Media Tonic

Unless, like us, you watch the video about eight times. And yes, it’s legit. Vijay Singh during the practice round at the US Masters last year. It’s a tradition at The Masters to try and skim the ball across the water on the 16th. As if that bloody game is not hard enough already.

Media Tonic is pleased to announce it now reps Curling Hats in Western Australia. We know a media-driven sports merchandising opportunity when we see one.

300 of the Perth Twitterati gathered in the Perth Town Hall on Feb 25th for the Media140 event. It was part of an Around the World in 140 days project initiated by founder Ande Gregson. That’s how he spells it.

Media140 began as a charity fund-raiser when Ande decided he wanted to run a marathon in Africa. Each event is a conference which is streamed live and encourages Twitter communication between speakers, attendees and anyone on the web who is following the Twitter stream. (Explanation of Twitter stream: anyone can tag their Tweet – like an sms sent via phone or web page – with *whatever* and people can then see an aggregation of all those Tweets on a web page in near real time). Creating a Twitter stream is a way of facilitating a Twitter conversation around your event; the Grammys used Twitter to ratings advantage and AdAge write about it here.

At the Perth event the Editor of The West Australian, Brett McCarthy, and his Twitter evangelist and online editor Gareth Parker spoke about the use of Twitter at the paper. They gave the recent example of the fire at Newspaper House, where photos and information were sourced from Twitter users rather than journalists. The journos were still in the car park at Osborne Park when the Twitter users in the city took the photos and reported the facts. Gareth Parker found the reports on Twitter. Ironic that the icon building of news coverage in the state should be an early example of Twitter out-news-gathering traditional journalism. “Out-news-gathering”: I should SO have been a journalist.

McCarthy canvassed producing a Twitter edition of The West Australian. He said the paper could use Twitter and social media as a way of influencing what stories were covered in that edition(s). And he invited the Twitter community to make suggestions on how that might work.

Brett Sandler from Nova had hands-on stories about the station’s use of Twitter while lawyer Andrew Pascoe from Allens, Arthur Robinson charmed the audience; no other way to say it. There were a number of very informative talks about the risks of social media and best practice in the area. Props to Tama Leaver of Curtin, Jared Woods from SKM and Venessa Paech from Lonely Planet. That’s how she spells them.

Photo by Paul Pichugin

Every year, TED names three winners of the TED Prize. The first winner for 2010 is Jamie Oliver. Below is his talk on obesity and what to do about it.

TED started out as the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. And Jamie Oliver started out as a prat. You can see previous TED Prize award-winners here.

“We’re not saying this body wash will make your man smell like a romantic, millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it.”

I’m on a horse.

Apparently they exist, though we have no experience of them. Clients From Hell.

“Can you call Google and ask them when the website will show up in the search results?”

“Can we pay for the logo in instalments, or even better can I pay you in salad?”

“Make sure it’s not too edgy, not too flashy, not too much detail, not classical/traditional, not too complex, exciting, but not all over all over the place, efficient but fun, clean, fresh, modern, up beat, contemporary, high readability, smooth, shapeless, timeless, not outdated, but simple.”

“That looks really nice, we love it…could you also ditch the graphics and just put the letters inside an oval? That’d be great” See? This is how we got our logo.

Via.
Image from Veer’s 2007 “Activity book” catalog.

Marshall McLuhan said “historians and archaeologists will discover that the advertisements of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.”

Via ResearchBuzz, over 100,000 old print ads searchable by category, keyword or even colour. Asian people weren’t as tall in those days. You can also buy prints of the ads quite cheaply.

Santa with a gramophone! Remmington’s new Punched-Card Collating Reproducer! And who can forget… Why did YOU change to Camels, Patrice Munsel? (“Because they agree with my throat”).

So much history to be proud of…

The banners were attached with natural wax and eventually dropped off by themselves. So no flies were harmed in the making of this commercial. Summer. Outdoor Advertising. Talk to us. Source.

Here at Media Tonic, we’ve been augmenting reality for years. Esquire Magazine’s David Granger gets his Media Tonic debut spruiking the AR edition of Esquire Magazine. It’s a gimmick but it’s clearly the beginning of new levels of interactivity.

Coke and McDonalds are using similar technology in their promotions for the launch of Avatar. If you follow that link you’ll see the extended trailer, which pretty much ruins the plot completely.

You’ll never guess what her dress is made out of. Doh! It’s a promotion for Breast Cancer prevention from a Canadian toilet paper brand. From the Advertising Is Good For You blog. Which of course it is.