Embargoes

Today on twitter and Facebook Australian tech journalists and the social PR and Marketing community were all enjoying this animated cartoon that looks at the ongoing Embargo debate from an uninterested journalist's point of view - was too funny not share (especially on a Friday)...

The difference between PR, advertising, design etc

With thanks to @issue where I saw it, and to Marty Neumeier who drew this little visualisation in the first place - this is a FANTASTIC way to describe the different ways different marketing professionals go about wooing consumers. Some people are just so clever! Plus it's funny because it's true :)

We are all grown ups here....

An interesting story broke over the weekend, which got me thinking...

Mars (the chocolate bar people, not the planet) has reduced the size of its iconic bar by 11% - from 60g to 53g. They are keeping the price the same.

And why did they say they did it?

To help us fight obesity.

Because removing that last mouthful from your calorie-packed afternoon naughty will make all the difference....

Mars' actions are intiguing to me. They demonstrate either opportunism (I can picture an over excited product manager; "Hey, can we make this a good spin? It's going to go down really well... I have seen loads in the press recently about obesity") or fear (VP marketing; "Since Caburys launched that thing that looks a bit like a Mars bar our ratings are taking a tumbling - our focus group results strongly indicate a risk of consumers feeling ripped off in these economic times. We need to save money but lets make it look like we are doing it for *their* sake." Goodness maybe its even the 21st century incarnation of their old tag line; A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play. Its all about healthy lifestyles afterall.

But is there really anyone that would fall for this? Is it necessary to find a positive angle in everything?

If Mars' motivation was health related it could either have taken 11% of every Mars bar sale after the bar size reduction and donated it to appropriate health charities, or cut the price - because this isn't about money.

Frankly, as a savvy consumer I know its financially motivated and you know what, I don't mind. It's Mars' business and if I want a Mars bar I will buy a Mars bar (hey, we all know Wagon Wheels are smaller than they used to be, and it doesn't stop me!).

It's just rather patronising to see an entire corporate comms team and its PR agency go to all that effort to communicate such nonsense to me. Makes me think that they reckon I am thick. Not a nice brand message.

What's a nice girl like you...?

I just emailed @brooke__ about a whitepaper one of our clients had shared with us overnight (they are in the UK). My email did little to contain my excitement, and she now thinks I am peculiar.... why? Well, the whitepaper is about MPLS, my all time favourite technology.

I can hear you wondering, if you don't already know, what on earth MPLS might be that could get a respectable girl like me, proud bearer of a non-techy history degree, all excited.

Back in the UK, from whence I was shipped last year, I was a telecoms specialist and MPLS stands for Multi Protocol Label Switching. Essentially MPLS gives a label to every packet of data transmitted over the network so you can prioritise, say, VoIP traffic over email, or whatever.

I know, I know, you still think its boring. Well this technology lead to some of the coolest case studies I have ever seen - radio stations migrating to a single IP network for voice, data AND their broadcasts!! By day they transmitted locally produced content, by night the entire network switched to a single broadcast (probably naff love songs and requests) all transmitted to the local stations over the IP network. If it weren't for MPLS they would never risk it because a single fat email could knock the broadcast off air.

So, dear reader, please don't think we PR folk accidentally fell into technology with our history degrees and wotnot... some of us have become really rather geeky in our old age.