Five things on Friday #114

Things of note for the week ending Friday March 6th, 2015.

Things of note for the week ending Friday March 6th, 2015.

JPEG_20150305_070233_-984705877

I’m coming up to the end of my two weeks in Sydney and it has been a helluva trip. I’ve been out here supporting Marketing Academy Australia mainly (speaking to the new 2015 Aussie intake – good looking bunch that they are) but have managed to squeeze in some Ogilvy stuff too – which has been excellent.

Did I mention I got promoted? That’s a thing that happened as well.

Hurrah!

Speaking of which, I should probably write something up on both those things in a separate blog post or two in the future. Yes, I’ll do that.

Right, enough about me – you’re here for the THE THINGS.

Lots to cover this week: so much as happened that I’ve had to bump one item to next week! Astonishing. Shall we dive in already?

1. BEESTON’S LAW

BeestonsLaw

Heard of this one before? No? Following up on something from last week’s Five Things, Beeston’s Law states:

‘However tasteless or tenuous, a LinkedIn blog will be published linking a current event to marketing or branding.’

A fair chunk of Industry folk know that LinkedIn blogs are the depths of hell when it comes to the achingly terrible and Beeston’s Law proves it. Think of anything crass from ISIS to Ebola and there’s a LinkedIn blog to cover it. It really does make you sick.

Anyway, if you see something like this, please highlight it with the hashtag #BeestonsLaw; there’s a Tumblr and everything.

Zing!

2. A FORMULA TO STOP YOU FROM OVER-COMMITTING YOUR TIME
This, from the Harvard Business Review, is a thought-provoking read and well worth 15mins of your TIME. To quote:

“The single most important factor in feeling like a time investment success or failure is whether or not your expectations of what you will accomplish align with how much time you have to invest. The following time investment formula provides a mathematical way to understand the relationship between your expectations and your actual time budget. Once you have this data, you can then determine exactly what you need to do to get to a balanced budget in which you have enough time for what’s most important.”

The author has put an extremely well thought through construct of how to measure your time spent vs what it is you want to achieve against the only non-variable that you have every day: 24hrs.

To give the formula away in this article would be to take away from the thinking and explanation that are given throughout the main write up.

In short: give HBR a read and then see if your time management improves.

‘But how is that going to stop me from over-committing?!’

To quote the article once more:

“If you’re like most people, you’ll end up choosing the first of the three options—the greater-than sign—because you’ve made more external and internal commitments than you can realistically keep. This has created a lot of guilt and stress for you in the past. But now that you’re aware of what’s happening, you can adjust for the future.”

Nice.

3. MORE ON ‘THE VIDEO ROYALE’
Indulge me for a second. Remember that 2015 trends deck that Marshall Manson and I presented a while back? The one I keep going on about?

Well, in said presentation we talked about ‘The Video Royale’ and how native video uploads, cross-channel, would be the way forward for 2015.

We also said this:

“In 2015, Facebook will need to start getting serious on copyright and then, once that’s tidied away, consider revenue sharing for its best content creators…”

In last week’s FTOF (#113), I linked to that gritty Power Rangers video that everyone was going nuts about but, as I was about to hit publish, I ended up having to link to a story about how the whole thing was going to get pulled down pretty sharpish thanks to a copyright infringement claim from Power Rangers creator, Saban.

Sad times.

The good news is: those involved have struck a deal and the film is back online for good (but this time with extensive disclaimers about it not being official etc).

Hurrah!

The Verge has the full story (and the videos are up here: NSFW and SFW – if you haven’t watched it yet, you really should; it’s quite excellent) but one paragraph stood out for me in particular:

“Saban wanted the disclaimers present so that kids wouldn’t confuse his “super-violent film” with the decidedly friendlier Power Rangers show that they’re used to. The short, produced by Adi Shankar and starring James Van Der Beek and Katee Sackhoff, went online late Monday and was viewed by around 12 million people on YouTube before being pulled on Thursday in response to a copyright notice from Saban. The Vimeo version was pulled even sooner. The film was also hosted on Facebook — apparently the only platform that it never managed to get pulled from. It remains there without disclaimers.”

Copyright holders won’t put up with this kind of thing for much longer and, as Facebook continues to grow in its video dominance, it really has to start taking this side of its business a lot more seriously.

When online publications start drawing attention to the fact that Facebook really doesn’t play ball when it comes to takedown notices, you know something is going to have to change and soon.

EDIT: this piece, ‘How you saved the Power Rangers short‘ from iO9 is really good too.

4. #QUOKKASELFIE
File this one under ‘perhaps the only reason in this world to own a selfie stick’, grabbing yourself a #QuokkaSelfie is the next big thing in Internet fundom. I read this piece on Mashable (forgive me), hit the photos, and then didn’t stop laughing.

JUST LOOK AT THEM

quokScreen Shot 2015-03-05 at 09.00.13 Screen Shot 2015-03-05 at 08.59.39

Source.

5. OLIVIA WILDE, I LOVE YOU

Wild about Olivia

Esquire magazine invited Olivia Wilde to edit their most recent publication. They didn’t expect her to edit her own interview too. This is great.

6. SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED
In an unprecedented move, our hero has thrown in an extra thing this week to cater for a special announcement:

Shaken Cocktails, the providers of the home subscription cocktail-maker kits (I’ve covered them before) have opened a Seedrs campaign to raise money to help expand their business. They’re well on their way to raising the £60,000 they need to help with their marketing efforts and business expansion in 2015 and I thought I should let you lot know about it just in case you might be interested.

I believe in these guys and I think you might too.

Check them out.

PS. Want to try Shaken yourself? Use this link and get £5 off your first box.

_______________________

Bonus items this week are were of the audio and visual variety (but then I added a couple more) –

 

And I’m spent.

Liked this? Tell a friend.

Whatley out.

Last updated by at .

Author: James Whatley

Chief Strategy Officer in adland. I got ❤️ for writing, gaming, and figuring stuff out. I'm @whatleydude pretty much everywhere that matters. Nice to meet you x