October 2009 Archives

When we first started running The Pit out of DJs Nightspot in Gosford, it was free entry. Thursday nights had always been notoriously quiet in Gosford - crikey, even most weekends resembled a ghost town - so there were no high expectations and we were on a trial.

The club was packed.

You may or may not know this, but throughout the '90s, I worked as a nightclub DJ. No, it wasn't all duff-duff and techno. My realm was 'rawk' and underground and alternative and black. Beat mixing The Offspring into Joy Division isn't easy, but it's possible!

In an age where the audience has an overwhelming number of choices, channels and media, getting people to switch on or subscribe to your channel is increasingly difficult. Therefore, advertising television channels with flashy idents and major marketing campaigns is now more common. Well, everywhere in the world except Australia it seems.

I love a good meme. There's something so exciting about hundreds or even thousands of people riffing off a simple idea to create sometimes inspired and hilarious results. Some memes have a very short shelf-life, such as the Kanye West "I'mma let you finish" and the wonderful Twitter game of #medievalbumperstickers. Others seem to go on and on, like the champion of social media memes - Hitler's Downfall.

This post started out being merely a quick plug for a YouTube video that really tickled me. It has turned into something else because of the bizarre actions of the video creators.

Yesterday, two YouTube vids of Google Wave Cinema were doing the rounds - Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting...

We know the stories: Kraft get spanked by the ranting interwebs over the ridiculous iSnack 2.0; Cotton On forced to withdraw an entire t-shirt line over a Twitter storm that lasted just one morning. These are not the only social media PR disasters of recent times and they certainly won't be the last.

So I was reading AdNews yesterday when I came across the following quote. (It originally contained two typos but that's modern subediting for you...)

When I think of some wonderful TV ads recently made - "Sony Balls", "The Big Ad", "Schweppes Burst" - I ask myself...

No, it's not The Muppet Show - it's the brand new, all singing, all dancing, all marketing Atomik Soapbox.

Y'see the old blog at CopyWrite had become unfoccused and unsure what it was - a blog about being a writer that mentioned marketing, or a marketing blog impersonating a writing one. So the time came to split it down the middle, repot the cuttings, add some fertiliser (there's an obvious joke there) and...