Category: What I Think

In the first week of each month the ANZ Job Advertisements report is presented to the media as if it is some kind of key indicator (and predictor) of the health of the Australian economy. Two things have always struck me about this monthly event;

1. Each and every month the news outlets jump on this data, and
2. It is complete rubbish.

Let me explain. Anyone who has ever had anything to do with the recruitment industry knows that for numerous reasons some ads just aren’t real. They do not exist. These jobs never have existed and never will. They are creative figments of the recruiter to lure candidates into their databases. Bait to create the illusion of a talent pool to be used to further entice companies into the client list.

This is not all jobs put forward by recruiters of course but let us do some conservative assuming…

There are in this country around 10,000 recruitment consultants. Now let’s assume that just 50% of these place a bait ad every second month (50% of the time). That’s 2,500 jobs every month that never, ever existed except inside the mind of a recruiter.

Is that a big deal? 2,500 is surely not going to make any impact. Wrong. The September 2009 report had a total of 10,863 ads. That means the conservative 2,500 extra ads calculated here accounts for an error of about 25%.

I have more faith in astrology as an economic predictor than the ANZ Job Advertisement report.

For many years Reuters, one of the finest media outlets in the world, didn’t bother to even report the fiction that is the ANZ JAR.  But the Australian news media is so devoid of original thinking that they pounce on these rubbery figures and say, ‘thank you, thank you ANZ PR hack for not making me have to think today.’

Up sees Pixar return to the former glory of Toy Story. I saw this version in the 3D format which was fun and well worth the extra $5 but by no way added anything to the story at all. It would be just as good in regular everyday normal format and on the small screen too.

Like all animation, the voices are a vital part of the movie. And perhaps for me this was the only slight downfall to Up. Ed Asner, a perennial TV actor, leads the cast as Carl. I haven’t seen Mr Asner in anything since he did a few episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the cult behind the scenes series that tried to take The West Wing plot and put it in the context of Saturday Night Live. Even here that sounds ridiculous but it worked very well for anyone with an IQ above room temperature. Network heads being network heads proved they don’t have this level of intelligence and the show was axed after one season. It was actually almost cancelled half way through but enough fans got behind the show and were able to get the network to at least wrap up all the story lines with a full season of 24 eps. (FYI The West Wing and Studio 60 were both created and in the main written by Aaron Sorkin – one of my favourite writers.)

The voice actor adds a multitude of layers to the character and a lot of those layers come from their real life persona. Up was not promoted with the usual fanfare of other animated features where the voice actors lead the way. This is typical too of most live action features as well. And for the first time it hit my that I wasn’t able to have any connection with the animated character because I didn’t know the human behind the character. Christopher Plummer lends his voice to the bad guy in a stellar performance.

I have the upmost (that’s deliberate) respect for Mr Asner and Mr Plummer and firmly believe that their and the other voice actors should have been  better utilised in the marketing of this film. For the benefit of the adult patrons – kids couldn’t care less.

Also interestingly Up features a short animated film about a stork and the clouds who create babies. For parents who have ever been faced with the question from their child, “where do babies comes from?” this excellent short answers the question beautifully.

Great article from the masters of mischief about PepsiCo ceasing its US$1.3 Billion dollar advertising budget.*

*This article proudly brought to you by our sponsors. That’s them, just under the ‘Print’ button in the ‘Article Tools’ box.

This interesting article from Fast Company features new research that proves 9 ways you can increase the ‘retweeting’ of your tweets.

Interesting stuff except that it’s one of those research projects where now that the evidence has been published, the circumstances will change. I predict within 6 weeks, if not sooner , these ‘rules’ will be out the window.

A common occurrence with this kind of ‘benefit’ research is that the mid section of the bell curve (the big bit) will adopt these tactics in their tweeting methodology. On some levels that is not so bad. I for one like complete sentences and punctuation. I also like that if the majority of people adopted and adhered to Point 3 then twitter traffic would drop by at least 50% and therefore junk tweets may disappear altogether. Epic Win!

But if everyone tweets, as per Point 9, at 4Pm on Fridays, then there is going to be an Epic Fail as twitter falls over.

Just when I was starting to think that news.com.au was lifting their game comes this story;

Advertisers pay for personal Facebook information

Shock horror! Oh, the humanity. On what planet does this constitute news. It may be to the ‘journalist’ who wrote this story but for every other person on Facebook its well known. Actually, expected.

Perhaps rather than coming from a journo this ‘story’ has fallen from the mind of a Myspace (owned by News Corp) PR hack and published on all their sites in some half hearted and poorly conceived strategy to bolster the flagging fortunes of Myspace.

And the comments on the story should give the editors some food for thought – if they do in fact think at all. Consumers expect to be advertised to when they receive a service for free.

Stories like this prove that news.com.au and the larger organisation is out of touch with their audience.