A fair few weeks back the team signed their lives away (at least for the month of May) to pitch on the digital creative account for Ardent Leisure Group, owners of Australia’s most loved fun-parks including Dreamworld, WhiteWater World, AMF, King-Pin Bowling, M9 Laser skirmish centres, and the national chain of Goodlife Health Clubs.  Today, after being tight lipped in celebration, Pusher and B&T Mag got to exclusively announce the win.  Along with becoming a top’notch key account for Pusher, this roller-coaster’strike of a win holds a special place for me. Many years back, my first Award School crack for the ‘The Claw’ made it to the wall.   Diggidy, top tune & salad days! Ecstatic to have had a dream brief in the early days…and now am getting to work on that dream. This feels better than the best job. v- happy friday.

Found an interesting case study into Call To Actions for different messaging. Basically they found that when the messaging was changed to a more of a command they had more success (10%) as compared to a statement (4.7%). When the command was followed with an access point of sort (adding the word “here”) it had a 25% increase to 12.8% click through rate. I found this interesting for the fact that I guess the internet is still a relatively new thing for a lot of people so we still need to make things very obvious for people and not take too much for granted.

Check out the article here.
(learning already)

-Brett

If you are a social networking hick and love all things ville and wars you can now buy and redeem products at 7-Eleven and gain points on a virtual punch card to unlock uber gifts to share with friends on Facebook.  Trialing in the US & Canada for now, the promotion is like a fly-buys points program for convenience store shopping that rewards you with an online Zynga game challenge every time you buy specially marked products. The ‘Buy, Earn, Pay’ promotion in-game Zynga challenges allow you to gain Ville cred, and depending on what you’re into, there’s challenges for MafiaWars, YoVille and FarmVille. Each game has its own unique gifts with users scrolling over the items for more details. You can also submit your code via text message and activate the in-game challenge that way.

I don’t know if the flight to LA is worth it at this stage, but when the promo hits Australia you can bet there will be plenty of people waiting to uber-gift on Farmville, Fishville, YoVille, Vampire Wars and the recently released FrontierVille where you get to carve out a home in the wilderness and raise a family, fight bears and snakes…you can collect FrontierVille Facebook gold too. Fellow pioneers who have been Frontier’ing for a while, can someone please tell me if I should start counting my chickens that the price of my gold is going to go up? How long before the first 7-Eleven opens in the Wild West?! All this land clearing has made me super thirsty for a Slurpee.

-mike

I went to a presentation this weekend on Technology and Behaviour for the Creative Sydney festival. Mike Walsh was one of the speakers, and I was really impressed with his insights. He talked about some of the interesting trends happening in Asia specifically, including internet addiction, group buying, user generated (or altered content) and the future of mobile phones. I could probably write an essay on his talk because I found it so interesting! But I’ll just talk about one point.

One of the main points I took from the talk was the fact that our world will soon be filled with people that have always lived with the internet and will not know life without it (people born after 1994). The internet will not be something you “go to” but just something that is. From this we need to make the technologies work for us, and change with them. One example of this is in China where group buying has become a phenomena. If someone wants to buy a fridge they put the call out to find 300 other people that want that same fridge. They then set a date and store location, and flash mob it, demanding 300 fridges at a huge discounted price (shop owners are normally so afraid of having 300 angry customers in the store, that they usually agree! ha). Perfect aye!

Another example about this was from another speaker Rachel Botsman. She believed that we were moving from a hyper consumption market into a collaborative consumption market. Pointing out that as technology is advancing our behaviours seem to be moving back to old ways of bartering and sharing. Things like share cars, couch surfing and land share are creating experiences we want to share and show off rather than things or objects.

I was really inspired and optimistic after hearing these two speakers about the future of technology and social media. Basically I feel that we are moving into a more social world with technology, where everyone can share their social experiences, help others and feel good about themselves. The more we can use technology and trust it, the more it lends itself to us being able to make it work for us and really benefit our lives by making them richer and fuller.

-Brett

Having just recently knockoff another birthday with the Pusher crew the week before, Brett Walsh still had time to sneak into the Young Lions Finals in the digital Cyber category.

Working with Natalie Dummigan, their brief for the final round of competition was for ‘Reach Out’ and addressed the issue of binge drinking among young people. Did it take them long to crack a great entry? Well, as per the rules of the global competition, they answered the brief with creative and production of their entry in less than 24 hours! Check out their solution and the winners.

Unfortunately, as the results came in, a team from Clemenger BBDO Melbourne managed to pinch first place, but Pusher have still got a few more fighting entries to come next year. Stay tuned and check out the great work from around the globe here.

-mike