Some nice PR from Morgan Stanley around a report drafted for them by a 15 year old intern on teenagers media usage. This has picked up tons of press coverage from Time Magazine to the FT and Telegraph and turned the intern into an over night media star. Not sure if this happened spontaneously or was planned but it works because it’s a surprising (to some) piece of work that most people wouldn’t expect to come from a (rather boring sounding) company like Morgan Stanley.
For more check out this from AFP and this from the BBC.
So Twitter is full of thirty somethings and Facebook is being rapidly adopted by the over fifties according to some recent articles. This makes sense i’ve been hearing lots of stories of parents making friends with their offspring – not least as its the only way they can find out what they’re up to.
The Guardian (UK) pulls out a bunch of stats on Twitter adoption which i think is likely to play out in South Africa too:
• In April, web metrics firm comScore reported that the majority of Twitter’s 10m or so users were over 35.
• In June, comScore reported that 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May.
• In June, Pace University said that while 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, only 22% use Twitter.
[Via The Wooster Collective] Florentijn is an artist from the netherlands who is becoming known for large scale public art exhibits such as this giant rubber duck. Check out his Youtube channel for examples of work and you can also download stills of his work here.
I’m uh talking about the Labia Cinema of course. Which I also personally rate as the best cinema in the world. In fact I’m having my birthday party there later in the week (we’re watching Withnail and I). Anyway the Labia now has a much deserved fan site ilovethelabia.blogspot.com. If you’re not from Cape Town then you probably won’t know that its named after Princess Labia (i shit you not) who opened it (the cinema). Just goes to show you that shabby and dishevelled bohemian hangouts beat the hell out of state of the art multiplex’s any day.
Bored? why not start your own 80s italo band and make pop videos for the weekend. Sandi Sirocco is the best fake band ever.
Although i’m slightly surprised that a globally aware mag like Monocle hasn’t realised for some of its followers its actually winter i’m enjoying their new more entertainment focused summer podcasts. They’ve also switched from uploading on a sunday to a friday. You can download via itunes or the monocle website.
I think alot of the blandness in marketing these days comes from inability of the people involved to collaborate with one another. This basically leads, at least in South Africa, to campaigns that are too focused on traditional print and tv ads and that don’t work efficiently when ATL strategies are handed to other agencies (web, pr, activations etc).
The blandness comes from a relatively small isolated pool of individuals that have been trained in a certain way coming up with campaigns that everyone else is suppose to “integrate” with…
So I was quite interested in Wieden + Kennedy’s Platform spin off which seeks to bring non-advertising creatives in to collaborate on projects with the agency.
Platform is a future creative talent platform, which will hire, teach and work with a diverse mix of people, from around the world. We will recruit talent from the arts, sciences and technology backgrounds who will work together to solve business problems through creative solutions. You will learn by doing which means being involved in everything from building prototypes, enabling and assisting in research development to curating your very own event space and programme.
I think local marketing could really benefit from a more collaborative approach that used creativity from non-traditional sources early on in campaign development. I’m pretty sure if you can put a group of people from different backgrounds in a room together and come up with solutions to problems without having an agenda to create an ad campaign or a pr campaign etc we’ll be much more likely to get some truly original work
Another day, another social media related PR fail. Last week RJ van Spaandonk, Core Group executive director, seemed to take on the whole blogosphere via Twitter. See themacblog.co.za’s aptly titled RJ van Spaandonk + Twitter: a pr disaster. A semi-repentant RJ wrote an “educational” article in The Weekender’s media section in which his take out from the unpleasent experience was the following:
So, what is the lesson in this for others, and especially for businesses that feel the pressure to embrace social media? My advice: stay away from Twitter.
You may think that after careful deliberation you are able to capture the essence of your message in 140 characters, but anything more complex than half-time rugby scores is bound to be misunderstood. It is just not a channel for nuanced conversation.
More importantly, I had forgotten that entries can be “retweeted” individually, and thus out of context they can look rather stupid.
I learned, to my detriment, that tyrants lurk around, trying to exploit your every mishap, and Twitter has rapidly become, like unmoderated blogs before it, the preserve of anonymous agitators trying to look clever at the expense of others. Perils of hyperbole in cyberspace
Actually i’d suggest his take out should be don’t use a communication tool that you don’t understand the ettiquette of, whether its traditional media interviews or social media. Plenty of companies have managed to use it as a decent communications tool. He could have for example written a detailed article and refered people to it. He could have built up decent relationships with key influncers by sharing his insight /opinions over time that might have led to them coming to his defence. Would he abandon TV interviews forever if an SABC journalist didn’t allow his side of the story come across to satisfaction in an interview?
Also worth checking out, just to see how messy the PR fail is, anti-Core site stopcore.co.za.
Oh dear…
Makes a good case study in how not to do PR though.
It’s been a while since I caught up with the exploits of Stormhoek. Being a fan of small towns in the middle of nowhere I’m enjoying their choice of Alpine, Texas as the place to launch their new label in the US. Stormhoek’s gleeful breaking of the conventions of wine marketing are as charming as ever. Check out their youtube channel for more clips.
Maybe we should launch the new steri stumpie flavours in Calvinia…
