Archive for June, 2010

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A PR Lesson: What to do when it’s not a slow news day


2010
06.24

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So our client, The Diet Plate (a medical device which shows you how much you should be eating from each food group) has paid a small fortune to bring out the doctor advisor guy from the British version of The Biggest Loser for a PR junket. He’s going to be on virtually every chat show and current affairs program in the country spruiking the virtues of portion control as a weight loss tool, and of course, telling everyone how great The Diet Plate is. They’d been hoping for a slow news week. What they got was quite the opposite. You could blow up the Sydney Harbour Bridge today and no one would notice*. Not quite the way I wanted to launch the first new client of my new agency (memery, more on that later).

Rather than moan about how we were going to get buried, we thought we’d run some ads taking advantage of the situation. It was too late to book anything anywhere, so we thought Google AdWords would do the trick.

Within an hour of the news about Julia Gillard taking the top office breaking we had an ad up targeting anyone who searched Google for her name. Here’s what it looked like (first ad at the top on the right):

While we were on the band-wagon, we also ran ads targeting the other political leaders, the copy was as follows:

Targeting ‘Kevin Rudd‘ searches

The Diet Plate
Lose weight while
eating humble pie

http://www.thedietplate.com.au

—

Targeting ‘Malcolm Turnbull’ searches

The Diet Plate
Revenge isn’t the best
dish served cold

http://www.thedietplate.com.au

—

Targeting  ‘Tony Abbott’ searches

The Diet Plate
Microwave safe. In case
of global warming

http://www.thedietplate.com.au

—

Targeting ‘Bob Brown’ searches

The Diet Plate
When you want to eat
more than greens

http://www.thedietplate.com.au

—

I usually prefer writing longer copy, but it goes to show, you can have a lot of fun with two lines if you try. I’m sure Ernest Hemingway would agree.

*Don’t try this at home

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Killbot Kindergarten


2010
06.09

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My friends started a band slash electro neo-soul duo called Killbot Kindergarten. They wanted me to write a bio for them. It was hard because they hadn’t done a whole bunch of stuff yet. They haven’t even played a show. Killbot Kindergarten though, how could you turn a gig like that down. Here’s what I wrote. Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/killbotkindergarten

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Killbot Kindergarten are electro folks. Two soul children with a glass-bottomed boat and pentatonic sails. Micro Korgs and mellow chords; hearts in Brisbane, ears abroad.

A retro-futurist collaboration of neo-soul tones draped over unashamedly binary bones, Youka Snell and Adam Sait’s project has graduated music college and arrived back at a pre-school for pandas bearing jet packs; Gorillaz in their midst. Like a soy chai latte in a styrofoam cup, the result is both organic and plastic. You won’t recognise the sound on your lips at first, but after a few sips, you’ll never go to Starbucks again.

It’s quirky café music, the kind the cool kids on Neptune are probably listening to right now, but it started in the parlour; in West End. Doornoch Terrace to be precise – about as far from London as it’s possible to get on this planet. And while they’re the polar opposite of Gilbert and Sullivan, elements of Killbot Kindergarten’s sound could have come direct from the overture of an oriental Damon Alban opera.

This isn’t the Mikado though, Youka, a classically trained violinist and Sait, an audio engineering dropout have thrown convention out the window to create a new form of operatic digital soul. Working from the Brisbane studios of dub maestro producer Paulie B (The Beautiful Girls) and the Gold Coast’s Govinda Doyle (Angus and Julia Stone) the duo have produced an epic five-track EP. A year in the making, the disc is a culmination of a six year creative journey for the two songwriters, who have known each other and played in numerous bands together since 2004.

Veteran tourers, the two have been criss-crossing the country with Grassroots Street Orchestra, (insert other band names here) for the latter half of this decade. Now, as Killbot Kindergarten, Sait and Snell are set to take on the world, with an Australian tour planned for the latter half of 2010 and a passport-destroying sojourn around the planet in 2011.

Lovers of digital neo-soul should be on notice. There are two new headmasters in town and school is never going to sound the same again.