Ladies, gentlemen, lend me your smarts!

I have a favour to ask of anyone who can answer the following for me.

I have a friend who is on their way back to our fair shores and they are trying to weigh up the freelance/salary options with their wide & varied skill set. (I'm not going to lie - I've worked for this person and they are fabulous, in management and in practice.)

Who can tell me the going hourly rate for following:

• Brand and Marketing planning
• Optiminsation strategies
• Ecommerce marketplace planning
• Adwords and social media management

So, I can understand if you don't want to comment on any of this, but if you have this kind of information and would like to share it with me, please PLEASE email me on monica.wales@gmail.com I'll be your best friend.

WTF ASB?

OK. So I get it, you guys lost the account and Droga are going to take over real soon (they haven't already right?) but what the f**k is this about?

Is there an entire campaign that I have missed. What relevance does this dog have? Or staring? Surely if you wanted to talk about animals that stare you would use an owl? Right? (It's the animal which springs to my mind when you talk about staring.)

All this does, is make me doubt ASB's ability to take itself and it's business seriously. Come on people - financial institution. That's not the client to be pulling your kooky shit with.

It's the first of the month

And you know what that means...

NEW BILLBOARD DAY!

What really gets me though is walking home at about 5am this morning I saw the skin at K Rd & Ponsonby being taken down and a new one going up. For a geek like me, this was exciting - nothing to do with the vodka & sodas which had been consumed earlier in the evening.

The poor installer didn't know what was going on, crazy girl taking photos of him, but I'm sure he will get over it.

It was such a quick process. Dude goes up in the cherry picker:

A quick pull and down it comes:
And up goes the new skin.
Bing, bang, BOOM. Done. I was impressed how quick the whole process was and felt little sorry for the poor guys who were missioning around putting up our skins for us at that time of the morning.

Talking about billboards, not so fussed on the new ones for The Mentalist. Some of the type is way too small. Hard to read.

I almost like the one they have on Richmond Road which says something along the lines of 'You live in Grey Lynn because you know its better than Remuera'. Almost.

Caught on Camera

There are some strange goings on in the Barnes Catmur & Friends offices... So much so that there has been CCTV installed.

and wouldn't you know it, we caught something strange straightaway:

Do you know what's happening in your offices when you're not there?

I'll return you to your normal programming next post.

Atrium Billboard

It's so big!

Back in May I wrote about the massive Mini billboard which someone at FCB told me that they had sorted out the site with Atrium.

So at the start of the month the Mini billboard came down and up went an Atrium billboard. (Yes, I'm running a little behind... been busy since I moved up.)

So, I am super glad that the site is being used, and that Atrium are making the most of it, but I think someone should have taught them one of the golden rules of outdoor advertising.

1 simple clear message. Just the one.

While I understand that it is a massive skin, the amount of time someone has to take in the message is very short. I imagine that the cost of the skin was lovingly distributed between all of the store represented here, but I couldn't tell you what any of them are.

So, I'm not huge on the creative, but I love the site. It's so big and impressive.

Bring the AdShow back

Last night I went to the recording of the final episode of The AdShow Season One. As with all the shows, it was a goodie with interesting guests and lots of laughs.

During the pre-drinks I got to talking with some of the peeps and it would seem as though Season Two has not yet been confirmed. I'm not going to lie, this surprised me. Season One was extended due to it's success. Now - for those of you who roll in the media world - as TVNZ7 is not monitored by Nielsens (the company which reports ratings for TV shows) as there is no advertising on TVNZ7. This means the success of the show is based on the number of online streams on tvnz.co.nz. From what I understand, The AdShow had more streams than any other TVNZ7 show. Good freaking work.

I can understand why this show has done so well. The advertising industry is full of people who know how awesome they are. They have to know how awesome they are, it's part of the job description. The thing that's annoying is that not everyone knows how awesome we are. Sure, there are awards shows where we get to pat ourselves on the back, but hows about some proper recognition? Some adoration from the general population?

Now I've gotta say, I wasn't a fan of seeing myself on television, but it was awful kind of them to invite me on. More than anything, I love trooping along on a Wednesday, watching the magic happen live and meeting the rest of the live audience.

Hazel and Simon do an awesome job and I would love to see the show come back for round 2.

If you agree with me, PLEASE join The AdShow Season Two group on Facebook and invite others who you think want to see more AdShow too. Let's show some solidarity and see more of, well, ourselves!

Who doesn't want to see more of this:

Hot.

No such thing as an original idea?

In the last 2 days 2 promotional ideas have been brought to my attention and BOTH of them have been done before. This leads me to ask the question:

Is there no such thing as an original idea anymore?

Example one. TVNZ promotion of Vampire Diaries:

These 2 images are c/- @peteinak & @dylanp these 'blood' coolers were in Starcom and I'm guessing Vodafone (Hmm - what a surprise, TVNZ going directly to a client!)

So, these are a blatant ripoff of True Blood:

Thanks to @harfish for this image.

What gets me about this TVNZ promotion is that the water cooler idea works for True Blood - there is a blood product in the series which the Vampires drink. Doesn't have quite the same synergy with Vampire Diaries.

Couple this with the (in my opinion) inappropriate online advertising, I think this has all been a bit of a flop.

Example two. Good Health Magazine promotion:

Blatant rip off of... VW Piano Stairs

So, is there such a thing as an original idea anymore? Or, considering the Old Spice ads, should we all just pack up and go home - cos there's no beating that.

Swan Dive!