Skip to main content

I have knits

Up at Waipu on the weekend. Saturday was market day. I came across these knitted things on a stall in the town hall - right next to a table of artisan honey. I have to say that I was impressed. The little old lady running the stall must spend half her life knitting these little figures. What I liked was the characterisation. Seriously. They reminded me of Tin Tin - or a mash up of Tin Tin, The Life of Brian and the Wombles. I took the shot but didn't notice the mad looking bagpiper in the background. It's crying out for speech balloons or a stop motion show (maybe for G3 mobile distribution). Might have to head back up next market day and see if I can commission the wee woman to knit some characters of my own cunning design...

Caught up with Simon Morgan for pint and a chat last night. Simon is managing partner for Publicis Digital Australia and New Zealand. Interesting to hear some of his thoughts on the use of social media by marketers. He described a successful promotion his team had developed for Nestle through MySpace. I met Simon when he owned Carpe Diem a small Direct Marketing company. e sold his business and in the past few years he has guided Publicis' growth in the digital arena. Always a pleasure to catch up with the grand lad from Sheffield - which you can do here too on his highly useful blog.

Simon also runs a terrific tool for holiday home owners who rent out their baches. Book-a-bach was just a glimmer in his eye when we first met but now it is going gang-busters with hundreds of listings all over the country. Brillian tool. I've used it many times. With summer coming get onto finding a getaway place before the rush. We were chatting about The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin. Simon told me there had been times when he had wanted to quit with Book-a-Bach. I know from my own experience with eMALE the men's interest site that I published for years that having a 'proper' job can take a great deal of commitment, making it hard to stay on top of personal projects. Simon plugged awayI am glad to say.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer