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 …

Spotted this on Gizmodo recently:

I don’t know if this is targeting a specific audience demographic such as Asian (as in living in an Asian country) males between 17 and 26 years old. There may well be cultural subtleties and memes I am wholly unaware of.

Here’s what strikes me when I look at the piece:

A …

Many businesses still think of marketing as a separate exercise. The primary actions revolve around Saying, and not Being. That is why they cannot Be truly different.

Being is a process. (Conversations with God III, by Neale Donald Walsch.)

To Be different, a business’ processes have to Be different. they have to act differently. Merely saying they are different is pointless without the actions to back it up.

Saying we are …

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 …

See this article on the Sydney Morning Herald: Nudie’s labels bare-faced cheek.

As I see it, Nudie HAD two key differentiators going for it:
1. A personable brand that projected realness.
2. A product that is made from real fruit as opposed to reconstituted or filler juices.

It is common for fruit juice or fruit drink* manufacturers to pad out their products with apple or pear juice as these …

In her article Leading Interactive Brands, Betty Southgate illustrates several great examples of how a brand can interact with its customers beyond selling to them or marketing to them. In particular, the transformation of a commodity product that is fizzy drinks into something emotive and personal.

Well worth a read.

(Hi Betty!)

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 …

Spotted these books at Kinokuniya Singapore that look like packs of cigarettes. Interesting use of the notoriety of the cigarette pack.

Spotted these advertising tags on the Singaporean trains (MRT). They have little cut-outs at one end to enable them to hand on the overhead hand rails.