No man can serve two masters

DHL web tracking ads on vans

Copy below reads:

The 'mobile' on-ground communication makes clever use of a large silhouette of a computer cursor installed on a fleet of DHL's runner vans, which shuttles around the Beijing's Central Business District to announce DHLs 24-7 online tracking attribute.

This simple stunt / live activity had effectively resulted in an apparent drop in parcel enquiry recorded by the DHL phone tracking system while online tracking click counters surged.

with thanks to I believe in advertising

The withering rejoinder

The Media Futures conference I went to the other week, reminded me of a little phrase that a planner I used to work with (Abe) said was invaluable. The basic idea is that whenever anyone makes some claim or tries to peddle you a message, the immediate response to this should be 'so what'.

This 'withering rejoinder' as Dr Brian Winston put it, is the acid test for whether any innovation really is likely to change the society it goes into. It is also the thing that every person asks themselves whenever they see your marketing hyperbole.

Use the 'so what?' test next time. You will see it works.

Threshers wine voucher

Is anyone else thinking that maybe this Thresher thing is a bit of a scam? Not an actual scam mind you, just in the sense that it's a very clever marketing campaign.

No marketing person in their right mind is going to release a three week long voucher in PDF to the internet without at some point going - "hang on a minute, maybe people are going to email this to each other". In my experience it's the ONLY thing marketers are worried about with vouchers online.

Given that Hugh MacLeod advises Stormhoek, where it first became big news publicly, maybe the whole thing isn't as accidental as it looks. I'm sure Threshers is a big account for Stormhoek, and they wouldn't promote it as gleefully as they seem to on their website, if they were worried about pissing them off.

When you consider that Threshers are giving 33% off a number of lines anyway, maybe they're not too bummed about the extra 7% for all the free publicity they have had.

If you have been living under a rock, here is the voucher.