August 27, 2010

My blog has moved!

I have recently move my blog to Wordpress. I've tried to replicate my articles there and although it looks a bit dodgy, I'm working on that too. You can find more stuff on the new blog at:


Article index (click to view):




August 22, 2010

A fragmented media space will eventually balance out



I recently had need (and the time) to update details across various public profiles and applications, and after trying to remember various combinations of sites, applications, and then logins & passwords, I realised just how fragmented the market has become.
In an average month, I find myself, along with countless others, Twittering, Facebooking, keeping a professional profile on LinkedIn, occasionally updating this blog, keeping up with the news, keeping up with the industry news, and I even recently signed up with Foursquare – but wait, Facebook Places is about to be added to the list too as soon as it comes to Australia!


So just when we had finally mastered the art of moving house and getting Australia Post to forward all our old mail for us, we find ourselves in the same situation - but in the digital space.


Now it’s not like I’ve only just realised this of course; I’ve spent the last 10 years working both with and for big media publishers that know their content is valuable – but just can’t make a profit from it in a world where every man and his dog has a social media application or some whizzbang content aggregator they’ve built.


So from the publisher side – the big players are finding it tough to stay ahead of the game because the little guys with the ideas are much more agile. The little guys though – are much too small to have the sales and distribution networks that could create a viable revenue stream in the first place.




The ones that do break through – get snapped up by the big guys anyway, like Australia’s Andrew Lacy who made a great series of mobile games only to be bought out and signed up by Disney as soon as he started to do well.


My theory


Well it may be completely devoid of research (it’s Sunday afternoon and I have a roast to cook!) but there’s a healthy dose of experience here – at some stage the garage banders with their brilliant ideas are going to realise there’s limited opportunity and a glut of other similar ideas on the marketplace all vying for the same niche. It all comes back to the one simple concept: he who produces the content has the best opportunity to develop, implement and profit from these good ideas as a media publisher. Niche mobile and other digital applications will continue to provide great ideas for publishers to draw from, but ultimately as the battleground becomes more and more competitive – we’ll see more and more of these great ideas fade to black as the big guns get back ahead of the game.


Don’t believe me? Watch and see what happens in 2010. In the meantime I’ll spend some time doing some real research and maybe come back with an update soon.


Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are crazy!

August 20, 2010

Transparency is the best form of business





For those of us who navigate daily minefields of corridor politics, the important thing to remember is that transparency in business should always be your first and foremost pillar of strength in the digital age.

Along with 9 million others, we’ve all seen the ‘United Breaks Guitars’ fiasco where United Airlines was stood up to the tune of a $180 million loss of share value by a band who wrote a song about the airline’s refusal to pay for a broken guitar (even though they witnessed ground crew damaging it).

There’s numerous examples out there of companies doing the wrong thing by hiding the real truth – then getting hammered when the real truth is exposed by everyday individuals. We’ve all seen and heard them and I won’t parade a list out for you. We see the media attacking politicians on a daily basis for the same reason, particularly around election time.

Conversely, popular fruit drink Ribena dobbed themselves in when Choice magazine noticed that after 55 years of claiming their product had ‘4 times more Vitamin C than Oranges’, that it was actually not much more than sugar and water. The move was damaging – but allowed Ribena to get on the front foot and deal with the situation honestly and up front.

Importantly, doing business for ourselves –for our own career, that is, requires just as much transparency in a time of social media where user generated content (UGC) is king. Comment below if you’ve never fluffed up your resume a bit to get that gig you’re after…I doubt I’ll see any comments!

I was reading about Skype executive Madhu Yarlagadda, who after only one month on the job, resigned due to overwhelming and unanimous negative commentary from his former colleagues. The forum, of course was the very article on which his appointment and background was announced, with dozens of comments being posted almost immediately by former colleagues and employees. It went on for weeks. TechCrunch’s editor even acknowledged in a later post that this level of unanimous negativity about an individual was ‘unprecedented’. To make the situation worse, Yarlagadda then reached out to friends to counteract the negative comments, only to have this posted onto the article:

“Like many others, I received an email from Madhu yesterday pleading for me to write a positive testimony of his work on this website. I never liked him and am surprised he didn’t pick that up in our interactions. Maybe he just emailed everyone he still knows at Yahoo! I can’t say we had many negative interactions together but his reputation as a politicker was well known and so I stayed far away from him.”

If nothing else, the ‘glocal’ world gone mad has simply made it easier to see the shortcomings of companies and individuals. If you don’t already listen to the clichés (be nice to people on your way up as you’ll meet them all on the way back down), the lesson here is that your former colleagues and associates now have much more visibility of what you’re doing and there are a number of forums and ways in which they are able to administer justice and perhaps even a bit of spite. Think of it as nature’s way of using technology to keep us all honest.

So play nice, and remember that if it’s not Facebook or Twitter, there’s always some other forum out there where you could get caught out.

Deliriant Isti Romani - These Romans are mad!

August 18, 2010

Good sense and experience in media publishing still count for something right?


Working in digital media (which you probably do too if you’re reading this) I know that one of the things both media side and client side love about it is accountability. But being someone that has learnt to do business based on common sense and a healthy dose of gut instinct, I have to ask the question: how much accountability is too much?

I was reading just recently about bit.ly – the url abbreviator that with a simple copy & paste job as well as a + sign on the end of the URL gives you immediate stats to see how many times your abbreviated URL (posted on Twitter or similar) has been re-tweeted, shared on Facebook and so on.


The geek in me loves this and thinks it’s fantastic that we can track every little piece of data and measure our audience and advertiser return on investment like never before. Like any first-time blogger I even have different types of tracking on this blog to see who’s reading and what is (isn’t?) interesting. The more practical person in me however starts to think: are we overanalysing everything?


Let’s put this into perspective. I work for one of Australia’s largest digital media publishers, and the owners of the business are unquestionably one of the biggest media players in the world. The people working within the business are highly technical, sophisticated, and far more ahead of the game than I am when it comes to measuring online audience, advertiser return on investments, and creating unique and wonderful digital user experiences. Want to know what the theme of our Christmas party was last year? Mad Men. That’s right – the idealistic, instinctive world of a 1960s advertising agency carried a certain aura to it that appealed to all and sundry within a digital media behemoth. A world where smoking was sexy, a great idea was better than a solid fact, and experience counted for everything.




There’s something to be said about those swashbuckling times when the art of creating and managing a brand was even more important than the science. The romantic notion of such an advertising universe still carries great appeal – because among us still, there are those individuals who know that all the stats and tracking in the world mean nothing when you have a good idea or just something good to say and aren’t ashamed of putting it out there as best as your gut feel can tell you.


Just remember the business decision making prowess of Sir Richard Branson the next time you have a good idea but are getting a bit put off by what the stats tell you: “Screw it, let’s do it!”


Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans, they are mad!

August 17, 2010

Social media still doesn't work without good content!





While it may be all the rage and in fact even critical to an organisation’s success in the year 2010, planning and implementing an effective social media strategy still plays a distant second place to the role of having good content.

Take a look at this year’s Australian Federal Election so far; The glitz and glamour of social media seems to have faded since the last, whereas in 2007 it was all the rage.

Cast your mind back to that previous election and the catchcry of ‘Kevin07”. The story of the elections was Kevin Rudd and his Twitter feed, and how he was communicating with new voters by speaking to them in the language of Generation Y. Politicians had never done this before. Going back to my uni days I seem to recall this as Marshal McLuhan’s “the media is the message” mantra from the 1960s – If you know how to use the right media then you’re already halfway through to mastering effective mass communication.
This year, it’s a given that every election candidate has their own Twitter feed, Facebook page, MySpace and so on. We’ve never seen Social media campaigns to this extenet in Australian politics before. The TV networks are gearing up with their own 24-7 coverage models which include variations of TV coverage, Twitter feeds, mobile applications (iPhone, Android AND Java are catered for), oh and of course those long forgotten media - the websites as well. 

This is truly ubiquitous media – all the information about the election we want and need in any form that we prefer.

So why on earth is nobody interested in this election? Love him or hate him, Mark Latham had a point the other night on 60 Minutes about the donkey vote. It really is one of the most uninspiring elections I’ve seen, even with the rise and rise of social media strategies to support mass communication campaigns.

Whereas Kevin Rudd in 2007 had a number of big issues and a ticket of significant change to deal with – climate change, the stolen generation and other big issues that really appealed to the masses, a lack of genuinely captivating content from the candidates in 2010 has reminded us of what anyone who has ever tried to sell an idea or a product to someone else knows: If you haven’t got a good product, then no one is really that interested.
Worth keeping in mind the next time you sit down to plan a social media campaign for your business or for yourself. I’m no expert but all I know is: 'These Romans, they are mad!'

Deliriant isti Romani

August 07, 2010

Talk is cheap, Wallabies - but we'll back you



Having lost eight straight matches to the mighty All Blacks, there is very little left to say for a proud rugby nation. Staring down the barrel of tonight’s match in Christchurch, the Wallabies yesterday held a press conference to tell everyone that they still believe they can do it – win one match against New Zealand, that is.






It’s easy to forget that in world rugby circles, the Wallabies still rank third. Yet here we are, week after week, carrying on like the minnows of the sport, having to defend our position due to endless defeat at the hands of Goliath.


And at a time like this, talk is cheap. You’ve either got ‘the stones’ as they say, or you don’t.


One could draw comparison to the rugby league state of origin series, where New South Wales has failed to win in 5 consecutive attempts, making what once was an unpredictably competitive clash into a competition to generate excuses and conjecture as to why this particular match was lost.


But when the tough get going, words are cheap. So to my beloved Wallabies, it’s time to shut up and suck it in. We’ll back you. Let’s face it – you’re chances aren’t good in Christchurch either but you’ve got to get on with the job. Let’s not forget that Aussies love an underdog – so we’ll be there when you stick to the man.




Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are mad!








August 06, 2010

What’s in a (brand) name?



There’s a lot of things that will gain you respect in this world, but the ‘bigger is better’ crew will have you believe that wearing a billboard for a ‘prestigious’ brand will catapault them from ‘ordinary man’ status to the uber-elite.

We’ve all seen it before – the young, trashy guy or girl walking down the street in their best trackpants, while sporting gaudy Dolce & Gabbana shades or one of those Guess handbags with the logo splashed over it 10 times over in a giant font. 

The perception that having access to a certain brand is being part of an exclusive club may not be that far off – but recent research shows that when it comes to fashion, the more exclusive the product, the less obvious the branding. 

The image below (which I have borrowed from news.com.au’s article) shows a demonstration from the study whereby the unmarked Gucci bag on the left cost well over $1,100, and the loudly branded bag on the right was about $650. The study showed clearly that not only did forgers prefer the louder bags (due to sales volume), but that those people with real status preferred the bag on the left every time. The same results were found with a number of fashion items.


Sunglasses are no different – it was shown recently that 28% of sunglasses priced at over $600 carried visible branding and/or logos, while 87% of those priced $100 to $200 had visible brand names.

One particular study found that with every 1cm decrease in the size of a Mercedes Benz logo, the price of the car went up by US$5,000.

For the manufacturers and owners of the individual brands, this means they walk a fine line between sales volume (appealing to the masses) and maintaining their brand exclusivity which wins them over with their real target audience.

A perfect example of just how badly a brand can get it wrong is that of Pierre Cardin. A highly respected brand over a long period of time, Pierre Cardin by the end of the 1980s had licensed its name to more than 800 products, including toilet seat covers.  Not the most exclusive club I'm sure you'll agree!

To illustrate, just imagine Wakuda Tetsuya – one of Australia’s finest chefs - opening a chain of several hundred restaurants - one on every suburban street corner around Australia! It just loses the gloss of what is really a great institution - and something exclusive.

At the end of the day, while our thirst for big brands all seems a bit silly sometime, this highlights all of our need to belong to an exclusive club – it’s just one of the ways we seek it out.

Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are mad!