When this 2010 election campaign is over,  Tony Abbott’s stumbling performance on last night’s 7.30 report may well be remembered as a costly moment for the Liberal’s campaign. Abbott was unimpressive generally, but in particular in his  response to questioning about the details of his party’s broadband plan. Abbott struggled with questions about the detail of the plan, then attempted to pass off his ineptitude by saying “I’m no tech head” .

What was stunning about this wasn’t  Abbott  ignorance of the detail of the policy, but the flippancy and complete lack of embarrassment with which he dealt with his lack of knowledge. By saying he “wasn’t Bill Gates”, he was implying, by proxy that technical issues were the concern of computer nerds, and that the details of the policy were beneath hin Which is stunning in both it’s arrogance and Abbott’s lack of understanding of how the real world works.

What Abbott doesn’t understand is about broadband speed is the question isn’t who in the electorate will be affected, but who won’t. What Australian business doesn’t now have a web presence? What person doesn’t pay bills or manage their finances online? What student doesn’t use the internet for study? In fact, who doesn’t go online as part of their day to day life?

The answer, evidently, is career politicians who have advisors to handle that sort of thing for them, and have never had to place an order, or pay a bill, or book a cab, or find a plumber online.  Rather than being the reserve of “tech heads”,  issues relating to broadband speed are part of mainstream life in Australia, and will only become more important.

To put the inappropriateness of the statement in context, imagine if Kerry O’Brien had asked Abbott a question about the wheat industry, and Abbott, unable to answer, had joked “Well, how would I know, I’m not Old McDonald?” Or if he had been asked an economic question and responded with “Who do I look like, Ben Bernanke? Ask a number cruncher, why don’t you?” Unthinkable.

Abbott can take some comfort in one thing, however. The man the ALP have entrusted to take him to task over this howler is Stephen Conroy.

Sometimes a random shot can say a lot. And the above shot, taken of my living room one arvo and loaded to facebook quickly gained comments from my friends without kids about how a shot like this would put them off having kids forever. Its a far cry from what our living room is supposed to look like, but that’s the reality of kids confined to a small space on a cold day.

This got me thinking. We so often take a shot that would accidentally just work its pants off as a real ad – hence the term ‘real ads’

So this post and following posts in the real ads category are just that. Shots of real life experiences that could form a tangible, real ad campaign and sometimes, the beginning of an idea. No models, no clever copy and no contrived shots. Just the power of a real life, original shot and a logo. We already have a heap ready to go so keep your eye on this space.

I did something I am utterly ashamed of the other day.

I went and filled up the car with a full tank of petrol from my local BP servo. What got me was that I did it without even thinking about what has been going on in the Gulf of Mexico. Yep, despite my constant rants about the environment, riding bikes, better ways to live and so on, it did not even register in my head what I had done until a couple of days later.

This got me thinking. I stopped eating Kit Kat after Greenpeace ran a fantastic campaign to highlight the plight of the Orangutan.  I black banned De Beers diamonds after reading Blood Diamond. Geez I event went off Gordon Ramsey after he came out to Australia and made a complete twat of himself. But, to my surprise, I am yet to see much more than a token response to what BP has caused in the Gulf of Mexico. To my knowledge, no local revolt against buying BP, no compelling social media action. Just, it seems, a token response in facebook, twitter, some isolated protests.

Why?

Is it because we all need petrol in some way, so we have to accept that these things will happen? Or because it happened in the Gulf of Mexico and not Bass Strait. Or are we just so battered by these things happening that we just don’t register any more? Maybe we are waiting for someone else to do it? Or, something else I have hear “Why black-ban BP when they are all bad?”

I don’t have the answer, but I do know this. Yes, I need petrol. Yes, these things happen. But unfortunately, on this occasion, it seems it was a) preventable and b) BP could have done and could be doing a lot more to fix the problem in terms of response time, cash and resources. I used to like the BP logo. At the time I thought it was a real swing by a company involved in a necessary evil to look “Beyond Petrol” Lets just say the brand looks a little darker to me now and I won’t be buying BP anytime soon.

@tonyprysten

More info

Gulf of Mexico official response by BP

BP Flickr Group for some nice company pics of the resonse

Igloo CEO and Co-Founder, Andrew Englisch, was recently interviewed on Q Radio for Qantas by Ita Buttrose. If the mile high club is not quite your thing, take 5 mins to hear his Andrew’s take on digital, social media and how igloo came about. The perfect way to pass time when flying Melbourne > LAX … only 15 hours to go!

Listen to the interview

Igloo has just started working on some tactical projects for Quit Victoria. This has opened our eyes to some crazy statistics around smoking. We all know its bad, but we thought it worthwhile pointing out the reality behind a few myths that were floating around the studio before we got the inside info.

Myth 1
More girls smoke than guys.

In reality, more males smoke than females. Whilst both have generally been in decline over the last 10 years, the gap is closing and interestingly, the percentage of female smokers in the last year has climbed. Kids are also smoking less so our good old y-gen who want it all, also seem to want good health.

Myth 2
Tobacco companies aren’t allowed to spend to promote smoking in Australia.

Unfortunately, the banning of visible advertising has just meant tobacco companies need to be a bit more cunning in the way they encourage us to smoke. Since the banning of smoking in pubs, bars and restaurants came into effect, the ciggie companies have been sponsoring a number of those cool outdoor areas, rooftops, beer garden. Read this article in the Age. Yep, some of those cool bars have been a tad uncool in the way they have been decking out their venues.

Myth 3
If you stop smoking, you will put on weight.

Sorry, folks. Can’t use that line. A recent study done by Uni NSW and Melbourne UNI found that having a few ciggies a day “does not keep fat off and could result in too much fat being stored in areas dangerous to health” According to the study, many young women start smoking in the belief that they will lower their weight. For inspiration, check out sites like Christy Turlington Burns. That said, a lot of people do find that they eat to fill the void of that habit of smoking. That’s cool, just try eating something that isn’t high in fat!

Myth 4
Low tar ciggies are safer.

Unfortunately (if you do like to smoke) this just ain’t the case. All cigarettes are bad whilst low-tar cigarettes “can be slightly less damaging to your lungs over a long period of time, people who smoke these have been shown to take deeper puffs, puff more frequently and smoke the cigarettes to a shorter butt length.”

Myth 5
Awesome creative directors need to smoke

Ok, so my favorite hero of all time (at the moment), Draper and his whole team suck back on countless darts whilst rolling out awesome creative for big global brands before spending his time (smoking) with various mistresses at lunch and then going home to one hot (ex) wife. And despite that fact that there are ace looking flickr groups, movie stars do it, rockstars do it, hell, even half of igloo can’t shake it, my respect goes to awesome people who you think would smoke, if it’s that cool, but don’t.

As we emerge victorious from a huge website build, complete with everything you can cram into a website – Interactivity, Social Media, Flash, Javascript, etc. all built on top of Sitecore – we feel that we have so much information to share with the world. I had a brief chat with some of the many key people involved in our latest project mazda.com.au and asked them, “what was the most important lesson to take away from the project”. I’ve tried to elaborate on these concise points and hopefully there is something in this for everyone.

Staffing a digital agency is very similar to casting for a movie. There are plenty of people that will fill the role, but it’s in the critical scene that the real star shows their value. Similarly, when selecting the right staff in an agency its easy enough to employ people who are ‘good enough’, but it’s not until your company’s flagship project is on the precipice of failure that the real guns will step up and prove their worth.

Make sure you know your culture and staff to suit that culture. A dev shop will be more inclined to find people who can grind it out from 9-5 and who are less creatively inclined as they can get easily distracted, however if you’re at a creative agency you may lean towards staff who are lateral thinkers and more outgoing but can be a little harder to control. Maybe you need a mix of the two? If you don’t understand your culture you will never recruit the right people.

As much as I want to avoid using another pun, here it is. You can’t choose your family, just like a digital agency can’t choose it’s clients’ partners.

You need to develop your relationship with these third parties as it could be all that stands between you and missing your deadlines. Think of ways to improve the relationship whilst respecting the boundaries you both have in your prospective markets. At igloo we work very closely with all of our clients’ suppliers and maintaining a beneficial relationship is of the utmost importance. Treating them as a competitor will only serve to make your job impossible when you are relying on them at the last minute.

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Check out the Fifteen Melbourne, video project overview featuring Co-Creator and Executive Head Chef, Tobie Puttock. Watch on iglooTV or on the igloo youtube channel.

I just did something that I haven’t done since I was a struggling design student looking to option up my crappy pad. Yep, I went to Ikea. Lets skip why I chose to do Ikea with 2 kids (or why I was at Ikea at all) skip to my design tuned eye catching these rather cool cans of produce that grabbed my attention as I struggled to wheel my trolley of bits (crap) to the car.

Always a sucker for good packaging or design, especially if the colour green is involved, I couldn’t go past the Ikea food store without grabbing myself a refreshing couple of cans of Kolsyrad Parondryck. What? Kolsyrad Parondryck. (If I google it I get the igloo blog?) Just what the design soul needs after a hard day pushing pixels. Yep, one for me and one for Ollie (my 4 year old son) Yep, Ollie, you can have the black can, I’ll have the white. Hang on. Why does mine say ‘Alkoholfri’?  Ok, my Swedish is a bit dusty so maybe I’ll just say it like its spelt. Al-co-hole-free. Ollie, give me the can back. Ollie. Black can. Now. NOW! Yep he was well and truly half way through his can of 4.5% Alc/Vol Kolsyrad Parondryck before I yanked it from his desperate grip. Oh well, don’t tell DHS.

So back to the point of all this. Ikea has got kinda cool lately. Well if I can drink and shop, that’s cool. Grab yourself a couple of cans of Kolsyrad Parondryck before you do the Ikea wander. I highly recommend the black can. Load up the trolley and watch the Ikea madness with the slight numbness only Kolsyrad Parondryck can give you.

igloo’s key values are Innovation, Collaboration and Exceptional Service, or what us in the know like to call – ICE. So it’s no real surprise that it’s something we focus from time to time here on the blog. I’m going to tell you what innovation means to me and then try to explain how to bring it to life for your yourself or your organisation.

What is innovation?

Innovation is creating something new; something original. But not inventing and not designing.
It’s using what’s around you, but just doing it better. Using your experience and knowledge to develop a product or process that is superior.

Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile.

He wasn’t even alive when it was invented in 1769. 1806 saw gas internal combustion engines, 1838 for the electric car, 1885 introduced petrol engines In 1902, at least 50 US firms manufactured and sold cars, generally expensive to purchase and difficult to maintain.

Ford developed an intuitive understanding that many people wanted faster horses to do practical jobs like getting to and from town quicker so more work could be done on the farm.

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I hate to harp on about Apple but it’s hard to avoid at the moment. Steve Jobs’ essay “Thoughts on Flash” this week lit a firecracker underneath the already over-effusive internet flame war that is Flash vs Silverlight vs HTML5. It’s nothing new from Apple, but it’s a real line in the sand and clearly not up for debate.

What Steve had to say about Flash:

First, there’s “Open”….
Second, there’s the “full web”….
Third, there’s reliability, security and performance…
Fourth, there’s battery life….
Fifth, there’s Touch…
Sixth, the most important reason… We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Conclusions.
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