On Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality, Jeff Kay compares promotional photos of fast food items with freshly purchased and photographed actuals.

Spotted on The Innovation Diaries.

I blogged about being annoyed by Freedom Escapes’ telemarketing calls a while ago.

I recently had a look at the comments. Talk about a mountain growing out of an ant hill (we don’t have moles in Australia). They are obviously still cold calling people. And those who are annoyed enough to go online to vent have subsequently found my site via Google. I also occasionally get personal emails …

I was away in Perth a few weeks ago due to the sudden and tragic death of a close friend. During those 10 distressing days, I had no less than three unsolicited telemarketing calls from two different companies; on my mobile!

1. Whilst I was in a meeting with a member of the clergy regarding the eulogy, an Australian index trading company rang. This was the same shysters …

When I saw this my immediate thought was - why are they showing a broken truss on the box?

Maybe it’s just me…

My friend Natalie Shell has mentioned these people a few times over the years: http://www.the-hub.net/.

“Social innovation” - I really like the sound of that. It appears to be a set of spaces set up around the world to enable those with socially progressive thoughts to get together and make things happen. Go positive change!

The website, however, is a disappointment. There are pretty pictures but …

As I am sitting here putting the final touches on a seminar on business blogging, I caught this “magic media moment” on the news: “an unscripted and unleashed punter giving some big wig in a suit a large slice of his mind on the state of Sydney trains.”

It was a classic moment. One moment there’s the “big wig” spewing the usual PR-contrived rhetoric about …

This was painting on hoardings around a shop under renovations in Singapore. It took a second to process - the first character is “cow” in Chinese. But the sign uses the sound of that character in combination with the second word to communicate the message.

Cow in Mandarin is pronounced “neu”.

Clever huh?!

I will be presenting a seminar on Business Blogging at The Western Sydney Business Centre on 28 May 2008.

For further information, please contact:
Mangala Srinivasan
Western Sydney Business Centre
T: 8843 1116
E: mangala.srinivasan@business.nsw.gov.au

Very short messages - like branding taglines and even biblical proclamations - are more susceptible to a wider range of individual interpretations.

When I saw this sign outside a church in Singapore recently

my brain immediately inserted the missing line thus:

Now I am pretty sure this was not what the designers of the banner intended. Nonetheless, the bottom message is what I got …

In high-traffic, information-dense environments like a train station, signs need to be clear and simple. The faster customers can get the message, the more quickly they can move on. Making customers think slows everyone down and adds confusion.

This sign spotted on a Singaporean train station is unnecessarily complex. The two uninterrupted services should not have been on the list of unavailable services.