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Category Archives: There's a Fly in My Soup

Great Spam Subject Headers

I know we all hate spam but sometimes you have to admire the creativity and thought that goes into some of the subject titles. I must admit, I’ve never been inclined to click on “get your viagra today” or “grow your schloong to extra lengths”, but today I had one sent through that I just had to click on:

“Grow a kangeroo in 2 weeks”

Brilliant! And for a moment I even let my mind wander into the realms of thinking about having a baby kangeroo hopping around my flat and the two of us staying in with Pizza and watching Rocky IV on Friday evening.

Imagine my disappointment when I clicked through and all I got was a link to some medication that would “upsize my organ”. At least the viagra spam is selling what it says it’s going to sell.

Anyways, I thought I would open it up to all the heavy chefs out there to check through their spam with a creative eye this week and see what other classic subject lines are out there.

By Mike | July 4, 2008
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Who needs Photoshop, when you can use MS Paint?

Classic stuff… [click here to view video]

Thanks Shaun for the link…

By Fred | April 23, 2008
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World Wide Creative’s all-time best typos

Being a media team of sorts, the guys at World Wide Creative generally regard the word ‘typo’ in the same way that one would regard downing a slug of greasy dishwater. We’ve had some corkers, the most recent being one from World Wide Creative’s new Creative Director, where she wrote ‘cyst’ instead of ’site’ - ahem. Here are some more pearlers:

‘I took a screenshit on the web layout, please take a look at the attachment’ (from an email to a client).
‘Do you want your website to shit in cyberspace and do nothing?’ (in presentation notes prior to a workshop).
‘When would you like your document suppository to go?’ (as apposed to ‘document repository’).
‘Your reputation exceeds you’ (technically, this wasn’t a typo… it was a phone conversation with an old client).

Speaking of telephone conversations, for some obscure, inexplicable reason, people get our name wrong when we say it over the phone. Here are some of the deviations of World Wide Creative over the years:

World Wide Creditors
World War Creators (no kidding… this one was a showstopper)
Wild World Creative
Wild Whirl Creative
Woolberg Creditors
World In Crisis

Aye caramba. Re-reading this post, I sometimes wonder how we got this far…

By Fred | April 20, 2008
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Standard Bank launches a shocker of a website redesign

I was checking in on Muti today when I saw Coda’s entry ‘Standard Bank redesign’. I clicked through to check it out, and was gobsmacked by what I saw. [For our international readers, Standard Bank is South Africa's second biggest bank. Bear in mind that in South Africa, banks are hugely profitable and should really have a big budget for this kind of thing.]

Here is a screenshot of the new website…

I’m at a slight loss for words, so let me list my observations in quick succession:

The logo is missing in Firefox (my browser of choice).
The design is breathtakingly inappropriate for a bank.
It looks like one of those domain squatter sites (you know the ones, with a bunch of arbitrary listings from ‘adult info’ to ‘zen’).
The adverts are cheap and nasty, and have absolutely no brand consistency.
There is no clear hierarchy of information.
With a redesign, there should be a news flash saying ‘Welcome to Our New Look’ with a link to an expanded explanation of their motives (there is only the confusing ‘re-energising’ banner at the bottom).
Just checked in IE, and nope it doesn’t work there either (see missing logo below).

Wow, I could go on, but I got stuff to do.

Sheesh. A bank. Big IT dept. Even bigger marketing dept. Lots of money. Lo-o-o-o-ts of money.

You’d think…?

By Fred | April 16, 2008
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Posted in There's a Fly in My Soup

The 9 worst domain names on the web

World Wide Creative’s web marketing ‘guy’, Mike Perk, places a lot of emphasis on a good domain name. Not only should it have ‘history’, but the name itself is very important. It should be relevant, focused and preferably memorable. A while back, my friend Andrew emailed me a list of names that you wouldn’t want (although, I reckon they get 10 out of 10 for being memorable!)

1. www.whorepresents.com - A resource site called ‘Who Represents?’, where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity.

2. www.expertsexchange.com - A directory site called ‘Experts Exchange’

3. www.penisland.net - A company called ‘Pen Island’, and a site where you can find, er, pens. Yes, it does exist.

4. www.gotahoe.com - Lake Tahoe tourist directory. Unfortunate.

5. www.powergenitalia.com - An Italian Power Generator company…eish. Not sure if this one is legit, actually.

6. www.molestationnursery.com - Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales. Also - doubt if this one is for real. Still funny though.

7. www.ipanywhere.com - Find computer software here.

8. www.speedofart.com - Apparently, a pretty quick art director owns this site.

9. www.therapistfinder.com - You can apparently find therapists at ‘Therapist Finder’. Seriously, seriously unfortunate.

By Fred | April 7, 2008
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Facebook will fall, soon.

The writing's on the wall

I have a prediction to make: Facebook, as we know it now, will fall, soon.

By soon, I mean, real soon. I think it has a shelf life of around 6 more months, and we’ll see a serious slump in numbers. I’m not sure why I have such conviction about it, but I do. It started as a feeling. A growing irritation with all the notifications I kept receiving. All the pointless stuff people were asking me to add to my page. All the weird invites to fringe groups supporting causes I’d never heard of.

So I thought about it, and then developed a hypothesis to support my theory. Here it is, if you’re interested:

1. Facebook is a great idea

2. Great ideas are great because they open your eyes to something new.

3. Once something is not new anymore, people will start looking for the next great idea.

4. However, people will stay if the idea becomes an essential component of your life (e.g. a word processor, toaster, etc.)

5. Facebook is not an essential component of my life.

I think it’s going to be hard for Facebook to stay relevant. Many people are talking about Facebook being the next Microsoft; and about Mark Zuckerberg being the new Gates. Marc Andreessen, the guy who developed Netscape, wrote a while back that Facebook is a platform, not an application - and that was why it would take over the world. (I also wrote about it on Ideate.co.za)

Andreessen was right about the platform thing. The problem is, though, that the only applications people are developing for it are silly widgets.

These widgets are not essential components.

This needs to change, or Facebook is in trouble. Zuckerberg has to figure out how to keep us engaged. We’re getting bored real quick, and unless either he, or one of the 50,000 Facebook developers out there (most of who are frantically designing things like ‘Buy Me A Love Bite’ and ‘What Kind Of Telly Tubby Are You? - Forward to a Friend!’), creates a killer application like MS Word for Windows, we’re moving on.

In the meantime, how do I turn my Facebook account to ‘Stand By’?

By Fred | April 2, 2008
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Posted in There's a Fly in My Soup

Facebook overtakes MySpace

According to the figures at Alexa it looks like tomorrow or Tuesday will be the day Facebook finally overtakes MySpace in terms of it web usage. It will officially become the second most popular social media site on the web behind You Tube. Read More »

By Mike | October 28, 2007
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I struggle with wikis

Don’t get me wrong, I can use a wiki quite competently, its just I don’t like using them. Its something about their style (or lack of it). I still don’t believe I’ve seen a great looking wiki in my time. I know I’m missing the point - a wiki is about collaborating and sharing ideas. But think about it, when you do that in the real world you do it in a nice environment. When we want to share ideas we don’t lock ourselves away in cupboards, we meet in places that inspire our thinking. Read More »

By Mike | October 10, 2007
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Using Social Media to improve search engine rankings

Social media as a way to improve search engine rankings is starting to grow in South Africa. Just as many companies are suggesting blogs, widget creation and face book applications as part of a search engine optimisation strategy as there are companies suggesting social media to build and develop relationships. So which is the right answer? SEO or Relationships? Read More »

By Mike | August 12, 2007
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Posted in There's a Fly in My Soup

New to Facebook

Just a fad, will not last long, and it is going to be shut down. After a few months of refusing to join Facebook, I thought I would give it a try to the relief of my family and work colleagues. Read More »

By Mike | August 11, 2007
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Website Profitability through My Space? We’re not sure.

I think the consensus was reached quite early on this one. The heavy chef project over the last month has shown that My Space can be used as a tool to grow interest in your product or service, however we feel it is only for specific types of product or service. Read More »

By Mike | September 25, 2006
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Posted in There's a Fly in My Soup

MySpace Members First to See ‘Borat’ Film

I’m still battling to see how MySpace can be profitable for small businesses (unless of course you just want to drive traffic from yet another link to your website like this). Aubrey, in our studio, reckons that there are networking groups that refer business to each other, a kind of online Business Networking International (BNI) or other business get-togethers. They then only allow select people who pass the grade into their closed circles. Funny that, since the whole point of MySpace.com is to be ‘the world’s biggest social networking group’. It’s starting to sound like the closed cliques that were formed at high school.

Anyway, it’s easy to see how bigger companies are starting to MySpace.com as a way to make themselves profitable. Parent group News Corp, who bought MySpace last year for around $450m, is now utilising the considerable numbers within MySpace communities to generate word-of-mouth buzz about their releases.

Take News Corp.-owned 20th Century Fox’s latest movie release ‘Borat‘ for example - it is being shown on MySpace before anywhere else. Anyone who has ever seen ‘Borat’ before knows that mainstream advertising will never quite cut it for this way-out highly controversial comedic icon. The character was created by Sacha Baron Cohen, more famous as his alter-ego Ali G. Borat has raised eyebrows before for his highly antoagonistic anti-semitic rantings (Cohen is Jewish), dipped with a heavy helping of irony. Fox has set a Nov. 3 U.S. release date for the film.

- Fred

By Mike | September 17, 2006
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Posted in There's a Fly in My Soup

MySpace May End Marketing As We Know It

As if to respond to the question in the previous post, this article came through in my Google alert. Read it. Be anxious. Be excited.

- Fred

By Mike | September 14, 2006
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Posted in There's a Fly in My Soup

Take your shirt off

Aubrey in our SA studio believes that the only way to get loads of friends on MySpace is to put naked pictures of yourself. I said that nobody would ever want to see either me or Mike wthout clothes. Ever.

Anyway, this has brought up the question: How can MySpace be useful for anything other than dating or socialising? Is there a way to bring business into this?

Considering that we’ve already established that relationships are critical to business success, there will be a big irony if the biggest relationship portal in the world (well over 100m people) has no benefit to a business.