Ads I hate

I’ve previously mentioned ads I like… Now it’s time for the ads I hate…

Topping the list this week – by such a large margin that I have vowed to never give them any of my money for as long as I live….

Telstra: For the “spread the good stuff” campaign. This campaign was originally not too bad. I quite liked the “you know people” execution which played on the concept that there are really only 5 people that you’re in such constant contact with that you need reduced call and text rates.

But the current ad is just awful – every time I hear it it sets my teeth on edge. For one simple reason

They make a *stupid, stupid statement* and I quote in its entireity.

“In summer – there’s this buzz about everything, the days are longer so there’s more time to spend with your favourite people…”

Seriously – WTF?! while it’s true that there are more hours of daylight – there are still *only* 24 hours in the day – where does this magical “more time to spend with you favourite people” come from?

It’s this kind of seriously stupid non sequitur that I really hate. It makes me feel that either the advertising agency responsible are idiots – or they think we are.

The only ad that’s ever annoyed me as much as this one was a regional ad for a video game parlour in Canberra which offered visitors the opportunity to “test your skill and courage to the limit”

“Test your courage to the limit”? How brave do you have to be to feed an endless stream of coins into a video game?

The question is – am I the only person in the world to get driven to such a state of apoplexy by poorly written advertising?

I’m ba-ack

(photos to come!)

So I’m back from my week in Niseko, which was probably one of the best holiday’s I’ve ever had. The people we were with were great, the people there were lovely, the snow was fantastic, the food was terrific… You get the picture, or you will when I get round to uploading the shots

I found this quite funny

Fossil find suggests microbats evolved the ability to fly before developing echolocation.

It might be just me – but I had a sudden mental picture of all these bat flying into things… and eventually figuring out they could use the echoes of other bats yelling “Ow!” to find out where things were.

I mean – how useless is the ability to fly without the ability to “see” where you’re going?

International Diplomacy isn’t all glamour

A very good friend of mince works for UNICEF and he’s just been posted to the Maldives.

When you think of the Maldives, you probably think of something like

this, your basic tropical island paradise, and if you’re on one of the resort islands that’s pretty much what you get.

If you’re not on a resort island – it’s a different story. My friend has been posted to an island that is 775m long and 450m wide, and has a total population of around 1300 people.

Here’s a picture

He’s around 200km from the capital, and over 2kms over open water away from the nearest resort island (the nearest place to get a beer.)

Fortunately my friend grew up in outback Australia, so small, remote communities is nothing new – the lack of alcohol is a different thing…

Going Dark…

I won’t be posting at all next week, because I’ll be on top of a mountain in Japan skiing. In fact I fly out in around 33 hours.

Where we’re going there’s no cell phone coverage and there are very few internet terminals. To all intents and purposes I will be totally uncontactable.

I’m *really* looking forward to it.

Why, why would you do this?

Every now and then I check out what sort of marketing my old company is doing. They’ve got a challenging job, because despite what many marketing and advertising guys tell you – selling stuff to businesses is different to selling stuff to consumers.

That’s how I came across this. If you’ve ever wondered just how boring TV can be – you need wonder no more…

Four…

days to go until I fly out for a week ski-ing in Japan.

We’re going to Niseko and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it

Chris de Burgh starts a rock revolution in Iran.

Music: Chris de Burgh starts a rock revolution in Iran.

There’s really nothing I can add to that….

Blogged with Flock

The mystery of morale

(note – that’s morale not moral)

I’ve been having a conversation with some friends of mine about morale. We all used to work at the same place, and we still have friends there, and we’ve noticed a certain change in the atmosphere recently.

For the first time *any* of us can remember morale is low across all three major offices (US, UK and Australia). Now these things tend to go in cycles, sometimes morale is good, sometimes it’s bad. But we’ve never seen it bad across the whole company.

Which got us to thinking about how does one affect morale?

I argued that

“Morale is a funny thing, in that it’s much more dependent on people than you’d think. Remember how morale in HQ improved when Fuzz and I got back? It wasn’t that we were special, but we were upbeat and cheerful, and that infected others.

Sadly it’s that simple. One or two people who are determined to be cheerful and optimistic (or even just make a lot of stupid jokes) can improve the morale of an office 100% more than any stupid “come to work in your pyjamas” day or “team bonding event”

I’d be willing to bet you that if you and Dean were back in the NA office morale there would improve *without anything else changing*. “

As a Communications person, who has worked in Internal Comms with HR people I’ve been responsible for my fair share of morale improving stunts. But every time I’ve organised a company wide treasure-hunt, or bowling day, I’ve tried to make sure the people who are naturally upbeat and optimistic get put in teams where they outnumber the pessimists. And slowly you can start to turn the morale around.

Seriously – want to improve morale in *your* office? Let people who are friends sit together, and encourage them to make jokes. They’ll infect all the people around them with the feeling that coming to work is fun. That’s all you need to do.

The problem with that approach of course is that in general, management seeing people talking and laughing as being deleterious to productivity. In many, many workplaces there’s still the cultural idea that work shouldn’t be fun.

Naturally, I don’t agree with that point of view I’ve already argued I think the ability to have fun at work is fundamental to the process of being innovative

If you like the people you work with, if you have fun at work, your morale will be high, and that of the people around you will be high, even if your office has never had a “come to work dressed as your favourite superhero” day

Let’s play a drinking game and a smoking game

There are two things you can learn from Latawnya – the naughty horse.

The first is, despite all evidence to the contrary – horses can light joints,

and the second is that they are much more generous than people.

Seriously – no-one I know would share their booze and fags with complete strangers.

Those city horses must have been dropping e as well.