As all regular pub-goers know, alcohol often acts as a performance enhancing drug when it comes to playing darts, pool and, on rare occasions, ‘the field’. And while it’s generally accepted that it’s the opposite of a performance enhancer for practically everything else, and particularly rugby, infographics.co …

Brad Novak via Cleverbastards.co.nz

With the nation currently in the grip of a violent strain of rugby fever (symptoms include very low workplace productivity, constant gridlock in Auckland, increasing popularity for psychic animals, ads between the haka, Google doodles and a penchant for infographics), it’s fairly difficult to think about anything else today.

Just as Dorothy and her companions travelled down The Yellow Brick Road, your website should also be viewed as a journey, not a destination. After all, you don’t just grow your business when people visit, you grow from the positive actions they take as a result of it. 

Journalism is dying a slow and painful death. At least, that was the argument put forward by award-winning UK reporter Nick Davies in his 2009 book, Flat Earth News. Well, I disagree entirely.

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s 2011. 1987 was a while ago now. And while it must have been a very exciting time for Kiwis of yesteryear to win a Rugby World Cup, do we really have to point every element of tournament communication and design back to the glory days?

So, DB has trademarked the beer name “Radler” for its Monteith’s brand, to the despair of independent brewers who say “Radler” is a style of beer, not a brand, and shouldn’t be owned by a beverage behemoth. It’s a battle begging comparison to David and Goliath, but then it seems so many trademark cases are. Here’s our pick of the persnickety trademark bunch ©.

It has all the key ingredients of a holy grail story that would be right at home in the News of the World: secrets, politics, royalty, skullduggery, dubious ethics and alleged bribery. And yet the 168-year-old tabloid renowned for nabbing such stories closed on Sunday after it emerged it had hacked into the phones of murder victims and allegedly also 9/11 victims, royals and politicians. As you can imagine, there’s a whole heap of information, commentary and satire available online about the scandal. And we’ve collected the best of it so you don’t have to.

Hopefully. After one week of playing with it, I’m impressed. The ease of keeping your profile secure from certain people and being able to easily see exactly what information is displayed to who, as well as the addition of “Hang outs” and a few other features is great.

In this edition of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week, how pollinators differ from influencers, social media’s skeleton is dug up, Sky future-proofs itself by looking at use-by dates for recorded content, short and sweet marketing snippets and an event for marketers hoping to prosper from the Rugby World Cup. 

If you think a ‘like to enter’ competition on your company’s Facebook page is a cunning way to grow your follower numbers, you’re probably right in the short term. But if you treat it as a loyalty database, be prepared for some repercussions. 

Alasdair ‘Sick Problems’ Thompson’s attempts to clamber out of the huge hole he dug himself last week was a massive PR trainwreck. And you can always rely on Tui to embrace the media zeitgeist on its billboards to try to sell more beer.

One of Gordon Ramsay’s most popular programmes is Kitchen Nightmares, where he helps turn struggling restaurants around. Let me say right from the start, I’m no fan of Ramsay. But I believe he’s teaching us some valuable lessons when it comes to website marketing. Let me explain. 

A lot has been written about the closure of 1-dayout.co.nz in the past few days. And I’m surprised at some of the claims made by its sales and marketing manager Race Louden in his recent article for StopPress, Getting the hell out of daily deal Dodge. 

In the past nine months there has been an increase in the number of group-buying websites offering vouchers for anything from haircuts to hotels to beauty therapies. These sites offer a heavily discounted, service-orientated deal, usually for 24 hours, in a variety of cities around the country. But as a marketing tactic, while successful in some instances, the group-buying model is flawed in a number of ways, primarily because it often attracts the wrong kind of customer to a business.

Over the past month we’ve rolled out our Colmar Brunton nzgirl Women’s Tracker presentation to agencies and clients and one of the key discussions from the preso has been around Twitter. While the most commonly bandied-around, unlikely-to-be-grounded-in-fact number of participators in New Zealand is around nice percent I suspect the reality is much smaller.  And in an industry more likely to be exposed to new communication tools, I found only a very small number of people actively participating. In some agency meetings, often in a room of twenty media buyers, not one of them was tweeting.