Marketing

Now for the third blog i once again come to the topic of the world cup. Now once again i am not necassarily about the football. But the world cup as an event ties in very closely to the idea of marketing.

I mean think about it (think think about it) it is impossible to watch the full 90 minutes of a world cup match without some kind of corperate idea put into your mind. Well obviously because of the ads but then you get back to the main feature and what do you get, little boards! With Nike and Adidas and Lynx and whatever some guy sitting at home scratching his ass with a solid gold ass scratcher wants you to buy. Now i know this seems a little like a broken record coming from me (what do you mean Oliver you love rich business owners and libertarianism?) and you would be right. Waheey

At the same time it is an interesting fact that marketers don't just need to use traditional media or advertising channels to entice the average rational consumer (as well as the other 90% of consumers) This other form of advertising is cheap, it spreads out far within the community and heck it could be considered good for the environment (none of those pesky flyers) It's out on the streets this marketing occurs (i sound so gangsta right now) it occurs between you and me, it's on t shirts and styrofoam cups (so not so good for the environment), it's on wrappers and shoes. It's on the feet of football players as they prance around the field (looking at you Italy)

When you buy a shirt, or boots or a cup of coffee you are buying for a corperate image, perhaps that's the image you associate with, heck you might like the taste of the coffee! (Yeah that is a bit of a stretch) It's not just visual, you can hear people talk about a cd, about a concert (if you're an eavedropper) you hear people sing (now that really is a stretch). Ultimately my point is it's hard to go down you're local high street, main street, shopping mall etc, without getting some sort of corperate image that the slick guy with a bluetooth headset and a ponytail (in other words a marketer) didn't directly make for you to see (well maybe he did) but indirectly benefited from)

To finish i put to you a marketing challenge, next time you go to a high street, main street, shopping mall or any urban area (the streets yo) look out for any corperate image not created through normal media or advertising channels. But pure viral marketing (i think that's what it's called) perhaps write them down, i planned to do that in a little notebook, we'll see.

Anyway, peace out

Mistakes

So i'm sitting here listening to one of my favourite Pink Floyd song, now those of you who know me would assume it would be something written by Roger Waters one of my favourite song writers. However that would be a mistake (ah the links write themselves) it's actually a David Gilmour number, from Momentry Lapse of Reason(which some Pink Floyd fans might call a mistake in itself). The song is One Slip which i think is increadibly relevant to the topic in hand.

I also think it should be the soundtrack of this years world cup. To list the mistakes i have seen; Green vs USA, The Algerian keeper vs Slovenia, the Serbian defender that gave a penalty against Ghana, the Australians for being Australian, the Argentina defender who basically gave Korea a goal and finally me for making bad picks on my Jimungo account.

We all have our perfect world cups set out in our heads, how games should go, which teams are better than the others and we never really account for the little mistakes that can go wrong, how can we i guess, we can never predict that one slip that tends to happen, only make a little contingency in the back of our heads that something bad will happen, best laid plans of mice (yes cheesy plans) and men gang aft agley (can go wrong) yada yada yada.

The best we can do is not be suprised when it does happen (i've been an England supporter since i could think so i've gotten rather good at it) and ultimatly not get too disheartened when things finally go wrong.

Now i when i say we all have our perfect world cups i don't just mean the competition, in life we have our own little event, very important to us, planned out in a way that would be perfect to us. Not only in football but in life can we shrug off those "one slips" and do our best to push through.

Peace out and hopefully you won't feel that reading this was a mistake

The World Cup

It is i back from obscurity asking the tough question, does anyone blog anymore? It appears not i guess i well and truely missed the wave.

Aside from that pessimistic notion (which i guess if anyone is reading this would come to expect anyway) i do actually have a topic on my mind right now The World Cup! Which is expected i mean day two and the competition is in full swing, but funnily enough it's not the football i want to discuss, it's what the World Cup represents to me, it's not very often in life where we get to take a static mental snapshot of a period in time of how your life was at that moment. I mean there are the usuals, weddings, graduations, family holidays. You remember who you friends were and what they looked like at that very moment in time. But they're not regular, i mean birthdays are a nice regular look at your life once a year. But that's once a year, there is regular time to look at changes in your life but too short of a time period, changes can be taken for granted.

Then there's the World cup, how many other times can you say, this is how i have changed in the last 4 years, especially in the life of a young man. So many young men can say "i know where i was when Brazil won in 2002" or "when Italy won in 2006" (and it was all against Vialoux). I have been watching the World Cup since 1998, this has let me share the joy of triumph, the dispair of (another bloody shoot out) loss and the perspective to see how much my life has changed in the last 4 years.

So those of you enjoying the football, waiting with baited breath on the performance of your respective countries, take a second to look at how your life has changed in the last 4 years and hopefully enjoy the same perspective that i have enjoyed from 1998.

And now a joke

"What do you call an Scottishman in the second round of the world cup final?"
A Referee!

Peace!