Carpark at Accure A blog about promotions, marketing, culture and more…
Categories: Around the globe, Cause Marketing, Promotional Marketing

Green Tomato Cars
Greentomato cars offer a taxi fleet in London made up completely with the greenest cars around - The Toyota Prius. The objective of the company is to get people from A to B while emitting as little pollution as possible into the environment. Off-setting carbon emissions is the hottest item going around at the moment (just ask Thorpie) but I there’s still an element of unknown, the greentomato concept however makes simple sense. They use hybrid cars and they offset unavoidable emissions by planting thousands of trees. If presented with this option at no extra cost, I’d like to think many consumers would opt-in.

To generate awareness, the company did a local door drop, but how do you do a door drop that isn’t wasteful of paper? Well, you can do an online campaign or in this case, produce one single door drop that can be passed around the neighborhood. Each street gets one door drop each. The first recipient ticks off their address once they’ve noted the taxi number and then passes it on to the next resident until the whole street has seen this one door drop. There’s considerable room for things to go wrong and the chain broken, but it’s true to the cause and I think the service itself is a pretty good offering and good offerings usually generate awareness all by themselves.

The agency - Harrison Troughton Wunderman UK.

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Categories: Blog Stuff, General

Memes are intriguing things so when tagged by DT at Design Sojourn who was tagged by the creative Marc Rapp who was tagged by Aaron and so on and on… I feel there is nothing for me to do than to participate and keep it alive. So here goes:

Eight things you probably don’t know about me: (in no particular order)

1. I’m a sashimi and Twitter addict. I also read my blog feeds before actual news feeds.

2. I was also a golf junkie before my daughter was born, now I have to supplement that addiction with a seriously outdated version of Tiger Woods 2004 on the Xbox.

3. I had to present in front of the faculty board after I failed 50% of subjects in the first year of Uni. I blamed it on the transition from High School and they let me stay.

4. I actually wanted to be an architect when I was little.

5. I fell on my head when I was 14 while being lifted to slam dunk a basketball. I grew a blood clot the size of my palm on my brain that had to be removed. It was a gnarly situation, especially for my parents but I swear to this day it did wonders to my IQ.
5. I used to work for a Bank.

6. I’m a coffee snob. My wife (and I) own a cafe that serves Illy coffee.

7. I felt strangely compelled to start my own daddy blog when my little girl was born.

8. I really don’t like pigeons.

Now the tag bit. Meg@Blogpond, Duncan@duncanriley, Miel@coolzor, Timothy@brandspankingnew and Ross@makinbacon

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Categories: Awards, Boony, Promotional Marketing, Promotional Products, Self promotion

Appa letter 2007
We received this letter from APPA today. Has Boony done it again? Guess we’ll have to wait until Spetember to find out.

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Categories: 2.0, Applications, Business, Promotional Marketing

SMS
I recieved an SMS from my auto-mechanic this morning. It’s an obvious proforma type message reminding me to bring my car in for service. A few personal details like my name and registration added, nothing special but “it’s high in value as it is low in bandwidth. The very kind of communication and promotion if you like which has been undervalued and misunderstood by brands particularly.

This is a little left field in terms of promotional marketing, but I wanted to share an intelligent piece of writing about the attraction of stripped back communication as used by platforms likeTwitter and Facebook. Michael and I had an interesting discussion about these social media applications last week. Apart from convincing him that I was not like a sixteen year old school girl SMS-ing like crazy on my mobile, I failed to express as eloquently as Rory has here why this form of digital communication works. This form of compressed inter-personal communication is enticing and as I sit here typing this post pondering the concept of technology and promotions, I wonder how many brands are allowing their customer’s to project themselves to a network of friends? A light turns on in Michael’s head!

Interested in following me on Twitter?

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Categories: Ambient Marketing, Around the globe, Outdoor

MTR Octopus Card
Sorry for the lack of posts lately but regular programming will resume shortly. If you’ve ever been to Hong Kong, you’ll realise that the this is an efficient self-contained city. From the moment you step off the plane at the airport, through immigration, to the MTR public transport system, it is the perfect example of how to move a lot of people around a city very quickly. Being used to the public disaster system over here, the precision never ceases to amaze me. Read more »

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Categories: Ambient Marketing, Outdoor, Promotional Marketing, Promotional Products, Street Marketing

Reactee
We’re about causing reactions in our line of work so I was intrigued with Reactee and their text T-shirts.

Here’s the rundown: Pick your personalised slogan and keyword, they’ll print it on a T-shirt and ship it to you. You can then engage the world by wearing it. People are enticed to text your custom keyword to 41411 (I believe it’s only US at the moment). A message you’ve carefully crafted will be automatically sent out by Reactee. The messages returned to others can be updated at any time, so you can change this message to reflect the latest news.

Interesting concept. Another example of ambient intimacy perhaps? Link via swissmiss

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Categories: Around the globe, Branding, Design

london 2012
According to Sebastion Coe “…it will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world.” I don’t exactly know how a logo can do that but considering it cost a figure just short of $1M AUD, you’d hope it’s one pretty talented logo. (Gregg probably would have done it for a case of Red Bull) Read more »

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Categories: Around the globe, Cause Marketing, Support

Connections Tour
The guys who run the Oak Tree Foundation and who organised the hugely successful MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY concert in Melbourne last year are at it again. Prepare to be blown away by the incredible Connections Zulu Choir from the Valley of a Thousand Hills, South Africa. Through song and speech, you will be taken on a journey with the choir members - from one of the poorest areas of South Africa, to a realisation of a dream: the opportunity to come to Australia for a music tour. Read more »

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Categories: Ambient Marketing, Creative, Street Marketing

Crate man
Spotted alongside one Melbourne’s northern suburb train stations was Crateman and his crew, performing what looks like some wall climbing activities. If only the milk brands or perhaps the public transport operators were this creative!

Considering the rumblings about public transport in Melbourne over the past few months, this is a little ray of sunshine for commuters in the morning who now are about a dollar less well off. Read more »

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Categories: Client Talk, Design

Make the logo bigger
I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but…can we make the logo bigger? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this line and there’ll probably be many more. So as a tribute to anyone in the design or promotional marketing industry who have had to endure this phrase many more times than they should have to, we’re posting the fabulous rock rendition of “Make the logo BIGGER”

This is definately going on my Ipod and I’m working on getting it as the Accure ‘on-hold’ music but I’m hanging out for the rest of the album. I hear there’ll be tracks like:

Make the font bigger, Can you make it like their ad?, Funk it up a bit and the all time great…Something like my Powerpoint layout!

This gem comes courtesy of CreativeTechs, you can also get a copy of the brilliantly written lyrics there. Why do I suspect Mark Holden had something to do with this song? If you missed the link before, here it is again.

Have a great week!

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