemplate them and what they could mean to us, to the world, to you.

A quarter of the people on this planet now use the internet - 1.8 billion individuals. As the developing world gallops ahead that will increase by at least a billion in a few years.

In 2007 we saw 5 exabytes of data flow through the internet every month (put simply that's 1.4 billion DVDs).

By last year this had increased to 21 exabytes a month. Pause a minute here.

Ten years ago it was calculated that the sum of all human-produced information, every word, book, note of music, frame of video, came to about 12 exabytes. And here we are nearly double that.

By 2013 this will have increased to 57 exabytes. Five times all human knowledge, every month.

We're no longer looking at some corner of the electronics industry doing interesting things. We are looking at the whole world, our whole civilisation and commerce and politics, changing. And most of us have little idea of where it is going, least of all our politicians.

For the most part the change will be benign - watch any movie you want, any time; read the newspapers on your tablet on the train; work from any corner of the earth, like you’re in the CBD.

For others it will mean their jobs will greatly change or disappear.

As a business person, it is your duty to keep abreast of these changes, don’t let events take you by surprise.

As a nation, it is up to us to prepare for the remodelled landscape ahead, so we can stay abreast of the world.

Anybody involved with information technology knows how vital this is, how important that we maximise our capacity. Every one of them knows we need - at least - the national broadband network. Including, I’ll wager, Malcolm Turnbull.


ray@ebeatty.com