Courtesy of cartoonstock.com
There is an age-old saying that you cannot make a leopard change its spots. Or teach an old dog new tricks.
Habits, especially deeply ingrained ones, die hard. Sometimes, they can be so addictive that they not only fail to perish, but linger on. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year.
Every now and then, you come across a nice marketing idea that not only catches the eye but changes conventional perception of how advertisements should look like. As I was flipping TODAY newspaper this morning, the following job advertisement caught my eye.
What I like about this ad is that it chooses not to adopt a conventional job advertisement format which lists down the various job requirements in bullet points, and is often written in a more straight forward manner.
The use of the visual provides a nice touch, and the use of colours is balanced in a harmonious manner while highlighting certain text which needs special attention. What’s more, the copy is beautifully written and pitched at the right level for the premium world-class restaurants that the Marina Bay Sands will be opening.
It would be great to see more organisations take the plunge by investing in creative and innovative job recruitment advertisements. People are the most important resource in any company, and it is absolutely critical to ensure that you hire only the best that your money can afford.
The art of curating and storytelling drew 8.5 million visitors to the Louvre in 2009 – many just to catch the Mona Lisa here!
One of the insights which I have gleaned in the hectic past few days from Steve Rubel and his thoughts on digital curation was this:
We should all be curators. Every single one of us in the fields of marketing, public relations, and advertising. And not only in the digital realm, but all others too.
Steve Rubel (courtesy of laughingsquid)
Just in case you don’t know, uber digital strategist Steve Rubel from Edelman was in Singapore (he just flew off this morning at 5.45 am) in the past few days. I had the rare privilege of meeting him personally at the kind invitation of Edelman and also to hear him speak at the MICA-CSC Public Communications Conference 2010.
Steve’s latest thoughts on what goes beyond Web 2.0 were certainly refreshing. His latest analogy likened the current information revolution to that of a bursting fire hydrant. We are all bombarded with multiple streams of data, information, contacts, video streams, tweets, photos, applications and what have you.
Transmedia in a diagram (courtesy of Seize the Media)
Crossing various media platforms (or Transmedia, a term which is well expounded by Kevin Lim) isn’t something new in the world of marketing communications. We have always done that in our ever desperate bid to attract eyeballs, visitors, and revenue in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Witness how quickly the emergence of communication technologies like the printing press, telephone, radio, television, websites, mobile phone, huge electronic billboards, bus stop shelters, and building facades are used for advertising purposes.
Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
In this current age of multi-tasking, multi-roles, multi-networks and multi-everything, a few things seem to stand out quite clearly.
Many appear to be the inevitable outcome of ever-increasing activity and interactivity across multi-platforms.
(Source: SCCCI)
How should board directors carry out their duties as arbiters of public trust? What should companies do to boost performance while ensuring that sufficient safeguards are in place? In an age of increasing dissatisfaction over how companies and charities are governed, how does one balance the need for innovation with control?
To find out the answers to these questions (and more), I signed up for a talk organised by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry yesterday by Mr JY Pillay, Chairman of the Singapore Exchange, who spoke about corporate governance and its implications for both public-listed firms and Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Mr Pillay is one of the movers and shakers in Singapore, and has helmed various leading organisations as the former chairman of Singapore Airlines, Temasek Holdings and DBS Bank, amongst others.
At the kind invitation of Omy.sg, I had the privilege of catching “The Lovely Bones” directed by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson with movie mogul Stephen Spielberg as the executive producer. Screened at the Lido, it certainly won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
Based on the bestselling novel in 2002 by Alice Sebold, the movie centred around how 14 year old Susie Salmon (like the fish), played with much aplomb by Saoirse Ronan, was brutally murdered and raped on her way home from school in 1973 and the events which unfurled before and after the incident.
Jack Neo and his wife Irene Kng (courtesy of Syokkahwin.com)
By now, everybody would have read, listened, spoken about or viewed news about Jack Neo, his wife, and his dalliances with Wendy Chong.
The local and international media has gone wild with the latest celebrity news in every channel, and tremendous buzz has been generated in social media and mobile platforms – SMSes, MMSes, blogs, Facebook, forums, Twitter, Plurk, Youtube, blog aggregators (like Ping.sg), wikis and so on. Many have leapt into the fray with all kinds of judgements and interpretations, with some harsher than others. Jack himself has blogged about it here and apologised for his actions.
Disney’s one of the top dogs both online and offline – it is 10th on Interbrand’s list and 3rd online (courtesy of Jeff Bullas)
An interesting social media monitoring report by Jeff Bullas highlighted the buzz which major brands generated online relative to their overall brand equity as measured by Interbrand. What’s noteworthy is that the most prominent brands in the digital social spaces – at least as measured by Jeff over the last 12 hours – is fairly comparable to those offline. The top 10 brands on Interbrand’s list, which are assessed by a robust mix of different factors linked to market value, financial earnings, and others, are measured vis-a-vis their online might.
Other than Google which appears to be a pure internet play, the rest of the companies have very significant brick and mortar presences.
