FRANKthoughts

It’s all well and good to sit at your big desk in the corner office and advise your clients on how to sell their brands, products and ideas BUT, have you ever tried it yourself? Have you ever tried to do it with a $2,000 budget?

The FRANk Crew has decided to conduct a little experiment.  We’ve imported 2500 Vietnamese Table Top BBQs and are trying to sell them using a grassroots strategy that relies on WOM and good old fashioned hawking, backed by a website because, lets face it, everyone has a website these days.  We’ve also taken the initiative to commit 5% of sales to The Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange Trust, a charity that will use our money to purchase cows for communities that have been affected by Agent Orange.  Remember my post on the Girl Effect?  It’s a bit like that.

If reading this is making that little hamster in your brain hop on its wheel and start spinning then we’d love to hear from you.  If you were in our position what would you do?  Have you got any advice that fits our budget and will sell BBQs?   Let us know and if it sells we’ll send you your very own Table Top BBQ to say thanks!

Holly, my 20 year old daughter, was recently issued a new bank card for access to her current account….it also doubled as a credit card. Now the thing is she didn’t actively ask for the credit facility (approx $3,000) but didn’t think to say “no thanks.”

Subsequently she found out how easy it is to draw cash from the ATM on the credit facility. I freak out…explain the 20% interest thing and encourage her to go down the branch to remove the credit line.

Holly phones me from the branch and tells me that the guy behind the counter is patronising & confusing. I suggest she talks with someone else. She finds herself dealing with a mum who has late-teenage children, understands Holly’s ‘concern’ and whips the credit away. This spawns my idea.

If you could match your consumer’s needs and level of financial acumen with the life-stage experience of branch staff wouldn’t that be good? It happens at a business banking level so why not at this crucial stage when the use of credit needs to be carefully managed.

A marketing opportunity right there.

This is a great slide show, courtesy of Paul Isakson. The future is engaging content not finger crossing humour…as we suspected. Please enjoy.

 Nature continues to take a bashing as dead Christmas trees and towers of yellow pages litter the landscape. The tower in our photo has been teetering outside our building for over two weeks, eagerly rejected by the nine businesses within.

The yellow pages site intros with “For decades, the Yellow™ Directory has been bringing buyers and sellers together. A Yellow™ Directory is readily available to people in virtually every home and business across Australia. It is the most used source of buying information when people are looking for suppliers of products and services.” The source for this insight is independent research which took place across Oct’98-Sep’99!! me thinks times are a changin’.

Anyone with no online access (now approx 17% Australian’s down from 95% in 2001, source Nielsen) may choose to op-in to receive their annual volumes but the rest of us might chose to opt-out, given the choice that is.

With Sensis starting to produce great new products such as the soon to be re-launched whereis let’s have an opt-out option for some of their less vibrant products. With approx. 5 million copies being distributed each year, some with over 3,000 pages we roughly calculate that we’re talking about 7 billion pages all up. If say 50% of us opt-out then hello we just saved 3.5 billion pages from being sucked out of the environment.

Let your conscience do the talking.

The Writers’ Guild of America downed pens/keyboards about 80 days ago.

In Australia the implications for the Seven Network are that hero shows, attracting the hero dollars, such as Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Lost only have 10, 11 and 8 episodes “in the can” respectively. Normally they would have twice this amount. Nine’s and Ten’s situations are slightly better because they have less reliance on US programmes (than Seven) but also the nature of their programming is that of self contained episodes such as the CSI and Law & Order franchises which can bear repeating unlike Seven’s serialised programming which just run into a wall of silence.

On the upside this situation is a bonus for local production companies and hopefully will give vent to upcoming Australian talent on both sides of the camera.

A great post from Get Shouty so whatta ya going to do? prompted me to consider what will Australians do with the approximate 1,200 million hours that we currently spend watching commercial TV each month (based on people aged 14+, source Morgan) and what opportunities and advice we might be imparting to our clients who are in some part “reliant” on 30 second solutions in high rating programmes.

If we can ‘reallocate’ 10% of this time, 120 million hours per month, what are the opportunities?

Well we could get people off their arses tackling obesity, creativity and mental health. We might imagine that cinema attendances and DVD rentals will increase, conversely we might see an increase in gambling and alcohol consumption. The web will undoubtably benefit as more people turn to it for entertainment and that surely is an opportunity as people switch tubes.

Ideas anyone? A resurgence of board games?

Thank you for coming here and welcome to 2008.

We hope you enjoy your juicy pineapple, a universal symbol of welcome for over 500 years.

To the people of the Caribbean, the pineapple symbolized hospitality, and the Spaniards soon learned they were welcome if a pineapple was placed at the entrance to a village. This symbolism spread to Europe, courtesy of Christopher Colombus in 1493 and then to Colonial North America, where it became the custom to carve the shape of a pineapple into the columns at the entrance of a plantation.

Seafaring captains used to impale fresh pineapples, souvenirs of their lengthy travels, to tropical ports atop the porch railings of their homes when they returned. It was a symbol that the man of the house was home and receiving visitors. Families would set a fresh pineapple in the centre of the table as a colourful centrepiece of a festive meal, especially when visitors joined them in celebration symbolizing the utmost in welcome and hospitality.

This communal symbol of friendship and hospitality also became a favourite motif of architects, artisans and craftsmen often announcing the hospitality of a mansion with carved wood or moulded mortar pineapples on its main gate posts. Today pineapples can be seen carved on bedposts, headboards, backs of chairs, front doors of homes, towns’ welcome signs, atop rooftops, weather vanes of important public buildings, sculpted into door lintels, stenciled on walls, carpets, china and in metalwork and needlework.

Please enjoy your pineapple.

Share it as a drink or cook with it, just enjoy.

Finally a half decent photo of the adspace we’ve created for kidspot, first mentioned here on 24th October. Kids and mums queue up for ice creams/drinks and there’s the ad right in your face. Well we like it

Tomorrow never comes, nor will the agency of the future. However after a great couple of months a bunch of businesses have decided they’d like to work with us and we’re delighted to introduce David Lee as our new FRANkophile. David joins us from Mindshare Interactive and his enthusiasm knows no bounds.

Welcome David

I have just had a spin around the hood in this eye-catching Messerschmitt. This is one of three to be used for promotions/events/whatever…must say that EVERYONE stopped to ogle. First mover advantage for someone. The site is just a holding pg at the moment.

AdNews has asked me to “mouth off” on the topic of

HOW IMPORTANT ARE RATINGS FOR INDIVIDUAL STV PROGRAMS?

Free TV last week took out a full page ad in The Australian Financial Review slamming its subscription TV rivals for not scoring any shows in the top 1000 programs of 2007. The question, however, is: should we be comparing STV to Free TV? Isn’t it all about niche audiences? Do advertisers care about individual STV program ratings?

So I said … “the approach being taken by “Free TV” (FTV) is ego-driven and lacks perspective towards the medium as a whole. To my mind STV has never sought to compete as a mass audience alternative, rather providing a mass of audiences. STV is becoming an increasingly important component for delivering TV ads in an environment of falling FTV audiences. The facts are that STV’s audience is growing largely at the expense of FTV’s audience and the opportunity, for advertisers, is to identify these audience “chunks” such as NRL in NSW and QLD and capitalize with environmentally engaging ads.

The opportunity for TV, and surely the issue, is to be collaborative. Check out thinkbox. This is an initiative which celebrates the use of tv, whether it be web tv, free or subscription. It includes information on the growth of TV, how it can work for all budgets, case studies, an ad gallery and the ‘Thinkbox TV Planning Awards.’

This kind of forum/community provides energy, innovation and perspective for one of the world’s most accepted mediums, as opposed to petty infighting. United we stand.”

This will be printed in AdNews issue 30th November 2007.