No complaints from me, but hands up if you think they’re trying so hard it ends up looking templated and insincere?

—

Dear Matthew,

Hi, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Sourabh and I’m going to look after your enquiry today.

Thank you so much for writing to me here at nab. First of all, I would like to apologise for the delayed response and would like to thank you for your patience in resolving your situation.

I have carefully read your e-mail and from my understanding, you would like to have a replacement card for your Visa Debit Card as your previous got damaged.

I am so glad your e-mail reached to me because I’m an expert here at nab and can definitely help you with this today.

As per your request, I have today ordered you a replacement card for yourVisa Debit Card number 4902 XXXX XXXX XXXX.

Your mailing address on file is recorded as:

PO BOX XXX
SOUTHPORT QLD 4215

I wish to advise that your current PIN will not change as a result.

Your replacement debit card is expected to arrive within 5 - 7 business days.

Matthew, I hope I have helped with your enquiry and that you are happy with my personalised service to you. Wishing you a fantastic day.

By the way, if you would ever like to talk with one of my colleagues directly, please feel free to call us on 13 22 65 or internationally on +61 3 8641 9083 between 8:00am and 8:00pm (AEST) Monday to Friday.

Your Sincerely

Sourabh Dua
Your E-Mail Specialist Team

1. Ryan Adams - To Be Young (is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)

2. Midlake - Roscoe (beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve Remix)

3. Massive Attack - Teardrop

4. Beth Orton - Stolen Car

5. The Cure - Lullaby

6. Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

7. Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone

8. David Bowie - Rebel Rebel

9. Jimi Hendrix - Castles Made Of Sand

10. Radiohead - Karma Police

I thought I’d put all the clips in one post and see what it sounded like if they were all playing at the same time - the Matt Granfield symphony if you will. It doesn’t sound very good, but the results would be better if record companies would permit embedding of the official clips. Most of them don’t seem to these days. They must think that by forbidding me to share my ten favourite songs with you it will make them more money. Aren’t they clever.

I had to leave some brilliant songs off, and I can’t believe The Rollings Stones or Rage Against the Machine didn’t make the list, but there you go.

Voting opened today in Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time poll. What makes it into your top ten?

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).

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

I went trawling in the De Pasquale library, looking for some inspiring weekend reading. I found a complete back collection of the American Marketing Association’s Journal dating back over 60 years. Wow.

I’ve been commuting between Brisbane and the Gold Coast a lot lately for work and as a result, I often end up sleeping somewhere I wasn’t expecting too (nothing suss, I just end up working late and can’t be arsed driving home). The upside is that I’ve been getting more and more intimate with various friends and their couches, the downside is that I’m often left without a toothbrush, toothpaste, or clean underwear. Toothbrushes and toothpaste are easy enough to pick up, but I realised that my underwear supply needed re-plenishing (it wasn’t an emergency, but it was getting close).

My initial reaction was to drive across town on my lunch break to the nearest David Jones or Myer to pick up something from Mr H.Boss or Mr C.Klein. The round trip would have taken me an hour, but I figured it was worth it to get some quality dacks, because after all, you get what you pay for. There’s a factory-outlet-style underwear shop just across the road, but I knew what they had would be no match for the real official merchandise. It was a no-brainer for me: Go the expensive version because they’ll last and they’re, well, more fashionable.

As I found myself reasoning along such lines I suddenly realised I had succumbed, almost completely, to marketing. Me. A savvy, industry professional, with insight, brains and a need to save money in a time of global financial crisis, genuinely thought that it was worth a trip across town to buy a brand-name item which would be worn, invisibly, underneath my clothes and seen only on a select few occasions to a select few people.

One of my favourite movies is Fight Club, and one of my favourite scenes in it is when the hero gets on the bus and looks at Calvin Klein ad and sniggers - “is that what a real man is supposed to look like?” before spitting on the floor.

I hate my industry sometimes…

I play in a band and last week we were lucky enough to have our latest single reviewed newspapers from Melbourne and Perth. The Melbourne reviewer said our song was edgy and brilliant, the Perth reviewer said it was commercial crap. It got me thinking just how poorly critical opinion usually correlates with history, and wondering why in an age of social media, we need to pay attention to professional critics at all.

Mozart, Van Gough, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Gustav Eiffel, Picasso, and virtually any other creative pioneer you can name was unanimously panned by the critics until they eventually gained some traction and became trendy. The unlucky geniuses, like Mozart and Van Gough, only became popular after they died.

Look back at old reviews from the bible of American music criticism, Rolling Stone Magazine, and you’ll see that many albums now considered to be among the greatest of all time were given average ratings by the original reviewers. When the Eiffel Tower was first built, the Parisienne establishment thought it was an abomination on their skyline and wanted it pulled down immediately. Abraham Lincoln was rejected by Republicans as a vice-presidential candidate four years before he became the greatest leader America has ever seen. We clearly can’t trust the critics to know greatness when they first see it. Now that every book, song, album, film, bottle of wine and chocolate cake recipe is accessible to everyone online as soon as the creator wants it to be, and rated by members of the public soon after, we don’t need to rely on critics for their guidance either.

You could argue that when we give the public too much say we end up with American Idols in the charts and George W. Bush in the White House, but you’d be forgetting the long tail of brilliance that follows those two blights on history. For every Idol single there’s an epic Bruce Springsteen album waiting in the record library; George W. Bush, had to govern in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial.

No-one has ever erected a statue in honour of a critic, and thanks to social media, they probably never will.

Imagine if you knew exactly what your customers were thinking. Imagine if you knew EXACTLY what they wanted. Imagine if you could switch your TV to a channel which showed non-stop, live coverage of your customers thoughts about your brand, their concerns and their ideas on how you could do things better. Imagine if it was free and, as a company, you were encouraged to participate in the conversation. Sound satisfying?

Get Satisfaction is a community that helps companies engage their customers in dialogue. The concept is that members of the public with an idea can share their thoughts and then employees can jump online and show that your company is listening – it could be a rep from your corporate affairs department, or a guy from the mail room – it doesn’t matter. 6,873 organisations have joined the site, including some big names like Adobe, Apple, BBC and Dell. It’s early days yet, but the theory goes that rather than calling a customer support line and getting an average answer, customers can leave a comment on this website and get exactly the answer they want from the right department in a day or so. It’s a completely new approach to customer service, but it appears to be working.

• Books are souvenirs that hold ideas
• If it’s so dangerous to have your ipod on during takeoff and landing, how come you’re allowed to have it with you on the plane at all? Does all the scolding actually increase safety? How?
• Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much.
• Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.
• Given the choice between amazing, guaranteed service with a one day wait or interminable waits on hold with people who can’t really help you right now… well, the choice is pretty easy.
• Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love
• Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.

I’ll bet I can find survey data to support any arguement I want to make. Is McCain going to be the next President of the United States of America? Yep. Does eating chocolate during pregnancy reduce the chance of complications? The Mirror says yes. Has Peanut Butter been shown to satisfy hunger up to five times longer than some high-carbohydrate snacks like rice cakes? Kraft seems to think so. Do Australian men feel more happy surfing the Internet than having sex? According to the Courier Mail they do.

It’s a shame that marketers have to rely on surveys to justify what they do. Everyone knows that by the time survey respondents get to question 20 they don’t give a toss. Google wasn’t started because of a survey. Columbus didn’t discover the new world because nine out of ten respondents strongly agreed.

Never trust a survey.