Nine In Publicity Bonanza
Could executives at Channel Nine in Melbourne be more excited than through this coverage of a new series about to go to air?
A television series so “gripping” that it is involved in an actual legal wrangle?
“Crime show Underbelly in legal wrangle” screams the headline from the Herald Sun. Talk of banning the show, talk of clouding the judgement of potential jurors.
And the opening paragraph:
A JUDGE has ordered Channel 9 to hand over episodes of the gangland drama Underbelly, casting last-minute uncertainty over the airing of the $13 million series.
Actually, I think the judge has ensured a last-minute extra ratings bonanza on the airing of next week’s first episode. Who doesn’t want to find out about this new series that’s tied up in the drama of the courts? A tv series so potent to capture attention of a real Supreme Court judge?
It’s a cliffhanger-style start without even having been broadcast to the public, overflowing with drama and suspense, and picked up in stories in both metropolitan Melbourne newspapers.
You even have the Prosecutor quoted in the article saying the show is “graphic, powerful and gripping”:
Prosecutor Geoff Horgan, SC, said he could foresee real problems with the program going to air.
“It’s graphic, it’s powerful, it’s gripping and I would be astonished if viewers of the program were not strongly attracted to it . . . can you really expect jurors not to be watching this,” Mr Horgan said.
And then on the defence side:
The accused man’s lawyer, Anthony Brand, supported the subpoena and said he preferred if Nine would pull the series.
“It’s well crafted, and powerful . . . and factually there were some matters I was not aware of,” Mr Brand said.
This would be publicity beyond the wildest dreams of the Channel Nine publicity team. Expect the show to hit the ratings jackpot once it is aired.
Facebook traffic turbo boost
Here’s the opening paragraphs of a recent article about Facebook in The Age:
To some, Facebook is a frivolous social forum, but Californian Lee Lorenzen regards it as “the lowest-cost customer acquisition vehicle on the planet”.
A partner with Altura Ventures, Mr Lorenzen appeared via video at last month’s Facebook Developers Garage meeting in Sydney. He told the gathering of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs that it took him nine years and “a lot of money” as CEO at Shop.com to get 500,000 registered users.
But then Facebook application iLike, from developer Rockyou, added 600,000 users in eight hours.
“Nine years versus eight hours – we knew there was something going on that was special inside the Facebook environment,” Mr Lorenzen says.
Wow, just 8 hours versus 9 years — that’s really showing the potential power of Facebook from a business sense — it’s time to take notice of Facebook when it is described as “the lowest-cost customer acquisition vehicle on the planet.”
Cheap Adwords tactic in crowded market
Flying up to Sydney today for our quarterly Platinum mastermind meeting, I noticed an interesting use of Adwords by an advertiser on the in-flight Virgin Blue television service.
The advertiser was Quickflix Movie Rentals, who have an online DVD rental business. It’s a pretty competitive field.
However, the call to action in the ad was to ask flyers to Google “Q” — and then Quickflix would simply bid on the letter “Q” as a sponsored ad.
Much easier to remember than their name. Just go to Google and type in the letter Q.
And it instantly takes virtually all competitors off the search results page… the ONLY advertisers were Quickflix, and a comparison service recommending Quickflix (obviously there’s some room for smart competitors or affiliates here).
On top of that, rather than having to pay a small fortune for popular keywords in their category (they’re ranked number 10 position for “online movie rentals”), they only have to pay a comparatively tiny amount to rank number one in their search results for “Q”, as noone else is bidding on this keyword (keyletter??).
I’m not sure if Quickflix use this in other offline advertising, but it’s certainly a cost-effective way get people to only have to type in a single letter to be one-click from the right website!
Useful Colour Resource 1
One of the handy online applications for creating color (or “colour” for some of us!) combinations is Adobe’s Kuler.
Kuler gives you a number of useful color combination tools — either you can view other color palettes already created (search on popular or high rated submissions), or create your own.
When you create a palette, you get a number of color “rules” to choose from: analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound or shades — or you can use your own rules/experimenting.
Logged in users can save and export these palettes (although a quick screen capture achieves the same thing if needs be).
It’s quite a handy bookmark for finding nice combinations without having to refer to hard-cover books of similar resources.
Getting Ready For Sydney Platinum Meeting
Tomorrow we head up to Sydney for Mal Emery’s Platinum mastermind group get-together.
This is always a great “brain refresher” for me, as I get to reconnect with like-minded people I haven’t seen for a few months (especially over the busy Christmas/holiday period).
As well, Mel and I a mini-break along with of course the content and presentations at the sessions (which I observe on several levels).
I’ll let you know how it goes!