[Update: Ok, so it took a day: It's growing on me.]

I’ve heard in meetings recently that the time has come to start casting the net out wider and cutting advertising budgets. I think in some cases this is true (and plays nicely into our hands being a web marketing company) but to believe that the advertising industry is dead, as some pundits have called it, is foolish.

Advertising is not dead.

It’s not going to die anytime soon.

Marketers must remind themselves that great marketing is all about initiating and maintaining profitable relationships. Figure out how your brand message is different, and then punt it on every channel where you’ll find your target market.

It’s great, and critical, to venture into other channels, but remember that consumers still respond to the same things: authenticity, humour, intelligence. This can be done through all the new media available, but if your key demographic is still reading the news and watching TV, it’s silly to ignore it.

In closing, bear this in mind. According to Nielsen’s report ‘Trust in Advertising’ in Nov. 2007, half of UK consumers, 55% of American consumers, and a whopping 64% of South African consumers still trust advertising.

“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.

Thanks Shaun for the link…

• ‘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…

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…?

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.

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’?

You are probably thinking this happened a long time ago. Who the heck uses MySpace anymore? A large number of people still use MySpace but the reason the figures still remain high are the large number of spammers pushing promotions to random people they don’t even know. So congratulations to Facebook, I know my life would be a lot duller without it.

Anyways I’m rambling. My point is I am now using a cracking application that I thinks fills that void left by wikis. I found iscrybe about a year ago whilst it was in alpha testing but couldn’t get to try it. Then a month ago Chris from Bittersuite sent me an email saying I had to check out this app. Low and behold iscrybe was live. Well since then I have been hooked. It has its downsides (in terms of categorising my data) but its a joy to work with. Check out the vid (its the bit after the calander stuff):