My Favourite email of 2009

2009 was an interesting year - not without its dramas. As a leaving gift I thought I would share with you an email I received in the midst of the 'Get Kyle off the air' saga (I've deleted his name). Bring on 2010.

Adam

Dear Adam,

My name is X, I am a freelance media adviser and publicist writing with reference to Mr. Kyle Sandilands. I am writing an e-mail that has been a long time coming. Speaking as someone who has has the privilege of working with Kyle, I am disgusted by your gutless bullshit withdrawls of sponsorship from Austereo. The only reason people are kicking up a fuss about this genuine mistake is because Kyle Sandilands has a reputation for being a hard-hitting entertainer.

Instead of supporting one of Australia's greatest talents, you kick him to the kerb. I am tired of people victimising Kyle for something nobody could have predicted.

No human being would have ever put a minor on air with prior knowledge or belief that such an incident, especially none as compassionate as Mr. Sandilands. Kyle Sandilands lost one of his greatest passions - the opportunity to enhance the careers of talented performers - through a simple case of human error. Speaking as one media professional to another, I offer these words of advice: You claim to have some utensils between your legs. Either use them to support true talent or go promote fluffy bunnies.

Good day to you.

X

Tiger Woods Never Watched Batman

"The brighter the picture the darker the negative", is a wonderful quote from the Batman animated series. Batman is based on the concepts of the shadow - made popular by Carl Jung. Briefly, the theory is that we all have a shadow, and one of our challenges in life is to successfully embrace our shadow. You can see most of the characters of Batman coming to terms with their shadow through the story (Bruce Wayne created his alter ego Batman in response to his deep seated fear of bats - in this regard he has attempted to embrace his shadow).

As we know Tiger Woods, presented a very bright picture indeed, whilst his shadow was running rampant. Tiger always appeared a little to close to perfect for comfort. White shiny smile, lovely wife, professional, well mannered, humble, winner. He really was admired by everyone. However, all was obviously (in hindsight) not well. Tiger was suppressing a shadow as dark as his image was bright. (Consider Tiger to his fellow Gillette TVC star Roger Federer. Roger presents as equally steely and focused, yet we have seen Roger have tearful outbursts, and doses of erratic behaviour throughout his career. Arguably, he is suppressing less.)

The real issue for us was that Tiger Woods was just an image - that's all. The money sponsors gave him, the love fans showed him was never actually for him - but for a carefully constructed image. And now the image has been shattered. This will become a recurring them in the new world order where there is no place to hide. The 'image' and the 'reality' of sports stars, movie stars, brands and regular folk will become more interrogated and therefore integrated as access to information and its subsequent documentation becomes omnipresent.

What's happened to Tiger was just a matter of time. There is no room for a shadow so large if you are in the public spotlight today. Not only did society catch his shadow, they hung it on the line and gave it a public flogging for the world to see. If you have a shadow (and you do), or your brand has a shadow (and it does), embrace it, and deal with it before someone else does it for you.

Note: Thanks to Simon Thatcher for originally teaching me about the shadow and the power it can hold over ones life.

Are you lonely tonight?

You may have heard about the latest study on loneliness by now. If you haven’t there are two key messages:

• Loneliness spreads between social networks like a virus
• If you are lonely you tend to act more negatively to others therefore reinforcing your loneliness.

There are some conclusions to be drawn from this, namely 1. If someone has been ignoring you for a while, when you see them next don’t bring it up and confront them - just be nice (put on a happy face). What’s interesting about this is it goes against the common psychological convention that we should always express how we feel in search of an authentic life and authentic relationships. The implication of this study is – if you don’t want to lose more friends then keep your issues to yourself (to a degree of course). 2. If you find yourself in a lonely cluster then do what you can to get out, as it's only going to get worse (as loneliness spreads).

This study helps show lonely people that the issue is systemic and is happening everywhere. There may be comfort for them to know that others are as lonely as they are. It's only going to get worse too, according to the ABS over a third of us will live alone by 2026. Loneliness is going to become omnipresent in our society, especially prevalent among older people (i.e. us).

The interesting thing with loneliness is that it is very situational and there is a cure, of which interacting with, and forming relationships with others is a key part. Therefore it's relatively easy for companies and brands to help play a role in this.

For example, brands playing in the telecommunications space, may benefit by teaming up with brands in the experiential space, and encourage people to actually physically meet each other once in a while. Now brands such as www.meetup.com have successfully brought vampire worshipping bungy jumpers together for years. However, these brands don’t take into account how hard it is for someone who is feeling negative, and has a lack of confidence, to meet others. Companies and brands who can tap into this mindset, and offer a real difference to people will be rewarded. Brands can take a role in facilitating interaction between lonely people (not people who are already socially doing fine).

Loneliness, boredom and depression are all closely correlated. It would be fantastic to see brands divert some of their investment in high gloss advertising into actions that would help fix the problem.

PS I couldn't bring myself to use the tired black and white shot of the man on the beach to illustrate lonely - hence The Beatles.

Some News on Naked and FBI Radio

Quick note to say Naked was happy with winning B&T's

• Specialist Agency of the Year, and
• Media Campaign of the Year for FBi radio

The campaign was called 'Ask Richard' had a $0.00 media budget, and was driven primarily through social media. So to all of you who promote social media campaigns like 'Ask Richard' thank you for the part you played. You've helped raise over $680,000.00 and kept the community based station on air. It was also a nice example of not worrying so much about building an 'emotional connection', but rather just getting people out there doing something. Congrats also to all the other winners on the night.

Postscript Jan '10: The Ask Richard campaign for FBI Radio is a finalist in 4 AIMIA awards including best use of social media.

A bit of a post post script March 3: We won at the AIMIAS!

• We won best Marketing campaign,
• best Public service campaign,
• best integrated campaign,
• and the big one Peoples Choice - voted by the public. Thanks to all involved.

Some more news the campaign has also won:

• Highly Commended at the World Festival of Media in Spain
• A Gold Clio for Strategic Communications in New York
• A 'In Book' for D&AD
• 3 Finalist Nominations for the Effectiveness Awards