The International Advertising Association (IAA) has announced the second IAA-Dentsu Global Student Poster Competition.
The challenge for this year’s competition, which is supported by the United Nations, is biodiversity. The challenge for entrants is to communicate that our lifestyle and consumption habits have to change if we want to stop the destruction of our ecosystems and keep our planet alive.
The brief is wide open for creative interpretation. Students must respond to the following criteria:
- One big idea executed in a poster format. This could be as an 8-sheet, 30-sheet or transit poster.
- Entrants are requested to create a branding device or logo that can be instantly and international identified with biodiversity.
- Taglines and headlines provide instant information on a topic. Entrants should include either or both of these on their poster.
- Entrants must support their ideas with a compelling rationale that identifies your target audience and explains the inspiration for the idea (max. 300 words).
- Poster and rationale must be in English.
- Entrants should not include either the IAA or Dentsu logos in their work.
- Entries must be submitted by 1 March 2010.
Full details for the second IAA-Dentsu Global Student Poster Competition are available here.
The Global Winner will receive a trophy, cash prize of US$1,000 and the opportunity to present their work at the United Nations.
- A travel allowance of US$3,000 is also included in the prize.
- The second prize is US$500
- The third prize is US$300
Regional Finalists will receive trophies and all entrants will receive an IAA-Dentsu Global Student Poster Competition certificates.
The Global Winner will be announced on May 1st 2010. And, the top three winning entries will be exhibited at the 2010 IAA World Congress May 12th-14th 2010 in Moscow, and at the 2010 Cannes Lions. The competition provides a great opportunity for aspiring talent to show off their creativity, insights and art work on a global industry stage.
The first Global Poster Competition focused on the issue of climate change. The first prize (World Champion) went to Matias Fernandez, Universidad Argentina de la in Buenos Aires for a piece of work entitled Thermometer.
I am a Board Member for the Australian Chapter of the International Advertising Association.
Over the past two months, I have been working with a small team at Burson-Marsteller in Sydney (my agency) on a PR research project which looked at the use of social media by the biggest brands in Australia. This has been a very enjoyable and interesting project, which resulted in some great media exposure for the agency this week:
One of the challenges that we encountered with this study was sourcing a list of the top brands in Australia. Initially, our intention was to survey the ASX100 but this presented us with a few challenges, not least the increase in project scope that this would lead to. Many of the companies in the ASX100 own multiple brands and so we would have been presented with a challenge of what to include and what not to include. Including everything was not an option.
Ultimately, we opted for the Interbrand Top Twenty Australian Brands report for 2009. Although relatively limited in scope we felt that this was a good option as it covered a broad spectrum of Australian brands in various sectors while enabling us to identify some industry sector trends in financial services and retail.
Our thoughts on the findings are included in the media coverage and in our release/ report.
Ultimately, my view is that many social media campaigns continue to be the preserve of the PR and marketing department. I don’t believe that business leaders have recognised the need for authentic communications or the benefits of social media, as a component of PR strategy. The vast majority seem focused on the risk over the reward. The US is a different story. Corporations are far more advanced when it comes to social media. Its becoming ingrained within standard business and comms practice, we’re yet to see this in Australia.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this if we put the fact that Australia has a more conservative business culture to one side. First, the majority of the world’s IT industry is based in the US. Clearly, the IT sector has been an early adopter, leading the way for many other American industries.
Second, many large American corporations faced serious PR and reputational issues as a result of the GFC and social media provided them with the tools they needed to begin re-building and re-orienting their reputations and corporate culture.
Neither of these factors apply in Australia.
We’re seeing a lot of interest from our clients and are actively engaged in this space with many organisations. I am looking forward to seeing a more flattended, transparent and communicative corporate culture in Australia. We are hoping to speed up the process by providing good advice and compelling insights.
The fact that corporate blogging is virtually non-existent is evidence, for me, that we are yet to see this change at the highest levels of Australian business.
We produced the following report of the results and developed a media release, which was offered to The Australian as an exclusive. There’s more where this came from. B-M Australia will be announcing additional research over the coming weeks and months.
BzzAgent is a WOM agency that manages a network of 600,000 highly engaged consumer volunteers located throughout the US, Canada and the UK. The WOM company has just announced a series of Compliance services to ensure that its clients in PR and marketing departments do not contravene the FTC’s Guides on endorsements in social media, which come into effect today.
I wrote an article in favour of these guidelines for Mumbrella.
BzzAgent refers to its network members as volunteers. I thought volunteers worked for not-for-profits. I think its inevitable that the WOM agencies will have to make full disclosure and transparency core to their service offering in order to stay on the right side of the FTC and similar enforcement agencies in other countries and for the reasons that I pointed out in the article for Mumbrella.
This graphic from BzzAgent provides a neat summary of the obligations under the FTC Guides and the steps that PR professionals and marketers can take to ensure compliance.
Subscribe to Just Another 24 Hours by Email
I’ve been watching the Brian Solis – Robert Scoble discussions here. Twitter continues to generate a huge amount of conversation, which is interesting considering:
- Facebook has 250 million active users to Twitter’s 19 million (eMarketer research via Mashable)
- A large number of users quite within the first month (Nielsen)
- Twitter has no revenue stream
So, is Twitter the new attention dashboard? I have my doubts. I think that’s a very limited view of the conversations that are occurring online.
Will the real-time Web be a major influence on communication in the future? Absolutely.
The focus on the newness of things, the tool and its features and the immediacy of information (Twitter beat CNN to the Tiger Woods story this week by 45 mins) is compelling – but only to a point. Beyond that point, Twitter discussions tend to become rather sycophantic, repetitive, tactical and/or theoretical.
This stuff is important though; The immediacy of micro-blogs like Twitter influences the way that we value information and perceive it. It speeds up the news cycle and makes information even more of a commodity.
In a presentation at the recent Media140 event in Sydney Barry Saunders spoke about the danger of not considering context when we use the real-time Web as a primary source of information. This is among the most insightul and interesting things that I’ve heard said about this space. Its a very valid point, which is – along with others - being overlooked in a plethora of hype fuelled conversations about Twitter. Mr. Saunders make some additional points on related topics here.
The Twitter purists consider Twitter to be a conversational tool but many organisations are, in my experience, approaching it is a broadcast medium, as research that we are releasing tomorrow will show.
I will leave you with this analysis from BlogPulse, which shows comparative mentions of ‘Twitter’, ‘Unemployment’ and ‘Iraq’ in all forms of consumer generated media over the past six months:
This man, Geoffrey Edelsten, is about to open a medi-hotel complex in Caroline Spings, Victoria. According to this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald, the medi-hotel will provide a range of cosmetic surgery procedures with the idea being that clients can’t recuperate post-op in the Mercure hotel part of the medi-complex.
This conjures up some amusing / disturbing images of breakfast at the hotel with patrons munching away and imbibing (via straws) at various stages in their recovery with a multitude of bits and pieces bandaged, stitched and stretched.
The over 55s: A sizeable and wealthy segment of the Australian population with an increasing penchant for all things Internet.
I am not planning on cosmetic surgery.
