Starship Articles

Business Marketing Online

August 10, 2019

In this day and age, if you have zero online presence, you’d probably be suspected of being Too Hipster to Care, a Dinosaur, or of laundering money for some local mafia. Even a token webpage would do, one of those annoying one-pagers which contain a phone number and a picture and little else. That’s the bare minimum to at least appear credible, unless you really are going for the Too Hipster to Care angle. Websites aren’t hard to build, and they don’t have to be a trial to upkeep — if you want to know more, just get in touch and we can give you a rough idea of what goes into it and how much it’ll cost.

If you already have a website, congratulations. That’s just the first step. Was the website created in the days of Geocities? Is your hosting in a labyrinthine mess where you’re not entirely sure who you’re now paying for hosting and why? Do you even have access to your site? All these are common issues that our clients face before they even get around to whether their site is now mobile-friendly or security compliant. Moving past that, we get on to whether your site even looks like a modern website, or whether it’s a morass of copy put in place by a developer rather than a designer.

A website doesn’t have to be token in this day and age. For many businesses, it’s a vital part of their overarching brand strategy. And yes, it should work on mobile AND on desktop.

Business Marketing on Social Media

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recently released a long report about digital platforms, where they discussed 23 recommendations around their concerns about the dominance of Facebook and Google:

The ACCC says it sees no sign that Australians will slow down their use and engagement with these digital platforms. Though the ACCC says it has no concerns with growth and profitability, it does compel policymakers to consider the “extent to which important decisions about the dissemination of information, the collection of personal data and business’ interaction with consumers online, should be left to the discretion of certain large digital platforms, given their substantial market power, pervasiveness and inherent profit motive.”

[…]

“Discrimination may occur in multiple ways where a digital platform is active in related markets,” reads the report. The ACCC has also expressed concern over Google and Facebook’s near duopoly on the online advertising supply chain. “While the existing tools and goals of competition law and consumer law frameworks remain applicable to digital markets, the opacity and complexity of these markets make it difficult to detect issues and can limit the effectiveness of the broad principles.”

It definitely doesn’t look like Australians will stop using Facebook and Google anytime soon. That’s why — depending on the client — we often recommend that clients centralise Facebook ads and Google Adwords in their digital marketing strategy. It isn’t just a matter of slapping an ad together and shoving it onto the platform in question, though. It should be integrated into your general strategy as a whole. Naturally, we’re going to recommend that you leave it to the pros. But if you’re just trying things out, here are some quick tips:

  1. Be respectful. It’s no longer true that any attention is good attention. Negative attention on social media — especially if it goes viral — can be completely damaging to your business and to your staff.
  2. Have definite goals in mind. Do you want to drive traffic to your site? Raise the profile of a particular product?
  3. Make sure the goals are attainable. Don’t waste money on moonshots unless you have money to spare.
  4. Make sure the process you’re using is measurable.
  5. Know your audience — the wording you use and the platforms you use need to match them.
  6. Check out your competition and see what they’re up to.

Testing, testing

Don’t be afraid to test new strategies and campaigns on small samples of your audience to see how they’re received. In a safe, controlled environment, we’d usually work this out on focus groups, but if you don’t want to use them, you can segment your audience into groups to try things out. Testing is a key part of any winning strategy. You need to figure out what works and what doesn’t and learn lessons from both. As to the amount of resources you’re willing to devote to testing vs a workable strategy, that’s up to you.

Marketing Tactics for Business

You might have heard of the so-called 7 Ps of Marketing: Price, Promotion, Place, People, Process, and Physical Evidence. Basically, you have to be clear on where you stand on each point. What are you selling and are you selling anything more or new? How are you putting your product out there on the market? Where can your products be seen or bought? What sort of people make up your business? Do you have processes in place that ensure good customer service and delivery? Finally, what are the physical touchpoints that your customers encounter when they see your products, such as branding or packaging?

Having to nail all of those can be a hard ask, which is why people tend to get professional help. That being said, by having definite goals and careful testing, you can often figure out key goalposts on all 7 by yourself, which is a good place to move forward from. Many of our clients do come to us with these already in place — either because it’s what they decided or because of particular constraints.

Where it can get granular is usually specific to the type of business you run. Is it a tech startup? Retail? B2B or B2C? All these will have their own realities key to effective marketing. Not to mention that marketing has been increasingly evolving as technology and the world itself evolves.

New Technologies

In 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in his Google I/O keynote that 20 percent of queries on its mobile app and on Android devices are voice searches. We presume that number’s only gotten higher by now. What does this mean for businesses? We can see two things right off — that any search terms you now buy in Adwords for your business should probably be more conversational than technical, and the names of your products should be easy to pronounce. If you speak the name of your product into Google and it comes up with something completely different, you might be in trouble. These statistics, after all, are just confined to Google. If you add in the number of people with other home assistants like Alexa, it’ll be even higher.

There are also existing technologies out there that can streamline marketing for your company, especially on a customer relations front. Chatbots are proliferating everywhere, and although they can’t take the place of a well-trained customer service team, they can alleviate the pressure of having to respond immediately to customers, and can even resolve minor queries. Tech can make your stores easier to navigate, or even fully integrate online and offline seamlessly — what we’d call an omnichannel approach.

Technology does need to be carefully considered before use, so as not to annoy your customers. If properly integrated, it can be a fun part of your customer’s experience — for example, the Singapore Airlines app is a great way to keep track of your travels and check on your tickets. It’s beautifully designed too:

However, not every business requires an app. Given how difficult it is to get people to commit to downloading apps. According to comScore, 51% of phone users sampled in the USA don’t download any new apps every month. This behaviour is likely similar to Australia’s usage. Of the people who do download apps every month, 13% download just one app. Most of the people who download apps are millennials (18-34 years old). Before you commit to the high cost of app development, keep all this in mind.

Need more information? Get in touch.

Influencers: Nothing is Real on the Internet

August 3, 2019

In 2019, as the Disney industrial machine regurgitates a spitfire volley of dead horses in the form of Toy Story 4, a “live” action Lion King movie, yet another Avengers film, yet another Spiderman film, and whatever else they’re planning on inflicting on us once they open Netflix: Disney Edition™ in November, you’d think that the general public is so glutted of glossy CG and airbrushed foreheads that a little unreality on Instagram would pass without comment. In the light of a certain recent Vanity Fair article about surfer mum influencers in Byron Bay though, we feel compelled to say a few things about influencers and influencer culture.

Full disclaimer: Starship use influencers in our work for clients, either directly or through specialist agencies. As a whole, they’re highly committed, on-the-ball small business owners who often have an extremely quick turn-around on briefs. Understand things a little bit more now? Yes, influencers are merely a new(ish) possible extension of your media buy. For them, it’s work. Just like the photographers, public relations people, and artists you might use on a campaign. Do you really think Omega watches are the best after watching a James Bond show? Think that driving an Audi will make you more like Iron Man? If so, we have bad news: advertising and marketing campaigns are all about promoting a particular reality on behalf of our clients. In Starship, we’re firm believers in authenticity and encourage clients to stick to valid statements where possible — if only because it builds trust in your brand. However, all the photography and media that form part of the content of a campaign is always put forward in the best possible light. Blemishes disappear. The light looks warmer and richer. Products are always perfectly positioned. We think of it as HyperAdreality.

HyperAdreality and Influencers

Back to the Byron Bay article. We now know that surfer mum influencers are collectively known as ‘murfers’, a term that we wish we could scrub from our minds. Carina Chocano wrote a cutting article about the murfers in Vanity fair, titled “The Coast of Utopia“, containing gems like:

She still considers her feed her “personal thing,” but there’s something about the stream of photos—the uniform palette of beige and white, ochre and dusty rose, the coordinated clothes, the styled life, the sponsored content, the kids like modern-day Von Trapps—that looks like a massive ad campaign. But for what? Children? Good genes? Good taste? Good luck? In the comments, her fans want to know how she keeps the place so spotless with five kids in the house. (And it is spotless.) They want to know what product she uses in her hair. (Aveda is a partner.) They want to know where she got that dress, that paint colour, those shoes, that life. They want to know her secret.

Opinion naturally split a few ways. There were those who loved the takedown. There were the Byron locals who bemoaned the effects Instagram had on their town:

“Too many people come here thinking it’s some kind of Utopia, when in reality it has just as many negative or other issues as any place,” she says. “An egalitarian, inclusive image is given [by Instagramers and marketers] of a place where you can make your creative dreams come true, raise your kids in domestic beachy, linen bliss.”

And the actual reality?

“Yes, it’s gorgeous. But behind the facade, it’s a big old country town, with all the restrictions and issues to go with that. People come to live here with unrealistic expectations — and often land flat when the truth of life hits. Ask any health professional in town and they will tell you stories of the people who arrive with big ideas and end up suffering from depression because the dream has been shattered, or because Byron Bay wasn’t the answer to their problems. It’s undeniable that a Utopian image is continuing to be sold [and] projected.”

There were people concerned about parent influencers oversharing information about their kids. Which, I mean, I get. I’ve opened Facebook before only to be shown naked videos of my friends’ toddlers in the bath. Why??? Why is something like that even online? There are all sorts of terrible people on the internet. That being said, there were also articles that came out in the murfers’ defence, including a response on SMH:

I know I use Instagram as a place to post pictures I find pretty and share moments that I think my handful of followers might enjoy or relate to. It’s not really real though but, who really wants to see our trips to Woolies anyway?

As a photo-sharing platform with built-in filters, it was designed for us to appreciate each other’s pretty pictures, as well as a form of self-expression and entertainment.

An interesting counter-trend involves some younger influencers “going out of their way to make their photos look worse”. Still, I get why the article has touched a nerve. What I don’t understand is the hate.

Regardless of how you feel about the article (which does make some good points about Australian immigration and native title), I’m not sure whether Adamo and her friends really deserve all the anger, privileged as they definitely are. Why bother so getting angry at some mums who like to post touched-up pictures on the internet? For a lot of them, it’s just a business that they can run from home. Yes, HyperAdreality can be bad for some people — particularly people who have lower self-esteem, tend to hold themselves up to unrealistic body expectations and such. I do know people who feel that social media puts them in a negative place, and I know people who’ve begun to tie in likes and such digital affirmation markers into their sense of self-worth. Flaming other people isn’t the answer though, even if social media can be a corrosive space. It’s why I’m not on Facebook any longer, and why my Instagram is highly curated to contain design, animal photography, and food pictures only. I recommend it.

Cultural Differences

That being said, it’s true that there are influencers who misuse the power of their platforms. There was a recent trending hashtag, #couscousforcomment, deriding food influencers who try to blackmail restaurants for free food for “exposure”. This was both depressing (poor restaurants!) and hilarious in a sad way. As creatives, we’re often asked to give free or heavily discounted work for “exposure”, and we like to respond that this sort of argument won’t work in a restaurant. Turns out it does — for some:

In the UK Mick Smith, a chef who runs three successful venues in St Ives, Cornwall including the Porthminster Beach Cafe, told the Guardian that some approaches he gets from influencers can feel like “blackmail”.

“It’s like people try and blackmail us: ‘We want stuff for free or else we’ll write a bad review.’ It’s a big problem.”

Only this week, a customer who wanted a discounted glass of wine but was made to pay full price took her complaint to social media.

“Within 30 minutes there were hundreds of extra comments on the post, many of them negative,” says Smith. “You feel like you have to monitor every social media thing – people want to take you down.”

A sobering read for people like me and the creative director, who often judge a restaurant on its zomato score before deciding whether to visit. This influencer shakedown isn’t confined to the restaurant industry — it’s also a thing for hotels. The White Moose Cafe, a luxury Dublin hotel, banned all social media influencers after Elle Darby, a YouTuber, asked for a free 5-night stay. The hotel refused in a Facebook post that blanked out the YouTuber’s information, but when people figured out who it was and took to her videos with negative comments, Darby uploaded an emotional video where she broke down in tears. The resulting stoush resulted in the hotel’s decision. While the White Moose Cafe matter was perhaps dramatic in particular, enough to make the news, this issue has been troubling the industry recently:

“Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It’s people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I’m an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all-inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.

Influencers can be good for a hotel — if they’re professional, and managed. Just like any other asset in your team. Some may even provide extra value:

Zach Benson, who owns a network of travel Instagram accounts and who says he has gotten more than 200 nights for free over the past year and a half, touts his background in digital marketing when he approaches hotels. Along with the traditional Instagram posts and Stories, Benson offers to work with a hotel’s digital marketing arm to improve the brand’s in-house social media accounts.

“We really want to help people and make their companies and hotels better,” he said. “We know that just doing a couple Instagram posts for them isn’t really going to help them that much.” During his travels, Benson hosts boot camps for hotel social media teams, where he trains employees on things like Facebook ads and Instagram promotion.

“I just think a lot of the influencers have entitlement mentality,” Benson said. “A lot of them think about giving the bare minimum.”

Bedwani said that it’s critical that hotels set explicit terms in their deals with influencers. “I know a major brand that opened up and flew in a plane full of influencers,” he said. “Three-quarters of them didn’t even post. It was a major fail from their team.”

As we mentioned at the start, we do work with professional influencers, all of whom have produced stellar work for our clients. As with any contractor, employee, or external agency that a brand might use, there are good ones and not so good ones, highly professional ones and ones who might not add as much value as you’d like. Want to know more? Need help managing your next campaign? Get in touch.

Racist Branding and Sushi Pizza

August 1, 2019

When I sat down for lunch in one of Melbourne’s most popular fusion restaurants and saw Engrish in its branding, it felt like a kick in the gut. The most egregious, on the business card: “Sum-Ting-Wong? Let Mr. M know and we fix.”

I live in the land of the tastefully plated smashed avocado. As one of the most hipster cities in the world, Melbourne is politically also the most progressive city in Australia. During the vote for same-sex marriage, inner-city Melbourne electorates came out in force for equality at 83.7% in favour, compared to a 61.6% national average. There’s a good chance that our next mayor is a Green politician. Melbourne has been crowned the “world’s most liveable city” for seven years.

Australia isn’t a post-racial utopia, to say the least. You don’t even need to look beyond the last few months. Coverage of crime in Melbourne has been increasingly racialised, creating a ginned up scare about so-called “African crime gangs” rampaging Mad-Max-style through the city, even though the Victorian police has said that gang violence is not growing. Historically marginalised, Indigenous Australians die younger and at higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians–the life expectancy gap is 10 years. And don’t get me started on Senator Pauline Hanson.

And yet. This restaurant is in Windsor, a very hipster district even for treehugger inner-Melbourne, close to affluent residential zones. Despite its colonial-era name, the food that Windsor is famous for is diverse. There were a few other Asian people in the same restaurant. A Malaysian friend recommended it to me. And as I’ve mentioned, the restaurant itself is wildly popular. The last time I’d tried to get in after watching a film in the heritage cinema down the road, I was told the wait for a table was 2 hours.

Maybe I should’ve known before even sitting down. The restaurant in question, after all, is Mr Miyagi. A fusion restaurant owned by non-Asian Australians, it’s named after one of the most iconic Asian characters in 80s American cinema. The rolling effect of the legacy of the Mr Miyagi character has been variously documented, including within the actor Pat Morita’s own obituary in the New York Times:

“But still, it bother me Miyagi-san so wise, but find it hard use articles, pronouns when talk.”

Generations of Asian schoolkids outside Asia have grown up tormented by that “wax on, wax off” catchphrase. As someone whose grandmothers could not speak English, I hate it when others make fun of the broken accents of people who try. In 2018, in the most progressive city in Australia, why is racist branding not just acceptable but profitable? It isn’t even limited to the card. It’s on the menu too.

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Maybe it’s something about Windsor. If you’ve been looking at the news, you might have seen the backlash against Sash. Sash Restaurant is a “sushi pizza” fusion joint in Windsor, again owned by non-Asians. It also has a racialised menu, and while its newly opened joint in Sydney closed, it’s still open for business in Melbourne:

Sash blamed closure on “overpaid” workers, among other things. This elicited the usual Twitter derision.

There’s also this place in Abbotsford:

Hilarious.

Racist Branding and the Wrong Sort of Cultural Tenancy

Thanks to glowing reviews on Eater, I recently got hooked on David Chang’s Ugly Delicious on Netflix. I binge-watched it. I even got my senior citizen parents to watch it. Though I don’t fully agree with some of the points raised in the show, I love it.

During the “Fried Rice” episode in the show, David mentions that Chinese people are the most food-obsessed people on the planet. It’s true. I’m Singaporean and ethnically Chinese. Despite being from a tiny country, I’m used to encountering Singaporeans in random restaurants around the world. I think Asian people, in general, are food-obsessed. Look at the recent #rendanggate stoush that consumed four different countries and several politicians. In some Asian countries, some recipes and chefs are considered national treasures. Once we were colonised for our strategic locations and/or our resources. Perhaps it’s inevitable that our flavours are now the most appropriated on the planet.

Take Masterchef again, for example. #Rendanggate aside, I do like watching the Masterchef format. In Australia, it’s feel-good popcorn TV fun. Yet as Asian food, in general, becomes more trendy, with each new season of Masterchef Australia I think I’ll play a drinking game. Every time a non-Asian person says they know ‘Asian flavours’, are going to use ‘Asian vegetables’, or love ‘Asian [insert noun here]’, drink up. Will the show be pulled off the air before I damage my liver? Stay tuned. At least I’d be able to unironically enjoy the show if I’m not sober. Maybe it’s the masochist in me, but I still religiously tune in every week, watching non-Asian judges smile and praise the Asianness of the contestant’s Asianly flavoured Asianish dishes while I grow ulcers. A previous non-Asian Masterchef Australia contestant, Matt Sinclair, even opened a fusion restaurant in Queensland that supposedly highlights their “spirit and passion for Asian cuisine and culture”, called Sum Yung Guys. I kid you not. At least last year’s winner was a Singaporean-born Indian man, Sashi Cheliah.

Don’t get me wrong. I like fusion food. Thanks to our countries’ often colonial past, some Asian food is fusion. Once, I sat down to lunch with my parents in Yet Con Restaurant on Purvis Street in Singapore. We ordered its famous, fragrant Hainanese Chicken Rice, as well as a side of Cantonese Pork Chop. Crowded knee-to-knee in the tiny shop, my dad laughed as the dish arrived on a plastic plate: pieces of pork breaded and stir-fried with vegetables. “Last time when the British came, they told local cooks, ‘I want to eat pork chop!’ But we Chinese didn’t know what they mean by pork chop. So we took a piece of pork and chopped it up into small pieces and fried it with everything. Hai,” he said, smiling, “we used to cook for [Westerners]. Now they cook for us.” Fusion was wedged into our cultures by the colonisers. Personally, I’m fine eating fusion food cooked by whoever. If it’s delicious, I’d probably be back.

Most of the time.

If fusion is so widespread within Asian culture itself, when isn’t it okay for others to “steal like an artist”, to quote Austin Kleon? In the fried chicken episode of Ugly Delicious, a white American fried chicken restaurant owner is asked about appropriation. He mentions having to be a respectful tenant of the (more marginalised) culture that you’re borrowing from. Is it respectful to have Engrish branding along with a menu loaded with kimchi and edamame, in a restaurant full of non-Asian staff? I don’t think so. There’s even an explicitly “borrowed” item in pride of place on Mr Miyagi’s menu. It’s a David Chang dish: his ramen gnocchi.

Stealing an Asian chef’s dish and featuring it on a menu that laughs at Asian accents? Hilarious.

Your English is Really Good

Fifteen years ago, while playing online MUDs (yes, I’m old), non-Asians would often say, “Oh, you’re from Singapore? Which part of China is that?” Nowadays, you’ve probably been to our beautiful and efficient airport, even if you didn’t step outside to get slapped in the face by the humidity. Singapore has an advanced, universal healthcare system, is highly affluent and developed, multilingual, is surrounded by large and less affluent neighbours, and sadly, has a zero refugee intake. I know what you’re thinking: in a way, we’re like an Asian version of Wakanda. (Not true, by the way.) Despite this, I still get “Your English is Really Good!” from well-meaning people who mean it as a compliment. “Well of course,” I want to say, instead of the fake smile I plaster on, “I grew up in a country with a world-class education system that has an English-based curriculum. I’ve published a novel and over 10 short stories with well-regarded magazines.”

Look, slang aside, Engrish is real, you might say. Some of you Asians don’t speak good English.

Hey man, we don’t laugh at your attempts to speak Japanese via Duolingo and put it into our branding. We endure your often terrible plot device attempts to speak Mandarin and other Chinese dialects in Hollywood films. Trying to learn another language is a good thing. Everyone’s going to be shaky at the start. To laugh at someone who speaks poor English when English isn’t even their first language is mean. Besides, look closer at who you’re laughing at and why. Do you laugh at European tourists struggling with English? Or do you think, in contrast, that French, Italian accents are ‘sexy’? Many Asians treat genuine attempts to learn and speak our languages with patience and delight. It’s a pity the sentiment isn’t always returned. It’s depressing when derision-bloated stereotypes are run for laughs and profit.

Confession: I’m not good at math. Dishonour on my ancestors.

Just Don’t Think About It As “Asian”

Once, when my father visited me in Melbourne, I trolled him by taking him to an “Asian” restaurant. It was Spice Temple in Crown, run by Neil Perry, a “Modern Chinese” restaurant focused on regional Chinese cuisine. Going inside was like descending into a gentrified opium den. It was dimly lit, with Asian-ish furniture, and the serving staff were all white, dressed in cheongsams. I took a sneaky photo at the severe frown on my dad’s face as we sat on plush red velvet and black furniture.

“I thought you said this was a Chinese restaurant,” he said.

“It is. Look at the menu. Sichuan pork rib,” I said, stifling my giggles, trying to sneak another photo of his suffering.

We ordered. The dishes weren’t that bad. In the end, in magnanimous recognition of this, my dad said, “If I don’t think of it as ‘Asian’, it’s all right.” Nowadays, before my family flies down to Melbourne, he’d often tell me to book specific restaurants. I don’t think my dad’s approach is the right one in this case. Sure, a restaurant like Mr Miyagi isn’t aiming to be Asian, but it isn’t aiming to be respectful either. It isn’t something I can easily ignore. Instead, I think of my mom. She likes to tell me, “Don’t get mad, get even!” Each time we speak out, we build a little more social capital. Maybe I can build enough to get a restaurant to change its branding.

Is Racist Branding Funny to You?

In the neighbouring land of many sheep and Lord of the Rings, a Western-owned fusion Asian restaurant in Christchurch called Bamboozle recently came under fire on social media. It had a menu that included, among other things, a dish called “Chirri Garrik An Prawn Dumpring”. New Zealanders declared that they wouldn’t go to a place with racial tropes on the menu. Heartening as that was to see, it looks so far like the restaurant probably isn’t going to change its menu. And unsurprisingly, it’s also had its defenders. A poll on Stuff.co.nz with 34.3k votes was 43% “Yes, it’s racist and insensitive” and 58% “No. Lighten up, it’s funny.”

So funny.

Not having racist branding is actually not hard. Serious talk here. We recommend thinking your project over each time and looking closely at where your humour comes from. Are you deriving “humour” by mocking an entire group of people or their culture? If so, maybe don’t do it. It isn’t called having to be PC, it’s called good business. When you own a business that lives and dies on reviews and word of mouth, do you really want to alienate whole swathes of your customers before you even get started? Think about it. Or maybe just employ an agency that isn’t rooted in the 60s. We can help.

Still, count me surprised if the owners of Mr Miyagi bother to issue an apology on their own steam, let alone change the branding. Other Asians have already tried complaining after a post about the place was spread on an Asian Facebook group. They hear us, but they don’t care, despite getting reviews on Yelp and other sites complaining about the language on their menu. That tonally ugly business card is still handed out at the end of each meal, beautifully typeset. I could have said something to the serving staff at the end of the meal, but it wasn’t their fault. To live as an Asian person in Australia, it’s sometimes easier to fake a smile when someone asks you how the meal was, in front of a tray of racist business cards.

I hope they change. I’d like to go back. The cheesecake was almost perfect.

Image from Sash Japanese, Urbanlist.

The Rise of Evil Photoshop

July 30, 2019

Photoshop isn’t always bad, I tell myself as I open CNN and notice that the latest news involve Trump appearing in front of a doctored Presidential seal featuring a Russian-styled two-headed eagle holding some golf clubs. Given it was for a conservative student summit, apparently it was all a mistake thanks to time crunch, but heads rolled and I laughed. Photoshop is a fun program. For many young designers, it’s usually their first introduction to Adobe Creative Suite — in design school, everyone knew how to use it. There are always funny Photoshopping events that run on Kotaku and other sites. That being said, it’s often used for evil or outright illegal purposes.

If you’ve been following the news, you might have seen that certain people thought it would be funny to make an app which auto-undresses women. Just women, mind you. If a guy’s picture was put into the app, it just added boobs to it. Naturally, the app promptly went viral, because there are a lot of evil bastards in the world. Via Vice:

“We created this project for users’ entertainment months ago,” he wrote in a statement attached to a tweet. “We thought we were selling a few sales every month in a controlled manner… We never thought it would become viral and we would not be able to control traffic.”

When I spoke to Alberto in an email Wednesday, he said that he had grappled with questions of morality and ethical use of this app. “Is this right? Can it hurt someone?” he said he asked himself. “I think that what you can do with DeepNude, you can do it very well with Photoshop (after a few hours of tutorial),” he said. If the technology is out there, he reasoned, someone would eventually create this.

Since then, according to the statement, he’s decided that he didn’t want to be the one responsible for this technology.

“We don’t want to make money this way,” the statement said. “Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don’t want to be the ones to sell it.” He claimed that he’s just a “technology enthusiast,” motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn. This is the same refrain the maker of deepfakes gave Motherboard in December 2017: that he was just a programmer with an interest in machine learning. But as the subsequent rise of fake revenge porn created using deepfakes illustrated, tinkering using women’s bodies is a damaging, sometimes life-destroying venture for the victims of “enthusiasts.”

“The world is not yet ready for DeepNude,” the statement concluded. But as these victimizing algorithms and apps show, there is no simple solution for technology like DeepNudes, and the societal attitudes that erase women’s bodily autonomy and consent.

There are a few takeaways from this. Firstly, I think it’s hilarious that Alberto thought he was creating an app “motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn” when it could destroy the lives of women with fake revenge porn. It’s either disingenuous — an “Uh oh, I now realize I could be sued for this!” or extremely ignorant, a “I’m so privileged I didn’t realize this might be a problem” thing. Secondly, it’s true that anyone with Photoshop could do what DeepNude does. If you pirate or buy Photoshop and if you invest time learning how to use the app (It WILL take more than a few hours), you can indeed create fake nude images that you could spread around to get someone fired / hurt them enough to drive them to depression or suicide / worse. Not to mention that anything that gets on the internet will likely stay on the internet.

What Can Victims of Evil Photoshop Do?

Depending on what the problem is, there might be a legal recourse. Many countries have a revenge porn law on the books. In Australia, there’s both a civil and criminal recourse:

“When we’ve spoken with people who’ve been individual victims of this type of behaviour — which is terrible behaviour, obviously — what they say is what they really want is some ability to really quickly compel that person to stop doing it and to compel people who’ve received it to take it down if it’s posted on Facebook or to remove it if it’s been texted or emailed to someone,” Porter told 6PR on Thursday afternoon.

“And so we’ve set up this civil penalty regime, which basically allows for this really quick take-down, if you like, of that type of posting. In addition to which, we’ve looked at the existing offences and we’ve toughened them up, so that it will now be the case that if you send an image which we have defined as a private sexual image of someone and you do that in a way that’s unreasonable — including, obviously, consideration as to whether or not the person consented — then you can face a penalty of five years.

“If you do that and you’ve been the subject of three or more of these civil penalty orders — which is the regime that sits underneath it — then you can be guilty of an offence with a penalty up to seven years.”

For everything else, things are more complicated. Deep fakes, or computer-generated replicas of a person saying or doing things they hadn’t said, already exist. In May 2018, a Belgian political party, Socialistische Partij Anders, or sp.a, created a deep fake video of Trump purportedly offering climate change advice to the people of Belgium. They’d assumed that the poor quality of the fake would alert people to the fact that it was a parody video. Naturally, it didn’t. The video went viral and sp.a went into damage control. If even a small-scale deep fake could damage our already fragile news systems, it could do worse. Via the Guardian:

Citron and Chesney are not alone in these fears. In April, the film director Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed released a deep fake of Barack Obama calling Trump a “total and complete dipshit” to raise awareness about how AI-generated synthetic media might be used to distort and manipulate reality. In September, three members of Congress sent a letter to the director of national intelligence, raising the alarm about how deep fakes could be harnessed by “disinformation campaigns in our elections”.

The specter of politically motivated deep fakes disrupting elections is at the top of Citron’s concerns. “What keeps me awake at night is a hypothetical scenario where, before the vote in Texas, someone releases a deep fake of Beto O’Rourke having sex with a prostitute, or something,” Citron told me. “Now, I know that this would be easily refutable, but if this drops the night before, you can’t debunk it before serious damage has spread.”

The problem, the article noted, wasn’t even whether people could or could not easily ID whether a video was fake, or if there was tech that could tell if it was fake:

Indeed, as the fake video of Trump that spread through social networks in Belgium earlier this year demonstrated, deep fakes don’t need to be undetectable or even convincing to be believed and do damage. It is possible that the greatest threat posed by deep fakes lies not in the fake content itself, but in the mere possibility of their existence.

This is a phenomenon that scholar Aviv Ovadya has called “reality apathy”, whereby constant contact with misinformation compels people to stop trusting what they see and hear. In other words, the greatest threat isn’t that people will be deceived, but that they will come to regard everything as deception.

Recent polls indicate that trust in major institutions and the media is dropping. The proliferation of deep fakes, Ovadya says, is likely to exacerbate this trend.

In other words, no, there’s nothing much we can do to prevent the increasing sophistication of evil Photoshop and its kin. It’s all very well to ask people to apply an extra-healthy dose of cynicism and scepticism to anything that appears too good to be true, but in today’s time-sensitive world, that’s a hard ask.

A Retouching Law

Altering images to remove small flaws is nothing new. We do it ourself — retouching images to make them more beautiful. I’ve worked before in a studio with mostly fashion clients where they’d regularly lengthen the legs, lengthen the neck, change the hair, the nails — all in post-production. The “It can all be fixed in post” attitude is filtered in from design school. A classmate once told me in third year that while in first year he would have reshot an image with an error in the set, in third year it was already just easier to erase it in post rather than fiddle with cameras and lighting.

When retouching is taken to extremes, however, that’s what I’d call Strangely Socially Acceptable Evil Photoshop. Look at the image above. It’s of the same model: Filippa Hamilton. See the problem? The image on the left drew criticism over its alteration to impossible body standards.

The Rise of Evil Photoshop

Such standards cause lasting damage or worse on people. In 2007, Hila Elmaliach, a well-known model, died of complications from anorexia at age 34. She was 5’8, and weighed less than 22kg at her death. She’d developed eating disorders when she’d become a model at 13 years old. The American Medical Association also released a statement in 2011 about image alteration:

“The appearance of advertisements with extremely altered models can create unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image. In one image, a model’s waist was slimmed so severely, her head appeared to be wider than her waist. We must stop exposing impressionable children and teenagers to advertisements portraying models with body types only attainable with the help of photo editing software.”

Israel has now passed legislation requiring models to have a BMI of at least 18.5, and there’s legislation in the books about retouching in some countries. Via Pixelz:

In France, a law that went into effect in October of 2017 requires a “photographie retouchée” label on photos that have been digitally altered to make a model’s silhouette narrower or wider; it also requires an every other year health exam for models, to medically certify they are healthy enough to work.

Getty images has now banned “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger,” and there’s also been celebrity backlash on the issue:

The Things We Do

People have less and less of an appetite for extremely retouched stuff. American Eagle’s lingerie line, Aerie, had a campaign celebrating women of all body types:

It resulted in a 20% increase in sales in 2015. And of course, there’s Dove’s heavy push towards body positivity, in award-winning ads that have raised the profile of its products. So how much retouching (if any) is OK, and how much is not? In our opinion, retouching minor things like dirt, temporary blemishes, lighting and such is fine. These edits don’t fundamentally change what the image is, they just change the basic presentation. Respect the model and respect your audience, and as with every ad/marketing content out there, create it while trying to do no evil. That’s the best advice we can put forward in this day and age. Want to know more? Get in touch.

Image by Alex Wong / Getty Images / as seen on CNN

Convenience and the Environment

July 27, 2019

As the general public grows increasingly engaged in a weird mea culpa over plastic straws — nevermind that plastic straws are only a tiny part of the problem and that people with disabilities need them — in Melbourne, I can sip my overpriced orange juice at a cafe with my steel straw and pretend that I’m not contributing the problem each time I buy takeaway food, or things to cook with from a weekly shop, or even a cup of coffee on the go. Convenience is defeating our commitment to the environment and we all know it. “But I put my plastic and stuff into recycling!” you might say. Well, if you’ve been reading the news, you’d know that Australia’s attempt to “recycle” by shipping its dirty plastic to poor third world countries instead of setting up an actual homegrown recycling program has been a slow-moving crisis that seems to have lost major traction in the popular zeitgeist, even though it’s about to hit a new level of trash fire as “recycler” SKM prepares to go into administration:

Beleaguered recycling company SKM has warned that up to 400,000 tonnes a year of paper, glass and plastic could go to landfill if it folds, triggering a capacity crunch at Victoria’s major tips. The Melbourne-based company has contracts with more than 30 Victorian councils to process kerbside recycling, but is being pursued for millions of dollars in debt and is reportedly preparing to go into voluntary administration within days.

Awesome. Given the crisis, is there still a point recycling, you might ask? Do those coloured bins still even mean anything? What can brands do?

Convenience is the Worst

A lot of the “recycling” that ends up in our recycling can’t be recycled because it’s contaminated. Before you start feeling guilty about the last yoghurt cup you threw into recycling that wasn’t washed, recycling systems can cope with leftover food in containers. Washing it out is just going to waste water. That being said, according to Sustainability Victoria, there are still things that we shove into recycling that we really shouldn’t be:

  • Soft plastics including shopping bags, cling wrap and soft plastic packaging and wrappers. Gather these separately and find out where to recycle these in your community, such as at your local supermarket.
  • Clothing cannot be processed at recycling centres, so donate wearable clothing to a local charity instead, or reuse as rags around the home.
  • Keep items out of plastic bags. This one is easy: just bin it – don’t bag it! All recycling items should be loose in the bin. If they are in a plastic bag, the whole lot has to be ditched.
  • Leave green waste out of the recycling bin. If you have a green bin, put all your grass clippings, prunings and garden waste in there.
  • Electronic-waste – this includes any electrical items, phones, cables, batteries and computers. E-waste recycling might be in place in your area. Check with your local council about what’s available near you.

Yes. Goddamned plastic bags. We should’ve just banned single-use plastic bags by now — other countries have done it — but given the crying fit customers went through when Coles and Woolies got rid of it, I can see why it still hasn’t yet been phased out in Australia. In any case, if you’re a consumer, stop with the single-use bags. You can get cornstarch ones that are bio-degradable and work just as well, so get on that.

If you’re a brand, well. The biggest producers of plastic in the world are brands. According to Greenpeace, it’s:

  1. Coca-Cola
  2. PepsiCo
  3. Nestlé
  4. Danone
  5. Mondelez International
  6. Procter & Gamble
  7. Unilever
  8. Perfetti van Melle
  9. Mars Incorporated
  10. Colgate-Palmolive

RIP. We’ve probably all used products from these companies in our lifetime. Probably more than once. Maybe even daily. (Confession: I did have to look up Perfetti van Melle. They own Mentos and Chupa Chups, among many other confectionery brands). If you’re a brand with plastic packaging, maybe think about whether it can get phased out for something else. We understand. Plastic’s an easy solution. We’ve had clients whose products are wrapped in plastic because it’s just the best way of keeping the product fresh before it hits shelves. It’s a nice, cheap, and yeah, convenient way to show a product while protecting it. That being said, the industry won’t move unless brands are willing to move.

A Hunger for Something New

I like going to the Big Vegan Market. It’s not only because of the free chocolate samples, which sadly are growing less and less available over time. I like looking at all the ways people are trying to get around disposables, from selling plastic-free combs and toothbrushes to selling reusable sanitary napkins (wtf lol). Every year, the Vegan Market is massively attended, and that can’t just be because a lot of people are into alternative plant products and weirdly spongy egg/dairy-free baked goods. There definitely is a hunger in Melbourne for something new. People are willing to change — eventually. There’s a growing consciousness that this earth is all we’ve got, and there isn’t going to be spaceships moving everyone to Mars. Everyone’s more or less gotten used to the bagless checkouts in Coles and Woolies. Steel straws are everywhere. You can’t get disposable bags in Queen Victoria Market or in South Melbourne Market. A brand that’s willing to get ahead of the curve with something new in terms of its packaging is going to be ahead of the pack. If you’re a brand that’s willing to innovate, get in touch. We’d like to help.

Give-Back Advertising in Australia

July 26, 2019

After recently listening to an interview with Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS Shoes, via NPR’s ‘How I Built This’ podcast, I wondered if this model of giving back to the community should extend to the world of advertising and marketing. TOMS is a shoe company that matches every pair of shoes purchased with a new pair of shoes for a child in need, in their ‘One for One’ program. So far they have donated more than 60 million pairs of shoes, operate in 75 countries and perhaps what’s most impressive is that around 40% of all shoes given away are made in the countries where they’re distributed.

What began as a simple idea has evolved to become something much more with TOMS branching out into other charitable areas including safe birth, eye-sight and clean water projects. 
Closer to home, Zambrero – an Australian founded quick-service restaurant chain – donates meals to those in need with their ‘Plate 4 Plate’ initiative with every bowl or burrito sold. So far the company has donated more than 30 million meals worldwide and this number is only expected to grow with new stores seeming to pop up faster than I could inhale a burrito!

Some other companies which have adopted this ‘give back’ philosophy include:

One thing we notice when considering these companies is that they all deal in consumer goods, but what if this extended to the services industry? Specifically, ours: advertising and marketing solutions.

As such, my question to marketing and advertising agencies in Australia is: Should we be engaging in more pro-bono work with local charities? We’re not talking about big charities with big budgets. We’re talking about small charitable organizations or groups within our communities who could use a hand spreading the word about their good work. Whether it’s:

  • SEO optimization: ensuring they are reaching the right people in their community
  • Web design: updating an old website to improve UX and engagement from audiences
  • Consulting: which channels to use to reach the desired audience.
  • Graphic design: designing a contemporary brand that community members can easily identify, that helps them better communicate who they are

A potential model for this type of work could be a project ratio. Meaning with every two to three for-profit projects an agency takes on, they engage in one not-for-profit activity for a local charity. It is not uncommon for creatives to become disillusioned with their work and wonder ‘Why am I doing this? Is it really helping anyone?’. By throwing themselves into socially conscious, give-back oriented work they can take pride in knowing that they’re having a positive impact on their community. The effects of such work can span all kinds of personal and professional areas, like boosting morale and helping forge a thriving working environment.

Another key benefit of give-back advertising is that it’s likely to generate new business amongst other socially conscious clients, whose values are aligned with this model of advertising. So essentially, everyone’s a winner!

Shining Examples of Give-Back Advertising

This model of give-back advertising manifests itself within a Singaporean NGO called Creatives for Causes. A company that pairs charities with creative volunteers in the areas of:

  • Photography and videography
  • Graphic design
  • Copywriting
  • PR
  • Social media
  • Blogging

Charlies Liew, the treasurer of Willing Hearts, and a satisfied user of the organization commented: “The Willing Hearts story with photos generated immense interest amongst netizens. From this article, there are a lot more volunteers coming forward to assist us in our cause.” I’m not suggesting that creative agencies become totally not-for-profit like Creatives for Causes, but to at least be aware of the needs of the community and areas where they could assist.

Back on Aussie soil, a Melbourne-based SEO agency iformat is leading the way in give-back marketing. Offering pro bono or heavily-reduced rates for ongoing development and web support for charities all over Australia. For example, they “designed and developed a simple ready-to-go website free of charge” to assist Caitlin’s Retreat. A property on the outskirts of Melbourne that gives families of special needs children the chance to get away and enjoy a much-needed break together as a family.

Moreover, in 2015 Starship undertook an important pro-bono project teaming up with Sea Shepherd to create a video to sell merchandise and raise funds for its conservation campaigns. We created an upbeat, colourful and positive campaign for Sea Shepherd Australia focused on getting existing Sea Shepherd supporters to help grow Sea Shepherd’s ‘ground crew’, by encouraging them and their friends to buy gift cards or merchandise for the upcoming holiday season. As a result, Sea Shepherd Australia received the highest holiday season merchandise sales on record.

So come on guys, let’s band together and start helping our communities!

This was a guest blog by our intern, David Holyoake.

The Restaurant Pay Reckoning

July 24, 2019

“I wish I could steal $7 million dollars and only get fined $200,000,” said a friend of mine when the scandal broke. If you’ve been on the news or Aussie Twitter recently, you might have seen that George Calombaris, one of the judges on the popular reality TV cooking competition Masterchef Australia and restauranteur of Press Club, Gazi, Hellenic Republic and others — has been fined a relative pittance for wage theft. Ironically, on the day of the finale, as activists were trying to get the #MasterTheft hashtag trending, news broke that all three judges wouldn’t be returning for 2020. Their pay negotiations had fallen through, apparently. Despite currently being on million-dollar salaries, they’d asked for a pay raise of 40%. Twitter was briefly overstimulated:

I confess I’ve tried every one of George’s restaurants, even the Press Club, which is probably the most pretentious restaurant I’ve ever been to. If you know me, you’d know that’s a real achievement. Yes, it was more pretentious even than Attica, which when I visited during the first year of its opening, had a little print-out essay of Ben Shewry’s “food philosophy” that you had to read before looking at the menu, where near the end you’re chivvied out into the freezing night and made to walk around the tiny backyard garden poking at herbs. More pretentious than Michelin restaurants in Europe, or even Quintessence in Tokyo, whose menu is literally a blank slate that’s passed to you at the start of the meal. In the Press Club, my guest and I were shown a basket of potatoes still in their jackets. “Cool,” we said, puzzled. “Now the kitchen will transform the potatoes,” announced the serving staff. “Ok,” we said. At the Press Club, your seats are against windows that look down into the kitchen. We watched the serving staff take the potatoes to the kitchen, where sauce was slathered on top. It was served as it was.

We laughed then, but now that I’m aware of the wage theft, I kinda understand.

Free Labour and a Fine Dining Restaurant

It’s now Rockpool Group’s turn to be hit by the wage scandal, before which it was Vue de Monde. To be honest, we’d be completely unsurprised if every high-end restaurant in Australia is underpaying its staff. After all, underpaying — or not even paying — staff has been a staple of fine dining restaurants for a long time. The latter is called ‘staging’, a sort-of free labour internship that is the backbone of fine dining across the world. Via Eater:

What is unfair, underneath the veneer of awards, and the steady flow of international reservation requests they come with, is an ugly economic reality. Because many of these temples of culinary artistry cannot function without the work of stagiaires, their unpaid labor force.

A stage (pronounced: stajh, taken from the French word for “trainee”) is like a cooking internship, and the practice is much more common in elite, destination restaurants than local faves. Some cooks do this for a few days, but often the unpaid work lasts for weeks or months; depending on the kitchen, a stage might see themselves chopping up produce for mise en place or running entire stations during a night’s dinner service. Ostensibly, a cook who has already been in the field a few years, is staging to learn, to absorb new skills and knowledge from the kitchen’s full-time staff — because to be the best, you’ve got to learn from the best. I know a chef who staged at the French Laundry in California, and he doesn’t regret the unpaid, 14-hour days for a minute. It made him who he is. And for those who are able to do this, the experience is figuratively priceless. But in a literal sense, it does have a cost.

“Pursuing your dream and doing whatever it takes to work for the best restaurant, you put up any sacrifice,” says Abigail Ainsworth, a Toronto filmmaker currently shooting a documentary, tentatively titled Stage, about staging in the world’s best restaurants. “We’ve met people who sell their cars, break up with loved ones, really do whatever it takes to live their dream and work for these chefs.”

[…]

In 2015, when Noma was ranked at number three, the Guardian reported that the Copenhagen restaurant employed about 25 paid cooks, with another 30 unpaid stagiaires. A memoir from a former stagiaire, published in Los Angeles Magazine, described 17-hour days. When El Bulli was in the number one spot, I interviewed Ferran Adrià, who told me that he had 25 stagiaires, a workforce that outnumbered his paid staff.

It’s all very well to claim that staging is going to cooking school for free, but unpaid labour is illegal across many countries for a good reason. Besides, people who can afford to stage would themselves be a privileged few — people who don’t have medical debts to pay off, for example, or families to support. That’ll contribute to a lessening of diversity across the industry, which you can see in the spread of the Best 50 Restaurants list this year too. It lauded itself for being “female-forward“, when there were only 5 women-led restaurants in the top 50, and there’s still, hilariously, a “Best Female Chef” award, as though women can’t compete at the same level for Best Chef.

Free staging isn’t legal in Australia — but underpaying staff in general while overworking them is still the go. When Ben Shewry of Attica implemented the 48-hour working week for his staff, it was lauded:

“48-hour work weeks at a top 50 restaurant is amazing – this should be the Australian standard.”

However, not everyone is receptive to a shorter work week – chefs included. Dan Puskas of Sydney restaurant Sixpenny tried to implement a four-day system six months ago, but failed.

“I pitched it to our staff and none of them wanted to do it,” he says. “We’re lucky here because we don’t do Sunday dinner and we close Mondays and Tuesdays so our chefs get Sunday nights off and then two week days.”

“There’s this old idea that if you want to survive in this industry, you have to work these crazy hours. Maybe it’s exaggerated but on the other hand, we couldn’t afford to be open if we worked eight hours a day. We’d need to double the chefs, our prices would go up and we’d have no customers,” says Puskas.

It’s a hard life. We can only hope the Attica staff are also being paid what they’re worth. The last time I was in the restaurant, the chef’s essay was gone, but the garden walk remained.

Masterchef 2020

To be honest, I don’t particularly care that three middle-aged guys have lost a job that they held with intermittent success for 11 years. I used to love watching Masterchef. I learned how to quarter a chicken watching the show, among other things. I’ve gone to restaurants or tried bakeries because they featured on the show. I wish it the best. Unlike a lot of reality TV out there, much of Masterchef is feel-good TV where you can actually learn something. Yet every year, having to watch George struggle to eat spicy food got less and less funny. And each time the judges (other than Matt Preston the food critic) was faced with something beyond the norm, I usually held my breath to see if they were going to handle it badly.

Notwithstanding the top 10 for this year, the show has become more diverse over the years — last year’s winner was Singapore-born Sashi Cheliah. It was an absolute trip to turn on free-to-air Australian TV five days a week and listen to the accent from the country of my birth boom out over everyone else (Sashi used to be a police officer and it shows). TV is changing. This year, one of the most-watched shows on Netflix was Ava Duvernay’s incredible When They See Us, about the Central Park Five. Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians have made silly money at the box office. The new 007 is Lashana Lynch.

Here’s hoping that Masterchef Australia and Channel 10 will see the way the wind is blowing, and bring in judges that reflect the huge variety of food that Australia is now home to. It’s a new world now, hungry for new things. To Matt and Gary, thanks for the entertainment, even though it’s been 11 years and I’m still not entirely sure why Gary was even there (does he even have a restaurant?). As to George… pay your staff more, man. And the potatoes were weird.

Image from 7news.

Effective Posting on Social Media

July 20, 2019

Let’s talk social media. Depending on who you are, you’re either rolling your eyes and closing this tab while you open up your printed-on-paper magazine/newspaper, or rolling your eyes and wondering out aloud what an older person in their 30s could possibly have to say about the dinosaur platforms that they use. If you’re the former, you’re probably on Facebook and maybe even my parents’ age in which case I’ll like to do the world a service right now and say: Don’t believe everything you read in Facebook! Don’t rabbithole YouTube! The moon landing is real! 9-11 isn’t a conspiracy! Ghosts aren’t coming out of the walls! *deep breath* If you’re the latter, gerroff my lawn and take your Snapchat/Periscope/whatever with you. No, wait! Teach me how to use Snapchat! …Just kidding. I know you’re all on Instagram stories now. Which I confess I don’t use often, save to engage in the time-honoured tradition of having picture-based social media in the first place: posting endless content about my cats.

Posting on social media is very much a microcosm for our time. You shout into the void and sometimes the void shouts back. That’s usually unpleasant. Having had a couple of posts go viral before on twitter, after a few hours you’re pretty much just praying the deluge is going to stop, and if you’re lucky, your viral post hasn’t brought any trolls to your yard or worse.

The void is segmented — depending on your age, circumstances, and culture, you’d probably prefer one app over another. Well-meaning diagrams like the following one often just heavily study a certain pocket of users (Western countries, English-speaking) and ignore most of the rest of the world, so take them with a grain of salt:

Screen Shot 2019 07 09 at 12.16.14 pm - Starship

For example, WeChat above actually has a billion users — according to statistics, only Facebook (2.1) and WhatsApp (1.5) have more. Yes, it’s more popular than Instagram, Twitter, and all the other social media platforms you likely use or have heard of. It even has an inbuilt payment system, which you might have seen pop up in some of the Asian restaurants in Melbourne, making it ubiquitous in a way that some other social media platforms can only dream of.

In that sense, a post like this is meaningless. With social media so diverse and used all over the world, what does a post setting down rules about timings and content matter? It’ll be as useless as those endless lists you see about writing advice. That being said, when we post, chances are we’re not looking to reach everyone in the world, only a particular audience. Especially if you’re an Aussie brand. You’ve likely already got a target market — if you don’t, we can help figure it out for you — and from their habits, you can work from there.

Navigating Social Media

As part of our work for clients in the digital space, we often create original content, repackage older content, and used mixed media to sustain engagement and create leads. Nobody wants to follow a random company’s page unless there’s something about it that’s worth their time. This is easier for some clients than most — for example, more people are naturally going to be more inclined to follow something like Sea Shepherd than the Instagram page of a car parts company or something. We’ve successfully pushed the public to clients’ digital platforms through considered strategies that we tailor-make for each client depending on their needs. This can include anything from coming up with competitions to having a ready-to-go roster of facts and fun content.

It’s possible for clients to run all this in-house if they want to, of course. Still, unless you have social media managers in-house, chances are, the poor admin person you’ve tasked with updating your Facebook hasn’t been trained to do so. This can lead to inefficient posting or worse — inappropriate posting. It’s important to have someone around ready to respond to customers on social media and the digital space in a polite and professional manner. Whether you outsource that is up to you, but it’s often good to have a strategy in place regardless. We often work with clients’ in-house marketing to create more effective strategies.

Effective Posting in General

There are any number of posts out there about when you should post on social media, and many of them are contradictory, so we won’t get into that. Suffice to say it isn’t often a huge stretch of logic. When do you often check social media? During breakfast and your lunch break, yes? Maybe on the commute home after work? Depending on which target market you’re looking at, if you post around these times, chances are whatever you’re writing won’t fall into a black hole. Experiment with your existing audience to see what times work best for which posts.

As to which social media platform works the best, well. Facebook is still king, at least in the bits of the world where it hasn’t been banned or supplanted by other apps.

Screen Shot 2019 07 09 at 12.17.30 pm - Starship

There’s a reason for this, a rather insidious one that we won’t get into right now, but we’ll point you toward further reading here and here if you’re interested.

Content matters. Is the image attached to your post in the right resolution and crop? Is there even an image? Is the content something people would want to — in other words, is it clickbaity? Worth someone’s time? Funny? Or are you being a non-automated can of processed pork product? The more value you add to someone’s life, the more likely they’re going to come back to you for more. If you can’t make it visually interesting, at least make sure it’s readable. Note that spreading misinformation in 2019 is quite likely to bite you quickly in the butt, and few things will damage your brand more than it being seen as untrustworthy by the masses. Be very careful about what you can state and what you can’t. Don’t post factoids that you’ve found off Facebook. Even if you’re sure that something you’re posting is right, you should also be careful about the language you use. Is it respectful? Something that you’d be happy saying out loud offline? Be inclusive. That means being respectful to everyone, including the disabled, marginalised genders and sexualities, and other minorities.

In short:
+ Post during a time that works for your audience. Test different times to check whether it has an effect on engagement.
+ Tailor-make content for your target audience that benefits them in some way.
+ Don’t lie or intentionally spread misinformation.
+ Make sure the content is readable.
+ Don’t be offensive — unintentionally or not.
+ Be as inclusive as possible.

Need a chat on any of the above? Get in touch.

Social Causes Marketing

July 13, 2019

Perhaps confusingly, one of the biggest adland events of the year bears approximately the same abbreviated title as the biggest film event of the year. Maybe because it appeals to adland egos, maybe everyone just likes to party in Cannes, who knows. This year, there was a minor stir over Alfonso Cuarón, who was a key speaker. You may remember Cuarón from films such as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban. Haha, we kid. We mean (also) Children of Men and this year’s Oscar bait, the long, black and white, Netflix-funded masterpiece, Roma. Cuarón was at Cannes to pick up more shiny awards, and also to talk about social causes marketing in a talk called Defining Art+Activism. Via FastCompany:

Cuarón directed a PSA to help promote a Domestic Workers Rights bill in Mexico, which was passed into legislation, and now they’re working to promote a similar bill that will be introduced by Senator Kamala Harris in the U.S. later this year. Back in 2017, Participant and Cuarón also launched a campaign called “Mexico Rises” to help reconstruction in Mexico after the devastating Puebla earthquake.

As more brands look to make social impact a part of their marketing, Cuarón had some key advice for the gathered ad industry in how to go about it the right way. “To do this in a genuine way, all you do is put yourself at the service of the (social impact) organizations you’re working with,” he said. “Not trying to tell them what to do but actually for them to lead the message. You become a platform for that organization. It has to be a genuine commitment. People nowadays, they smell everything. They smell when something’s not genuine, and then it backfires. These relationships have to come from a standpoint of honesty. It’s clear we’re in difficult times, in which people are aware of the reality in which they live. And as much as they want luxury, they also want to do the right thing.” Good direction from one of the world’s best.

That’s exactly what I wish brands who piggyback on social movements for momentum would understand. If your commitment to whatever it is isn’t genuine, it’ll often backfire in your face.

Social Causes Marketing in the Wilds

For the most recent egregious examples of social causes marketing, check out what happens during Pride Month. Every year, a bunch of brands jump on the chance to put a rainbow in their logo without having to do the work of being an actual ally.

As Fran Tirado says in their thread, there are several vacuous ways that brands engage with the LGBTQA+ community. A t-shirt doesn’t cut it, nor does vanilla messaging about how “love is love”. If you plan on monetising Pride, make sure that you at the very least:
– Have a queer nonprofit partner
– Donate a portion of the profits that isn’t a pittance to your queer nonprofit partner
– Have a diverse campaign developed by queer/trans people, for which they are paid the market rate

In other words, if you want to jump onto a movement, do it for the right reasons — and you can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk.

Some Good Examples

Moving on from egregious examples to good ones, here are some ways that a brands have done the work.

One of the most well-known PSAs out there is Dumb Ways to Die, from our very own Metro Trains. The combination of a catchy song and hilarious graphics meant that the song went mega-viral, reminding everyone to be careful around trains. Train safety is of course close to the Metro’s heart, but the video’s a good example of how messaging and imagery doesn’t have to be explicitly branded in order to work for the brand:

Outdoor clothing brand Patagonia has stepped up its attempts to bring awareness and help to public lands during the current administration, including briefly blacking out its front page after Trump’s announcement that he would scale back two national monuments. The company also launched lawsuits on behalf of one of the monuments (Bear Ears) and works with conservation groups. With a nearly 30 year history of working to protect public lands, Patagonia also teamed up with Google to create a series of interactive videos:

Have a cause you want to support? Curious to learn more about how it might fit into your company strategy? Get in touch.

Feature image from Variety.

What is Omnichannel?

July 8, 2019

Omnichannel is one of the popular buzzwords flying around the industry, randomly smacking the uninitiated in the face. You’d be forgiven for thinking it has something to do with science fiction. The star of some new Transformers movie, maybe. Or the name for a new Pacific Rim Jaeger. Put simply, an “omnichannel” approach is a multi-channel, integrated approach to sales. But wait, you’d say. That’s just more marketing TEDtalky word salad. Listen to yourself and stop drinking the craft beer.

Okay. To put it even more simply, omnichannel approaches try to provide end-users (aka customers) with a seamless experience, whether they’re accessing whatever it is online, on their couch at home with a cat on their head, or in a brick and mortar store. It sounds like science fiction because it is science fiction. It’s Luke Skywalker using the Force to appear seamlessly on another planet, hopefully without being tempted towards the Dark Side. It’s Neo integrating into the Matrix, but with hopefully less Agent Anderson. See the common thread through our analogies? No, not the mega money-making profits from both SF franchises. While omnichannel can help integrate and improve the customer experience, the information you’d have to gather on a customer to make it possible is also vulnerable to abuse.

Hello from the Dark Side

Inside Retail declared in 2016 that omnichannel would soon meet its demise:

“The ability to have a continuous experience across brands, across formats and across devices that is completely bespoke – that is the promise of a new way of thinking and marketing that has been long unnoticed”.

The real reason omnichannel will die a slow and gruesome death is that the customers will reject it. Ironically the better omnichannel works, the more intense the rejection will be.

What is needed for omnichannel to work? Cloudtags explains:

  • Seamless, open lines of communication across multiple channels (in-store, on the website, in customer service emails, on store associate calls, via tweets, etc).
  • Data is used intelligently to inform decisions on the when, where, how, with whom of those communications.
  • The customer sees a valuable return for their the collection of their data. Data gathering methods are transparent and always opt-in at the end.

The first two parts is on brands to develop. The last part requires delicacy and respect. Today, as customers grow more and more tech-savvy and conscious of their privacy online and offline, it can be harder to persuade customers to provide their data to you, a commercial entity. Privacy-preserving services like VPNs, script blockers, Tor, and ad-blockers are becoming more and more popular. And with data breaches growing commonplace and increasingly egregious, affecting large companies like Sony, Yahoo, and the latest, Facebook, customers are becoming more aware about who should have their data and why.

Take the Cambridge Analytica business with Facebook. Customer data on Facebook was gathered by Cambridge Analytica through this process:

In 2015, Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, created an app named “thisisyourdigitallife” that promised to predict aspects of users’ personalities. About 270,000 people downloaded it and logged in through Facebook, giving Kogan access to information about their city of residence, Facebook content they had liked, and information about their friends.

Kogan passed the data to SCL and a man named Christopher Wylie from a data harvesting firm known as Eunoia Technologies, in violation of Facebook rules that prevent app developers from giving away or selling users’ personal information. Facebook learned of the violation that year and removed his app from Facebook. It also asked Kogan and his associates to certify that they had destroyed the improperly collected data. Everyone said that they did.

Of course, they actually hadn’t. Cambridge Analytica continued to use the data to help Trump more effectively target voters on Facebook than his rival, Hillary Clinton, giving it an unfair advantage.

Similarly, surveys are a favourite way of gathering customer data by brands. Agencies like the Retail Partners Unit can provide a nuanced omnichannel strategy that respects customer data while providing them with an affirming, useful return for its supply. This data has to be analysed and used to inform a brand’s overall approach to creating offers for clients, marketing, and other forms of communication. If the data is to be shared with other channels, consent needs to be acquired from the customer. At all points when customer data is gathered, the customer must be given information on how the information would be used. A lack of transparency will breed distrust: just look at the backlash when people were randomly messaged by the “Yes” campaign during the marriage equality vote. While we’re suspicious of people who used that incident of SMS marketing to decide they were opposed to marriage equality (what??), we note that people can find omnichannel features like geolocation contact intrusive and offensive.

How to be More like Keanu Reeves

Our quick omnichannel rules:

  • Let people know what they’re getting themselves into. Don’t be afraid to be honest.
  • Provide an experience that feels naturally seamless, and isn’t just there for the sake of being cool. The integrated touchpoints of your retail offering have to be valuable and well thought out.
  • The experience has to make the customer feel like they’re getting more out of the retail experience.
  • Don’t use data without consent.
  • Be transparent and mindful.
  • Be respectful. Data is valuable. If a customer willingly provides it to you, value their data and their trust.
  • Don’t overdo it: study when and how it would be appropriate to engage with customers, and, especially, when they might want you to engage with them. If you bury customers in messages, pings, newsletters, and more, chances are they’d unsubscribe, and worse: you might lose a customer if you piss them off.
  • Be fully digitised: this will help you integrate multiple touchpoints more easily.
  • Stay on top of retail trends. If your business is future-facing, customers will be more willing to engage with multiple touchpoints that might otherwise feel confronting and scary.
  • Don’t use the data to help elect Donald Trump.

Need more help? Still don’t understand any of this? Drop us a line.

This post was last updated on 8 July 2019.

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