PS3 v Wii (via Apple)

Fantastic. I want to go out and get a Nintendo Wii after watching this.

TK Maxx - Data is a marketing issue

Data is really dull, but as we've seen a lot recently, and again spectacularly, with TK Maxx it goes to the heart of a brand and its relationship with customers.

Hackers have stolen 45.7m TK Maxx shoppers’ credit and debit card details, putting at risk anyone who has shopped at the discount store over an 18-month period from January 2003.

TK Maxx isn't the first company to be hit with data problems. As many as 13 banks and financial firms were recently highlighted by the Information Commissioner for "carelessly" dumping customer information in outside bins and putting them at risk of identity fraud.

Those named by the information watchdog include HBOS, Alliance & Leicester, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays Bank, all of which were found to have discarded personal data in outside bins. They have now been ordered to adhere to information disposal requirements under the Data Protection Act and

Now TK Maxx has been hit as well and it is only a matter of time before it happens to someone else.

Everyone who has ever shopped there (including me – oh the shame of buying all those cheap gym T-shirts) will be thinking this morning "oh frak I wish I had never gone in there".

In the TK Maxx case (with US retailer TJX, which owns TK Maxx, also being hit), the store has been actively targeted by hackers looking for customer data unlike the banks who were just "careless dumping data on the street.

With identity fraud such a major issue who we as customers give our personal and financial information to is or paramount importance.

If you can't trust a brand to protect your identity and your data when you buy stuff from them, then it is unlikely you will be shopping with them again.

What will happen to TK Maxx now that it has been hit by such a large loss? Will its tills be ringing slightly less loudly this weekend?

I would imagine people would think twice about venturing in. It doesn't even know at this stage the full extent of the theft and its effect on customers.

For instance, TK Maxx said 100 files were moved from its UK computer system in 2003, and two files were later stolen, but it doesn't know what was in those files.

"We don't know what was in those files -- the technology the hacker used prevents TJX from knowing, and also the fact that TJX system routinely deletes files," the spokesperson added.

People can get their money back, but it means watching very closely what is going in and out of your account. Do people still do that? Oh right, just me then.

D&AD judging

Does judging ever sound glamorous to you? If so take  a look at this.

It's day three, and D&AD Global Awards 2007 judges are almost halfway through 25,000 pieces of work. Count  'em.

Judging concludes this Thursday, and entrants will be biting their nails until the first week of April to find out how they've faired.

Photo credit: Christine Donnier-Valentin

The buzz about Twitter

It's going to be the new YouTube or MySpace maybe. Must be a bidding war in the offing.

The last few weeks have been abuzz with coverage of a hot new (ish) Silicon Valley firm and if you haven't heard of it yet you will soon. It's called Twitter.

Twitter is a mobile micro-blogging service (no more than 140 characters) and it is being predicted that it will be a mass-market hit. People who use the service to share their thoughts are called Twitterers.

The service was it was launched a year ago by Obvious Corp a startup headed by blogging pioneer Evan Williams with the idea of offering a simple service that people could use to send text messages to friends' mobiles.

The firm, which is just a year old, was singled out last week by Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, as a service that had the potential to attract a mass market.

The simple and easy to use service will be attractive to existing bloggers and is being seen as a potential replacement for RSS by some.

Schwartz says that like YouTube and MySpace, Twitter has the potential to "take off like lightning".

Others are more cautious and do not expect it to suddenly be sold for an astronomical $1.65bn as YouTube was, but maybe on a smaller scale like Flickr, which Yahoo! snapped up for a bargain basement price of $35m.

Twitter is being seen as a more instantaneous way to blog allowing users to post short messages, which can be read online or on mobiles.

It is the mobile or PDA, however, where the power for growth is really being seen.

The number of messages on its site according to a report in the FT today has jumped from 20,000 to 70,000 a day.

One blogger writing at BlogCritic says:" While I spend a lot of time looking at social networks such as MySpace, I never find a great and compelling reason to stick around. I particularly like MyBlogLog because it's a great networking tool for bloggers (and an experience that lives outside the site through the use of its great blog log widget), but it's simply not fun in the way that Twitter can be."

There must be a buzz as Robin Grant has blogged on this today as well.

The downside is that after the initial buzz (like blogging itself) people tire of getting tidbit updates.

In a BusinessWeek article it highlighted a recent blog post, RIP Twitter (2007-2007), Mathieu Balez, a web entrepreneur, knocked the mundane nature of Twitter posts ("Going to the gym," "Groceries with mother-in-law") and the voyeurism of readers. Twitter will be history by the yearend, abandoned by former fans too tired to keep up with endless streams of quotidian tidbits, he predicted. Balez's blog was soon flooded with comments, pro and con. "Yeah sure," one Twitter supporter replied. "Twitter will die. Just as text messages, mobile phones, blogs, the Internet..."

But then there is the 'Seinfeld' scenario. Like the post-modern episode where Jerry and George pitch NBC "a show about nothing"? At one point George asks a network executive, "What did you do today?"

"I got up and came to work," the exec replies.

"There's a show!" George exclaims. "That's a show."

That's also a Twitter.

During one recent minute Thursday morning, users posted the following urgent updates: "Tried Scottish oatmeal this morning, very impressed. Will have to soon phase out the Quaker oats."; "reading a blog, returning emails".

You just know its going to be a hit.

R2-Mail 2

How cool is this? OK, the geek within is speaking. The US Postal Service is to rebrand 400 of its mailboxes as R2-D2.

The US Postal Service has done a deal with Lucas Film (aka the world's biggest promotional juggernaut) to put the trusty droid and C3-P0 sidekick in 200 cities across the US.

The temporary rebrand is part of the promotional campaign for the launch of a first-class commemorative stamp coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the release of 'Star Wars' (or as we now know it 'Star Wars IV - A New Hope').

The stamps go on sale later this month although no news on what will be on them.

There's a UPS Jedi Master website as well, which with its will appeal to geeks the world over, with a clip as well from the movie showing Vader's grand entrance and then a small change to proceedings. Rather than Princess Leia sticking a disc into R2 we see a rather less feminine hand posting a letter instead. Nice.

The woman in question

The Times has this morning published a picture of Daniela Weber the woman involved in the Sir Martin Sorrell libel case.

The paper says that the High Court judge Mr Justice Eady has lifted an order banning it from publishing a photograph of the head of WPP Italy.

The 44-year old Weber is said to have had a close relationship with Sorrell. So if you were wondering what the woman in question looked like now is your chance.

The picture, taken by a Times photographer, shows Weber, who is Swiss, before she began her evidence in private yesterday via a video link from Milan.

As you will have already have read on Brand Republic and elsewhere the pair had been unfairly labelled "the mad dwarf and the nympho schizo" by Marco Benatti.

Anyway take a look at what The Times photographer saw here.

The Independent - it's a viewspaper

50 ways to lose readers of your 'newspaper'. The Independent continues its pioneering project to remove news from the paper with its 50 Reasons to love the EU frontpage.

I think The Independent has a trajectory like plan: from news, to views, to snooze. Surely the only explanation? Okay it does have a good reason for today's front cover - the EU is 50 years old, but still (and besides the Marshall Plan, which gave rise to the whole endeavour is 60...).

It's like someone at Canary Wharf found an old copy of The Sun (50 reasons why we hate Europe) and had a brainstorm and smartly concluded: "We can turn this around?"

At Number one 1 on the Indy hit parade is an end to wars between European nations. I thought that this was only because the now wimpy Germans refuse to fly at night or do their fair share on the international scene? I could be wrong.

Still, while I carp about the amount of news that The Independent does not carry on its front page on a regular basis, I am clearly in a minority. I know, what's with that?

In the most recent ABCs The Independent remained steady in February rising by 0.26% to 264,182 over the month. Simon Kelner's title has dropped 1.65% in its six monthly average to 257,036.

That said it is only around 100,000 down on its centre left rival Guardian (364,491), but I guess in its favour the Indie does not carry the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood and Simon Jenkins on its comment pages – neither of which when I last checked had much to do with the centre left. Still with the paper advertising for a new Comment Editor on Monday to replace Seamus Milne lets hope its once fine pages take a turn for the better.

Redefining McJob

McDonald's is trying to redefine this Generation X slacker term to mean something better than an "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector". Good luck.

Well that's what struck me first when I read this in the FT this morning, I thought it is never going to happen. No way. Then I did a straw poll and was shocked. Yes, that's right folks, shocked, to find that two of our twenty-something reporters looked at me blankly when I asked if they knew what a McJob was.

How did that happen? Pretty easily, is the answer. McJob is tied up with Douglas Coupland's novel 'Generation X'. A classic to be sure and one that is indelibly associated with me being a student, grunge and general slackerdom.

But that book was published in 1991, the same year Richard Linklater's film 'Slacker' came out, and now no one it seems under the age of 25 has a clue what you're talking about when you mention the phrase McJob.

We were here just over a year ago when I blogged about it after McDonald's tried to take ownership of the McJob label in an ad campaign.

The campaign tried to put a positive spin on the word that has for long been used to describe anyone working in McDonald's or any other low-paid and low-prospects environment. It still does.

And no matter what the ads say ("McProspects – over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob.) flipping burgers does not look like a career option of choice for many.

Go into a McDonald's and you know it's true. Go see Richard Linklater's new movie 'Fast Food Nation', which opens in six weeks time (it is excellent, btw), and you will not want to go near the food ever again.

Still McDonald’s is trying to change the way we see McJob and ultimately it. This time it wants to get British dictionary publishers to revise their definitions of the word McJob from it classic low paid status.

McDonald's argues the term is out of date and out of touch with reality and "most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day".

It might be, and I can see that, but the image goes so deep, way past the counter staff in your local restaurant that it is a hard thing to change, but as I already found today, apparently not as hard as you might have thought.

And the Oxford English Dictionary seems to agree. It said that it "monitors changes in the language and reflect these in our definitions, according to the evidence we find".

So maybe, but here is a question. 'Fast Food Nation' is on the way, McDonald's is about to be under the spotlight again so why draw attention to yourself? Answers on a postcard.

Microsoft blogger bites back

That'll teach them. Microsoft's once tame blogger has bitten back. Some people are so ungrateful.
Robert Scoble, who writes the Scobleizer blog, worked for the software giant as an in-house blogger for three years as a "technology evangelist" has laid into the firm slating it after a global summit of its top software developers where Microsoft said it would win the search war with Google as part of its Windows Live internet strategy.

His comments came after Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive laid into search leader Google at the summit.

Scoble, who the Economist magazine credited with helping to improve Microsoft's former monopolistic and bullying reputation, doesn't quite see Microsoft winning. He had been pretty generous in the past, but not anymore.

"The words are empty. Microsoft's internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that’s ‘in it to win’, then I don’t get it.

"Microsoft isn’t going away. Don’t get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the inter-net? Come on.

"Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative."

Does that mean bloggers should just be kept at arms length and you invite them in at your own peril as really they’re just a bunch of egotists looking for an audience? Probably…wait clearly there are exceptions.

There is more on this story in the Sunday Times.

Brand Republic is free

It's been two weeks since Brand Republic relaunched, so it seems like a good time to see what people think about the new free to access site.
The biggest change, that may not be immediately apparent to everyone, is that Brand Republic is now, of course, free.

It was a huge change for Haymarket and Brand Republic, moving from a subscription model to a free to access, where all a visitor has to do to access the wealth of content, take part in our forums, or these blogs, is to register.

The move to free access has coincided with not only adding more content (there is also Campaign, Marketing and Media Week, as well as a number of monthly industry titles such as Marketing Direct, Promotions & Incentives and Revolution), but more in the way of personalisation.

The personalisation we have added effectively allows you to build and design your own homepage with the content you want to see from Brand Republic and elsewhere, as well as maintain a personal profile page for each member.

We're particularly proud of this and its really quite cool. Within Brand Republic you can select all the news feeds you want from the site, be they from DM or digital (among others), and combine these with news from any other source.

With your RSS reader you can view your favourite news sources in one place. So you can add news from the BBC, Reuters and Page Six as well. Just go to MY BR on the main navigation bar and click on My Page on the menu on the left to get started.

It's all drag and drop and really there is nothing to it. It's easier to use than many RSS software. If you run into problems there's a simple walk thru guide that gives you a step-by-step guide.

There is much more on the new Brand Republic and we will be adding to it as we go along.

As well as great personalisation tools, Brand Republic has pushed forward social networking allowing you to comment on all our stories, on creative work, blogs (like this one) and the much expanded discussion forums.

Keaveny takes over at BBC6

The news that former Xfm DJ Shaun Keaveny is to take over the BBC6 Music breakfast slot is the best news I've heard in a while.
I used to really love the Xfm breakfast when it was presented by Christian O'Connell, before he left for the wastelands of Virgin (is that working out for him? Does anyone listen?).

Naturally I thought that Gcap, the owners of Xfm, would appoint Shaun Keaveny as his successor, but no, instead we got the very annoying Lauren Laverne.

She's too much to listen to in the morning, she already had a voice that wasn't suited for music (Kenickie), but someone clearly thought differently. Lavern was fine on the drive time show, but mornings are not her thing.

It isn't just me. In the most recent Rajar figures in February, Xfm fared poorly and was the only commercial station -- apart from Premier Christian Radio -- to decline in terms of listeners, down from 551,000 to 479,000, and share, down 1.6% to 1.3%. Ouch.

Now, Xfm have parted company with Keaveny who has been snapped up by the BBC -- and I for one am going to be tuning in.

I tried before, but there was something about Phill Jupitus. Just wasn't the thing for me.

Puff Grazia

Congratulations to Grazia PR team at Emap on the three page advertorial in the Observer. Nice work.
The piece in Observer Woman magazine waxed lyrical on the current star performer in the women's magazine market.

The success of Grazia with its impressive ABC (up 20% to 210,200) performance has been a boon for Emap, which is exploiting it by bumping up ad rates on the title by 23%.

We are told that "one magazine is setting the agenda for the media" and how Grazia is different as it is "comfortable analysing the Man Booker shortlist as we are dissecting last night's I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here".

Intelligent women then spout on about how they are hooked on Grazia. With the likes of former Orange prize winner Linda Grant saying she rushed to buy her copy every week. "You never know what's going to be in it. I like it in the same way that I like South Park. Its lack of morality, the edge to the humour. There is nothing soft about it. It has a toxic edge to it that is evidently not good for you. It's like drinking a Cosmopolitan."

All very well, but this idea that it is somehow more intelligent than the average women's gossip glossy has really got to stop. Grazia is all about pics of celebrities and some catty comments.

This is the prize excerpt of a Grazia news meeting from Observer Woman:

Laura Benjamin: "Lindsay Lohan's rehab is the funniest thing I've ever seen. She just goes shopping every day."

Victoria Harper, associate editor: "Have you seen the Britney pictures? She looks like she's gone out dressed as Vicky Pollard!"

Laura: "Nicole Kidman's friends say she's got really boring because she never goes out any more."

"She's got really boring?" hoots Marianne Jones, the deputy editor.

Challenging stuff. It might like to think that it covers everything from Chanel handbags to Gordon Brown – but a picture of Gordon Brown and a few words about his appreciation of the Arctic Monkeys is as much about politics as a Chanel Handbag.

I'm not sure why anyone has to try and dress Grazia up as anything more than it is: a successful dumbed down glossy women's magazine.

Just look at last week. It paid out to Kate Winslet in a story accusing her of dieting.

Still, getting a three-page ad in Observer Woman is good work by anyone's standard.

How on earth will that translate to the talked of Grazia for men? Answers on a postcard.

Arena

Arena is on its last legs and Emap has taken a radical solution: appoint an editor with no magazine experience.
Not only does Giles Hattersley have no magazine experience, but he is 27. Not a crime, but if your magazine is down in circulation almost 30% year-on-year, is that the answer? Maybe.

Hattersley joins from the Sunday Times, where he had the job title of "chief interviewer". What a great title.

However, not everyone is a fan. Someone here has described him as someone who writes "vacuous reporting on every conceivable topic remarkably unfettered by depth of knowledge or experience. Name a subject and in steps the all-knowing Hattersley with an opinion".

Hattersley joined the Sunday Times straight from Jarvis Cocker's favourite college, St Martins College of Art and Design, where he did an MA in fashion journalism. Oh, come on, should there really be an MA in such a subject?

I digress. Emap says the appointment of Hattersley is about building its men's portfolio. No seriously.

Rob Munro-Hall, managing director of Emap Metro, East and FHM Worldwide, said: "His unusual background in quality journalism and fashion will be a great asset to Arena, and I look forward to him bringing his talent and drive to the magazine and the company.  This is a key appointment for Arena and EMAP Consumer Media (ECM) and further reinforces our commitment to build on our successful 'First for Men' portfolio both in the UK and internationally."

This magazine will be closed before the year is out. What else can happen to a title that appoints an editor who has no clue and figures like these: July-December the title reported a period-on-period decline of 13.9% to 34,556 copies.

Year-on-year figure dropped 29.9%.

The biggest dick in advertising

What can anyone have against Ray Winstone? OK, he is advertising breakfast cereal, but in a manly way... you know or something.
But this guy has named hard man Winstone, of too many movies to mentioned fame (OK 'Nil by Mouth' and 'Sexy Beast') as one of the ten biggest "cocks" in advertising. I think it’s cocks in that sense of twits.

He's pretty angry. I don't think he is an Optiva fan. In some cases rightly so, but really I think we should spare Ray. 

Autoglass bloke beats James Nesbitt

There seems to be a trend to using real people in ads. Now James Nesbitt, he of 'Cold Feet' and Yellow Pages fame, has found himself losing out to a bloke from Autoglass.
OK, losing out in the Xfm Scotland awards, but still. Breakfast show host Dominik Diamond asked listeners to vote for their favourite radio actors. The shortlist came down to a choice between James Nesbitt, Dawn French and... Gavin from Autoglass. Gavin won, hands down.

The only thing is Gavin isn't an actor or a comedian. He really does work for Autoglass. Like those people who work for Halifax. Gavin is a technician from the Birmingham Autoglass centre and has appeared in a series of ads created by radio ad agency Radioville. You must have heard it, it’s the one where he goes on about dangers of ignoring chips on windscreens and how Autoglass can often repair them for free.

According to Radioville, the ads have been a big hit  with Autoglass reporting a large increase in business, and signing up Radioville for a new £16m contract.
Have a listen for your self