Two common mistakes in contemporary advertising are to underestimate the intelligence of the audience and overstate your own worth. Both are at work here. The ad starts with the assertion that the state government inherited a weak economy and has turned it into a powerhouse.

Taking credit for this undermines credibility. Far better to have said, ‘as you know WA is currently the fastest growing economy; we’re actually not taking credit for that but we believe we’ve done a good job of managing state finances and investing in sensible projects…’ Political advertising should aim to cement credibility and make you look reasonable, not show how partisan you are.

The more recent ad contrasts said schmick Premier with an unflattering photo of the Opposition Leader. It’s black and white, out of focus and his eyes are closed. The audio describes Colin Barnett as a ‘flip-flop’ man (new heights in sophisticated invective) and it verges on insulting. The Labor Government is in a position of strength but using negative advertising packed with pejoratives makes them look petty and insecure. It’s just shabby.

It looks like strategy is being dictated by party leaders who have little understanding of advertising and insufficient contact with mainstream society.

I was surprised to see an ad for Woolworths during the Network Seven Olympic coverage. You would have thought Coles’ position as major sponsor [see comments] would have given them some category exclusivity.

Research has consistently shown that sponsorship is almost always a poor way of spending advertising dollars. More evidence recently from the Adelaide School of Commerce.

The consumer is so deluged with advertising the association between the event and the advertiser is quickly forgotten. Who sponsored the Melbourne Cup? Who sponsored The Australian Open this year? Who sponsored the last AFL Grand Final? Answers below…

Of course, sometimes TV stations sell sponsorship packages that discount the cost of advertising. Even then it’s hard to justify; you’re buying frequency at the expense of reach. In other words, the same people are seeing your ad over and over. The better strategy is to spread your advertising as widely as possible.

For premium events like those mentioned and certainly for the Olympics, you pay a premium. The justification is that you are hitting such a large audience. In effect this is saying, good reach, less frequency. Offset I believe by the premium and the fact that you have to buy a large number of spots.

Why do apparently rational companies buy into this?

Well maybe not, here’s a contrary view from Mediacom’s Anne Parsons.

One of the interesting things with sponsorships is that the advertising adopts the theme of the event. At present, almost all advertisements feature China and Australian sport. This would be clever if you were the only advertiser doing it. Unfortunately, just about every sponsor has gone down this path, which minimises the amount of cut-through the advertiser gets. Just remind me; this ad I’ve seen 180 times with the beautiful Chinese girls and lots of red in it, who’s that for again?

Partly it happens because the ad agency has to justify the extraordinary expense of the Olympic sponsorship. In light of the massive spend and the fact that the agency was party to the decision it would be a brave Creative Director to advocate another theme. And yet, an ad which avoided the Olympic theme would have stood out. Gorilla in a jockstrap.

For what it’s worth, I like the Coles campaign. The ad acknowledges parents who support their little sporting prodigies. It features normal looking people. Scary concept.

Answers: Emirates, Kia, Toyota. Hope you got ‘em right. About $30m worth of sponsorship there.

Learn to spell the word ‘the’. Most of you are not teens or twenty-somethings. Stop faking it.

I’m really not interested in the fact that you’re going to bed. Really.

It’s nice that you are looking forward to something but know that it’s okay to keep some things to yourself. Just go to bed.

We know it’s boring at the airport but there is no need to inflict your boredom on us. As a general rule, your travel plans are of no interest.

Telling people how many followers you have is just sad.

Pontification is no substitute for original, witty, unusual or profound thought.

It’s a fine line between hero-worship and sycophancy. Get a grip.

Go ahead punk; Twitter that I’m snarky.

Let’s start narrow, with two little ones. When you’re looking at a normal search query, you’re getting the highest ranked results. But these are often out of date. You can use the Advanced tab to get recent results but this is a bit kludgy. I’d like to be able to easily order results by recency.

Second, I think Google seriously underuses Alerts, the email notifications you can set up on any search query. With Alerts, you get new results as they are indexed, so over a period of three months or so, you become very well informed on your subject. My point is, running an Alert once a week for a three month search period can be far more powerful than a one-off search that generates 400,000 results. Some searches you do will be one-offs but some will be ongoing areas of interest. Current search engines don’t distinguish between the different classes of search.

Google doesn’t promote the Alerts; I’d be putting the Alert button next to every search query you run. And I’d be offering it as an RSS feed as well as an email.

Now a broader approach.

Google is a bot. An automated search built in a pre-Web 2.0 world. Perhaps the way to beat it is to take advantage of (1) the fabulous people who are already out there categorising and rating content and (2) people doing new searches who are encouraged to rate/tag the sites they visit.

Imagine a service that aggregates searches done on Web 2.0 sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious and WordPress then indexes their tags. Aggretagging. To me it’s not about getting 400,000 results, it’s about getting 20 better results than Google. To do this, you need the discernment that real people bring to the equation.

The other tactic is to turn your search engine into a social engine, using networks of existing and emerging friends. Google has no soul. Compare it to Twitter or Friendfeed; already being used by people to share quality sites. People use social media to build knowledge networks. That’s a threat to the Googlebot model.

Experience with Delicious and Twitter shows that people are prepared to share some of their search results. Our social engine would allow you to share as many of your search queries as you wanted. Cuil was exactly wrong. Less privacy, not more. Combine the social networks with aggretagging and Bot’s Your Uncle. Social aggretagging.

Reading through Rob Antulov’s summary points of the Future of Media session on Media and Social Networks; wanted to discuss this one: ‘many companies about which conversation occurs online are NOT tracking this conversation, so are missing out on a unique opportunity to listen and engage with some of their passionate consumers’.

Are those consumers who use social media any more passionate than other consumers? I don’t think so. How are they different to other consumers? They use technology more so they might be more passionate about technology but I think the passion ends there. As technology early-adopters they are more likely to be educated and affluent but from a market research viewpoint, this renders them uninteresting. They are not a representative sample. If I’m selling a mainstream product I’m interested in the opinions of a cross-section of consumers, not an elite niche. So much for the Passion Argument.

There are two other arguments often advanced for companies expending effort on social media. One is the Influence Argument, the notion that social media early adopters are more influential in the public realm than Joe Dokes, Couch Potato, passive media consumer.

At risk of heresy, Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble are no more influential on mainstream consumer opinion than Joe Dokes. In their own limited areas they exert influence; no argument. If you don’t know their names, I’ve made my point. Broader society is unaffected by blogging, micro-conversations and micro-blogging. The capacity of social media to influence mainstream media, and hence the mainstream, is pathetically small.

Then there is the PR Argument; that a company can use social media to initiate positive conversations on the Internet and beyond (cue Buzz Lightyear) or respond to an adverse story before it gets a head of steam. Poster child for this is Southwest Airlines, which responds in near real time to Twitter users who mention the airline when they Tweet (blog).

I’m afraid this is influence at the margins. If Qantas had been using SouthWest Airlines’ approach would it have stopped or influenced the mainstream media blitz that followed their recent in-flight explosion? Not a skerrick.

I don’t think social media is an advertising medium or even a PR medium. It is a new kind of word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth derives from your staff and your policies (in that order). The capacity of your marketing department to drive it is negligible.

Well what is social software good for? Access to the knowledge of informed people is a biggie. And you would have to say it has great potential as a tool for personal branding and personal promotion. If you own a business (particularly a tech start-up) and you want to raise your profile, invest hundreds of hours in blogging and micro-blogging - you might very well build a following.

But it’s not probably not going to make you more passionate or influential than Joe Dokes.

From a conversation with Myles Eftos

Reminds me of the Jewish couple leaving the restaurant. ‘That was the worst food I’ve ever eaten’. ‘Yes, and such small portions!’

Google have this philosophy of putting products into beta early in the development phase and ironing out the problems as they go. It’s not going to work with Lively in the virtual world/game space. People are not going to come back. Ask the owners of Second Life. They lose 9/10 people who try it and those 9 do not come back. Despite its dumbed down functionality, Lively will lose at least 9.

Rooms are supposed to contain 20 avatars. Mostly they close with about 12 and lag badly.

People in the environment have NO IDEA what they’re meant to do. What’s worse, there IS nothing to do, other than chat. A large number of people are 14 years old, speak different languages or lag so badly they cannot communicate. Believe me, there’s not a lot of chemistry in there. Didn’t Google study the Second Life orientation experience?

Most of the people I was able to communicate with had computer problems in Lively and were Facebook users. The idea that people are going to migrate their friends’ network across from Facebook is just fanciful. Only one in three are going to have sufficient graphics grunt and bandwidth to make it run tolerably. What are they going to do, stay in Facebook with all their friends or jump across to Lively leaving most of their friends behind? That was a rhetorical question.

I went into Vivaty as well but after it insisted on re-installing the software it packed up completely. Able to display only one room of those I tried. Like Heidi said in her comment; Just Starting.

Pictured: Me in Lively, streaming Lisa Nova’s Twitter Whore video into my room, Twittery.

Lively is described as Google’s answer to Second Life. It’s not. Second Life is a virtual world; Lively is chat software with 3D avatars. It’s browser-based, as opposed to Second Life, which operates with separate software, like a computer game. Contrasting the two environments highlights the originality of the Second Life product. Lively is imitative and cut-down in every respect. Conceptually barren. This is by intention; the Second Life interface has proved too daunting for most people. I note that they used to think that computers were too complicated for the mainstream too.

The interesting aspect of Lively is the ability to embed the interface in a web page, effectively offering interactive 3D chat on a web site. For a business, this has the same limitations of normal chat software, ie it only works if you allocate staff to interact with people. Kind of the opposite to what businesses tend to want these days. You can imagine teleseminars and teleconferences working this way, if they get the wrinkles ironed out.

And there are a lot of wrinkles. It’s painfully slow. There is no orientation. Things don’t work. Movement is difficult. Thousands of bad first impressions are being created as you read this. This is no way to run a ballroom.

My friends at Millions of Us are one of two development partners and have created a themed room for one of their clients, National Geographic. So; themed rooms, limit of 20 visitors at a time: looks like a similar scaling problem to Second Life’s.

Lively’s launch has overwhelmed another entrant in this space. Vivaty. It is easier to understand, is less ambitious than Lively and seems to work better, though I haven’t seen it under load.

Vivaty also allows you to embed your room in a web page (coincidence). Like Lively, it offers to suck you across from Facebook (just a coincidence). Quite an unsettling experience walking into your Vivaty room for the first time to find the walls covered with pictures of people you know. It loads pictures randomly from your Facebook account.

But most people I know don’t dwell in Facebook. It’s a ‘touch base’ medium. This is at odds with the 3D chat idea, which is conversation. I would have thought the concept was a better fit with MSN than Facebook.

Always risky making an assessment early on, but here goes. Lively will disappoint almost everyone who ventures into it, will get a reputation as nothing special and die of embarrassment. Vivaty will struggle to move people across from Facebook in sufficient numbers to give it traction. Both are kludgy and compare poorly to their 2D rivals.

Not through to the next round.

IBM and Second Life have announced the ability to teleport from Second Life into Open Sim grids (an open source version of Second Life). They describe this as a first; well, my business partner Loki Clifton and others have been doing that stuff for six months. The big guys may have improved the scalability or reliability, but it is not a first and they know it. Must they lie to us?

Linden Lab hope to turn Second Life into a platform rather than a product. One that respects people’s intellectual property, allows transfer of assets and maintains LL’s control of the virtual currency. The benefit to corporates of Open Sim however, is that the virtual world can be SEPARATED from Second Life, avoiding the morality and security issues that send men in business suits scurrying into mouse holes.

The elephant in the room (nicely sustaining the metaphor here) is that the Open Sim versions allow other people to sell ‘virtual land’, currently LL’s major source of income. Already land is being sold at a fraction of the Second Life price. Undermining your own profitability is one of the less successful business strategies. The road to survival for Second Life probably involves transactional fees of some sort. Dare I say ‘tax’.

The ongoing problem for Linden Lab is the lack of platform stability. It crashes and it lags. Assets created within the virtual world are not stable. The monetary system is not stable. I lost several hundred dollars one week and I still don’t know why. Reporting these errors does not lead to remedial action or even attention.

Unless IBM can dig LL out of its technical hole, (unfortunately it’s a development partnership, not a rescue package) the thing doesn’t scale and business is not interested. IBM will host its own Second Life servers for clients; I wonder how solid they will be. I wonder how expensive they will be.

Although I’ve invested lots of time in Second Life and I believe that 3D virtual worlds will be a powerfully disruptive media in the future, I’m writing it off for the time being.

The ABC are advertising their Local Radio stations on the teev. Fair enough. The ad features snatches of audio from a range of different programs and a fairly static visual background. It’s dreadfully unappealing.

When you watch television, and this will come as a shock to most of you, your brain is expecting visual stimulation. Colour and movement. And for the most part, it expects the visual to match the audio. If the lip sync is wrong, the brain doesn’t like it.

With television your visual centres demand movement. So certain kinds of static or slow moving programming don’t work that well. Parkinson for example. Television requires rapid cuts. Even the News now hardly shows ‘head of newsreader’. It cuts away to story and graphic over and over. Constantly capturing our attention with the next flicker of change. It’s packetised: eye grabs. We don’t really have programs any more, just non-stop cut-through.

When you listen to radio, your visual attention is not called for so you can move freely in space. Because you’re less constrained your imagination paints a picture that fills in the gaps. As a result, a well told story can be more powerful on radio than on television. When you watch television, the brain is largely occupied interpreting visual stimulus. When you listen to radio, the brain is more free to imagine.

So, given that radio is a different experience, how do you convey that? The current TV ad presents radio as an inferior version of TV. All the audio but nothing to look at. Playing radio sound grabs on television is like promoting a newspaper on television by showing photographs of news articles.

Three ideas:

1. Film people talking. Just because the audience can’t see the DJ while listening doesn’t mean you can’t show them the DJ talking to someone in a studio. It’s TV advertising. Give them a TV experience.

2. Black the screen while you run the audio. This will make people listen differently. Use a full 60 seconds telling a story. Or longer.

3. Interview people about what they’ve heard on radio. Talk about content. Radio programming is far more diverse than TV; that’s one of its strengths. ‘Did you hear that interview with the Jewish journalist who went around interviewing terrorist leaders?’ ‘Did you hear about the Canadian Government giving Australia the oldest document ever printed in Australia?’ ‘Did you hear about the garden of blue sticks?’ ‘Did you hear that program about the blogger who can’t stop criticising the ABC?’ No wait, that last one was the Internets.