Each week, the Gruen Planet poses a creative challenge to two advertising agencies. The resulting TV ad is then judged by the panel.
This week, the challenge was to rebrand Australia’s greatest horse race – the Melbourne Cup. Is it possible to turn Australians against the event “that stops a nation”?
The winning clip from Sense was devastating. Take a look. If I was Andrew Wilkie, I’d be talking to Sense and asking to run this ad.
That wild, wonderful thing that is Wikipedia has changed our lives in all sorts of subtle ways. Gone are the vast bookshelves of leather bound tomes that held me in thrall as a child – and in their stead is a white page, an empty search field and a button.
Amazingly, as Clay Shirky reminds us, Wikipedia was built by a global collective donating 100 million hours of time to its grand vision. But this cognitive surplus is just a drop in the ocean of time that is spent by Americans watching television each year – estimated to be many times that number.
Now, while this is fascinating as a data fact, what I am more interested in is the substitution that is taking place. You see, for 100 million people to donate one hour of their time – a deliberate choice is being made. The choice is to create rather than to consume. And the thing is – as humans, we seek the pleasure of consumption over the cold choice of decision. We have to be driven to act. Compelled. Consumption, after all, is the easy way.
Now think about the current debate in Australia around the regulation of gambling. Clubs across Australia are claiming that these regulations will impact their ability to employ people and to support the community through their charitable giving and community support programs. But as Ben Eltham points out, most clubs direct a miserly proportion of their revenues into such programs:
Or examine the Rooty Hill RSL, also in Sydney’s western suburbs … Poker machines raked in $43.2 million of the club’s total operating revenue of $64.7 million … [with only] $601,000 [spent] on donations.
What would happen if INDIVIDUALS actually chose where to invest their “community support” programs? I’d actually be keen to see some small percentage being funnelled into a microloan style service or even an insurance fund to help problem gamblers (but that is a whole other blog post).
Today, on Melbourne Cup day, the folks over at DebtConsolidation.com.au have put together this infographic that images what could be done with all those wagers being made at the track and at betting agencies across the country. Makes you think – what good could we do if we made better decisions? What indeed.
Or an alternative title: What Qantas Will Learn from its Former Customers Because they are Social
I can still remember the smell of the lithographic duplicator machines that were used in my primary school. The light purple writing would hold that odour long after the ink dried. And one day – I think it was in 5th class – I remember learning about the Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service. What today we call Qantas.
Back then – in the 1970s – school children would learn about Qantas as part of the school curriculum. We would read the teacher’s notes and then write neatly formed sentences into our brown paper covered school books. I dutifully etched red and brown pencil lines into my book, showing the shop and the sign over the Qantas booking office in Longreach. I was proud. I’d done a good job. And with every stroke of the pencil, I was also marking this brand deep into my psyche.
But over the weekend I watched the Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce – with the full support of his Board – trash one of Australia’s most loved brands. In grounding the entire domestic and international fleet, Joyce threw the travel and business plans of thousands into chaos – and those passengers reacted by tweeting in record numbers.
A usually quiet social brand, mentions of Qantas spiked on Saturday as the news of the groundings spread around the globe. The graph from Trendistic, when extended back 30, 90 and 180 days barely rises off the base line. And while mentions tailed off on Sunday and earlier today, mentions of the name Qantas are still ranking well beyond its normal zone. Jenni Beattie from Digital Democracy tracked the Qantas conversations across a number of other social platforms – from a Facebook protest page to off-brand forums like Golf and Vogue Fashion.
CEO Alan Joyce doesn’t appear concerned, stating in the Wall Street Journal “I think the Qantas brand is an amazingly resilient brand and we've gone through very significant industrial disputes before”. But for the Australian public, this wasn’t a matter of industrial relations – it was a matter of national pride. The actions of Joyce and the Board severed a bond of trust.
Now, much has changed since the 70s. OK – maybe not the trade unions that Joyce is arguing with. But the ticket buying, holiday making, business travelling customer that contributes to Qantas’ record breaking profits is a whole different beast. These are “social customers” and they are different. And brands – even brands as big as Qantas – no longer operate in isolation.
Essentially, your customers pwn your brand – and if they can’t, they go to where they can. This is especially the case with emotionally charged brands (and travel/holiday related brands certainly are). In the days and weeks ahead, Qantas will learn more about the social customer, including:
What impact will this have? Here are some thoughts:
What else? Is there another impact coming? What else do you see?
What does it mean to “do” social media in a business context? Is it always and only about marketing or brand? If course not. There’s so much more.
In a couple of weeks I am heading to Philadelphia to speak at SocialMediaPlus – on the topic of “social selling”. I am looking forward to sharing some of the wins and some of the challenges that we’ve faced working with the global sales teams at SAP’s Premier Customer Network.
But more than that, I am looking forward to hearing from some true innovators – folks like Jason Falls, the powerhouse behind SocialMediaExplorer.com and author of No Bulls**t Social Media; and Frank Eliason, SVP of Social Media at Citibank and former customer experience pinup at Comcast. There is also e-newsletter guru and Director of Strategy at WhatCounts, Christopher Penn and Dachis Group’s Gunter Pfau – and many more.
The SocialMediaPlus conference runs November 15 and 16 (with the pre-conference academy on the 15th). Register using GH15 and you’ll even receive a discount. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!
As you read the posts below, I’d like you to think about subscribing to these blogs. I know that many people think that “feed readers” are old school now, but they really can be powerful (especially if you use them well).
Try Feedly or something like Flipboard if you have an iPad. Categorise the blogs in a way that works for you.
While there are thousands of blog posts published each day, the great bloggers produce consistently good content. It’s worth coming back to them regularly!
Increasingly, businesses are turning to social media as part of their marketing mix. There is a smattering of Facebook, a Twitter account – and maybe even a YouTube channel. Some will have a social media monitoring solution in place, others a bunch of Google Alerts bombarding their inbox with messages and updates. But there is often a gulf between the listening and doing – between the monitoring and engaging.
And perhaps, more alarmingly, there are precious few businesses who have done the work to put social media into a framework or business context. That’s why I advocate continuous digital strategy. It’s why I think a social business maturity model is important – so that you can actively work to transform your business relationships, systems and processes in such a way as they deliver sustaining value over time.
Unfortunately, many of us only take on transformative challenges when we are forced to – often because our competitors beat us to the punch.
Wouldn’t it be nice to lead and set the agenda instead?
The Dell Social Listening questionnaire gives you valuable information from seven relatively simple questions. Based on Forrester industry data, it allows you to model your own business (or your competitors’ business) and have it visualised as an infographic. Here is one I did for a medium sized tech company. Makes for interesting reading … but it can also be a useful way of laying out your strategic challenges – especially if you are also working in a medium sized tech company.
How do you compare? Where are the gaps? And what are you going to do to close them?
You see, it is important to listen to and engage with your customers. But that’s not the end result. It’s the start. Get to it!
Assistance Dogs Australia is a charity that trains Labradors and Golden Retrievers to help people with physical disabilities. These dogs take two years to train at a cost of over $25,000 each but are given free of charge to people in need.
To raise funds to help cover some of these costs, Assistance Dogs are asking people to register to hold an event with your family, friends, colleagues or neighbours. There are some great ideas for events (organising a Dog’s breakfast or baking and selling pup cakes to Dogs-bowling).
But you’d better get cracking! Put your paw up to help.
There’s a bit of something for everyone this week – something for the activists, some for the bloggers, some for the business to business marketers and even a snack for the hard working strategists and creatives in the agencies.
There was a time when we used to create websites to solve a problem. Now, often, our websites are the problems that need to be solved. They no longer tell the story we want to tell. They don’t engage the people that they should. They aren’t relevant to the communities we claim to serve.
To solve this new problem, we often turn to search engine optimisation (SEO). What we are looking for is a quick fix. The problem, of course, is that you can’t quick fix bad content.
My recommendation is always to focus on useful content. Make sure that what you are creating helps the people who need it. Make sure that it reaches them in a format that is easy for them to consume. And design it so that it can be shared with others who have the same challenges.
Sounds simple, right?
But, don’t take my word for it. Check out what the folks at Brafton have to say in this funky content marketing for SEO infographic. Then stop looking for silver bullets and get to work on some quality content. Your customers will love you for it.
When you are dealing with statistics one expects a margin of error. You could be estimating a project and suggest +/- 10 percent. You could be waving your finger in the air and provide a rough order of magnitude “guesstimate” of +/- 200 percent.
So the thought of taking as little of 0.5% out of an equation should not be a problem, right?
But what happens if that 0.5% happen to control 38.5% of the world’s total wealth?
The Business Insider shares 13 Staggering Facts About the Global Super Rich – and it leads out with this image of the global wealth pyramid based on data from Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook 2011.
Given these figures, there’s little surprise that civil protests like #OccupyWallStreet in New York are gaining momentum (including the local #occupysydney efforts). It makes for interesting times.