The back door to the office is usually propped open with a wooden doorstop so the smokers can duck out for a puff without carrying their keypass thingos. Today I saw this:

…And it made me think that there are probably a lot more redundancies on the way. Here’s ten things that no-one will do offline in ten years time (list includes bonus interesting links):

1. Looking up a word in a dictionary
2. Reading the newspaper
3. Finding a local business
4. Getting directions
5. Making plans
6. Writing a diary/journal
7. Email
   
8. Going into a Government-run office for day to day stuff (even if you’re an old person).
9. Whatever the last thing you did offline was.
10. Going out on a Friday night. (All entertainment will either be online, or we’ll all have Swine Flu and be stuck indoors).

Why doesn’t McDonalds do its ads in-house? Surely it would be more cost-effective. They could hire a bunch of creative teams and do their own production. It would have to be cheaper. Obviously there’s the argument that they want variety, but VW used DDB for decades and the results were brilliant. The Economist hasn’t changed it’s marketing comms strategy since the 70s. McDonalds could save a mint, and they never do anything that risque anyway. They’re never done anything remotely like Subservient Chicken.

Although this is weird enough…

What are they worried about?

What am I missing here?

Toothpaste. I like mine with breath strips and green gel. You like yours with red stripes and bi-carb soda (for that whitening sensation). That’s cool, different toothpastes are pretty easy to tell apart, look at them on the supermarket shelves and they’re all vying for attention in different ways, trying to out-brighten and out-whiten each other. There’s no confusion. No company makes their toothpaste look like any other company’s. It’s all minty freshness, and a few crazy oddball flavours thrown in the mix from time to time (Zest Impact anyone?).

Mints, on the other hand, exist in an entirely different void. I saw these at the local cafe yesterday and was puzzled:

I made a purchase, wondering what brand manager in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to position a product with exactly the same packaging, shape, size and flavour as Tic-Tacs and then allow them to be sold for $2 (Two Dollars!) at Brisbane coffee shops. I was going to write a blog entry about it and ask if their daring design would prompt anyone else to buy them, just out of interests sake. I was going to offer whatever was left of the contents up as a prize to the reader with the best answer.

Before I hit ‘publish’ I decided to quickly search the web and see just which company was behind ‘Flirt’, and what information I could gather on the ‘Jigz’ product line (which, to be honest, looked alarmingly like the sort of generic brand name you’d come up with if all the other ones were taken, despite their official-looking trademark symbols). But no information was to be found. Nil. Nothing. Google didn’t know they existed. Google image search revealed only some wannabe rappers. How could this be? Was I on the receiving end of a product so daring, so cool and so cheeky it existed only in the real world, with no actual online marketing campaign and no multi-million dollar website? Was this 100% pure guerilla marketing with distrubution at only the hippest, underground Valley cafes?

No, sadly it was not.

Just before I hit publish and went about my day I turned the pack over to see if I could find the address of the manufacturer. Hidden in the fine print, the second last word after the coluring information, was the word ‘Aldi’. “FLIRT is a registered trademark and JIGZ is a trademark of ALDI Stores”. I hadn’t discovered a daring new mint, I’d been ripped off by a cafe too tight to buy proper mints and a discount food chain with so little publicity and so many lawyers it could get away with it. They weren’t cheekily ripping off Tic-Tacs as part of a marketing campaign for cool people, they were cheekily ripping off Tic-Tacs as part of a marketing campaign for poor people. Cheeky fuckers.

I could see the rain pouring down outside the window yesterday but I was so preoccupied with work I didn’t leave the office until 9.30pm after the Gruen Transfer (which featured my sister agency Gallery De Pasquale doing ‘The Pitch’) had finished. (Jeez I like long sentences). It had stopped raining by then and I live on a nice high hill, so I was kind of oblivious to the damage, at least until an email did the rounds of the office today with a whole bunch of images of the damage. There were so many it was alarming, but this one of Breakfast Creek overflowing near the hospital about 1km up the road from where I work in Fortitude Valley really hit home.

Scary stuff. Glad my house isn’t on the other side!

Anyway, I just had another email from someone else in the office mentioning that CityCat services will be stopping at sunset tonight because there’s so much debris floating on the river it’s too dangerous for ferries to be out.

This proves a few things:

• If you’re going to live near a river, live on a hill
• At $20 a pop, gumboots aren’t a bad investment, but buy them when it’s dry
• Email is still good for spreading stuff, especially lots of random pics

Last night my friend, let’s call her @trudy_adams, was headed to a comedy gig in Brisbane. Being a young early-adopting Twitter user she did of course tweet her intentions and happened to mention the name of the performer. Within a few minutes a bar next door to the comedy venue had started following her and given her a special offer if she popped in for a drink before the show. She was chuffed because they’d taken the time to give her something of value. They won themselves an extra customer for the evening.

Cost to both parties: nil.

This was not a major corporate chain with a team of social media strategists working behind the scenes to squeeze dollars out of sentiment, this was just a small business owner overhearing a conversation by a potential customer and engaging.

It had never occured to me that starting a social media marketing agency was a dumb idea. I’m reasonably cluey, not too bad at making business decisions, and have done OK for myself over the last decade since I stopped working for The Man, but it didn’t occur to me a firm which focussed solely on helping companies create meaningful, profitable relationships with their customers via social media was doomed.

You can be a gatekeeper to a new technology for a while, but you’ll quickly end up being a troll trying to eek out a living guarding a bridge to nowhere, oblivious to the fact that a new bypass has opened up just down the river.

Social media is just another bunch of communication channels which work the same way as talkback radio and letters to the editor do. The only difference is that everyone gets to be Rupert Murdoch and the old people aren’t invited. It’s not rocket science, it’s just the way people communicate now. If you’re interested in it and you’re adept at expressing other people’s opinions in 140 characters or less, you’re looking through a small window of opportunity here to pimp yourself out as a social media consultant. You’ve got about 8 months left to hold seminars and help newbies guide the way, but by 2010 all the road maps will have been re-written and marketing managers, PR firms and advertising agencies will be bypassing your little bridge in the woods as they travel down the newsest section of the information superhighway, on which Twitter will have been relegated to the slow lane and Facebook will be a distant speck in the rearview mirror.

Make hay while the sun shines of course, just don’t try and build your house from the crop. Remember what happened to the little piggy.

The winner has been announed for Tourism Queensland’s ‘The Best Job in the World‘ campaign and congratulations must go to Brit, Ben Southall, for taking out the prize.I have no idea what he did to win, but presumably he was affable, scrubbed up well on YouTube and had starred in less than a handful of Russian porn films. I haven’t been following the campaign closely, but of course, I didn’t have to. Every news channel in the world has been running headlines since day one, Sunrise had a spot on it this morning and even ABC news bulletins have talked the story up.

I’m mighty impressed with the campaign on the whole, despite some early stumbling, and given that this is only the end of phase one (the dude now has to go do the ‘work’ and write a blog about his experience), I’ll bet Tourism Queensland are chuffed with Cummins Nitro’s work. My guess is Ben’s blog won’t reach even a fraction of the people that news of the campaign to hire him did, but at the end of the day, I don’t think that really matters. Both agency and client will be hoping the online journal generates some interest, but success will be measured by overall column inches, and by that yard-stick, they’ve put together one of the best social media campaigns to date.

Will it translate into dollars for Queensland’s Tourism industry? It certainly will for Hamilton Island (I wonder what the other resorts think of it all). There’ll undoubtedly be a ripple effect too for the rest of Tropical North Queensland, but I’m really looking forward to reading the final report at the end of the day and comparing the success of this social media-bsed campaign to what they’ve done in the past. I’ll be surprised if there are any jaw-busting revelations there though. I think it will result in much greater media coverage than they’ve ever had, but in reality, Queensland is a long way from the rest of the world and favourable coverage on Fleet Street has a long way to trickle-down. For this to convert to substantially greater visitor numbers would be a massive achievement. I don’t think they’ll pull it off, but regardless, it is an absolutely fantastic advertising campaign.

Oh, and did someone mention something about a new mens range at a clothing store? No? Didn’t think so.