Europe’s Best Cemeteries #3

Père-Lachaise – Paris, France

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Everyone loves a celebrity corpse, and there are quite literally piles of them in Père-Lachaise. Renowned as the final resting place of Jim Morrison, this enormous Parisian landmark is also home to Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Molière, Marcel Proust and Édith Piaf (three guesses what’s written on her tombstone. Wrong: there’s nothing.)

But it’s not all about the famous cadavers: come for the dead, stay for the décor. Père-Lachaise’s ornate memorials, leafy walkways and lovely smoke-free follies help create a calm oasis in the frantic French capital.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #2

Old Jewish Cemetery – Prague, Czech Republic

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The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is, rather predictably, a cemetery for old Jews: specifically, those who snuffed it between 1439 and 1787. During this time the Jewish community was kettled into a tiny ghetto, having to stuff their stiffs into a 60-metre-square graveyard, and so over three centuries it was crammed with around 100,000 bodies. Which explains why it has Europe’s highest concentration of tombstones.

FUN FACT!!! Prague’s famous cemetery only survived Nazi occupation because Hitler wanted to preserve it as ‘a museum to an extinct race’.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Web spelling errors cost retailers ‘millions’

It’s official: spelling matters. New research reveals that simple spelling and grammatical mistakes cost web firms ‘millions of pounds’ each year.

Online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe claims that misspellings can foster major concerns about the credibility of a website, and therefore put off a slew of potential consumers – and potential income.

“Even cutting-edge companies depend upon old-fashioned skills,” says Mr Duncombe. “When you sell or communicate on the internet, 99% of the time it is done by the written word.” Continue reading

What Makes a Viral?

today21[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 4TH APRIL 2009 BY RED C MAGAZINE]

On 10th March 2009, the BBC’s Today current affairs radio programme ventured into the world of viral marketing by uploading a video to YouTube. The ‘viral’ – a video that rapidly gains popularity by being distributed and shared on the internet – was created as an experiment to see how widely the three-minute ad could spread in a short amount of time.

As of 31st March 2009, three weeks after being uploaded, Inside Today has been viewed nearly 55,000 times and has been emailed, instant messaged and blog linked across the planet. So far, so good. But the experiment has had its critics, with many questioning whether the Today promotional video can really be defined as viral. Continue reading

Cheryl Cole: Geordie Martyr?

There are many perfectly good reasons to sack Cheryl Cole, but her Newcastle accent shouldn’t be one of them

Three weeks. That’s all it took. Three measly weeks for Cheryl Cole’s role as chief mollycoddler of the musically mental to be savagely snatched away. Word has it, she was axed for her accent.

Of course, that may just have been a convenient motive to get shot of her: perhaps, behind the scenes, Fox execs were really sweating over her lack of profile Stateside; or at her dull, nodding-dog-style screen presence. But if we believe the News of the World (and why shouldn’t we?), it all came down to the way she speaks. In the 21st century, when television should celebrate and embrace diversity, that’s surely a damning indictment of America’s tolerance of English accents. Continue reading

Propaganda: Marketing for the Masses

An iconic phrase from Nineteen Eighty-Four from Joe Reaney's Blog posting about Propaganda by Red C Marketing, Advertising Agency, Online Marketing Agency and Award-Winning Agency based in Manchester and London[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 17TH NOVEMBER 2009 BY RED C MAG]

Have you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four? It’s about an everyman living under an oppressive totalitarian regime. The ‘proles’ are kept in a controlled state of poverty, living under almost constant surveillance and being ‘educated’ on a daily basis to believe in the inherent good of their government and the inherent evil of others. All in all, it’s a terrifying fiction. Well, if you can call it that. In fact, the regime in the novel closely resembles many real-life regimes of the twentieth century. And, much like the citizens of George Orwell’s dystopian world, the billions of human beings living under these govenments were mostly genuine and wholehearted believers. Their corrupt leaders successfully brainwashed them into thinking they were living the good life, even while terrible things (war, poverty, oppression) were happening all around them.

It’s a mightily impressive feat. So impressive, in fact, that you can’t help but wonder… how on earth did they do it? Continue reading

The Marketing Might of Music Streaming

spotify[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 24TH SEPTEMBER 2009 BY RED C MAGAZINE]

Do you like music? Okay, stupid question: I might as well ask if you like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, or Christmas Dinner. Everyone loves a good tune – with the possible exception of Andrew Lloyd Webber – and there’s nothing better than getting it for nothing. Remember how the holy grail of free music lured an entire generation into the open paws of that creepy Napster cat? Until the Recording Industry Association tied the bugger up in a burlap sack and chucked it in the Mississippi, of course.

Now, after a miserable half-decade of having to fork over cash for music, the free tunes are back; and it’s all thanks to applications like Spotify, we7 and Grooveshark. Music streaming services like these have become incredibly popular in an impossibly short amount of time, and they’re already having a big impact on the way music is made, distributed and charted. But forget all that. The important bit for us to realise is this: with all new forms of music consumption come all new advertising opportunities… Continue reading

Billygean’s Blog: Hooray for the Humdrum

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 17TH DECEMBER 2009 BY RED C MAGAZINE]

I have a love-hate relationship with blogs. There are several I enjoy – travel blog Going Local is an absolute delight, for example, and James and The Blue Cat is consistently chucklesome – but there are many more that incense me. Like spite-filled celeb rumour mill Perez Hilton, an ever-present reminder of humankind’s inexorable retreat into idiocy. Though it’s the ‘personal diaries’ that have traditionally acquired the majority of my goat.

“Come on”, I thought. “Wake up and smell the narcissism. How can you be so arrogant as to expect total strangers to give a flying fig about the mundane happenings of your mundane life? It’s the 21st century equivalent of popping round the neighbours’ to show off snaps from your latest break in Bognor.” Continue reading

Alrite R’kid? Why I Love the Manc Accent

oasis_narrowweb__300x367,2[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 28TH JANUARY 2010 BY RED C MAGAZINE]

When I was growing up in a quiet little town in the south of England, I was always jealous of people with accents. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to be able to ask for jellied eels, or a sausage barm, without sounding like a ponce. Wouldn’t it be bloody brilliant if the sound of my voice alone communicated a deep-rooted link to the precise location of my upbringing.

I do, of course, have vocal indicators that identify me as southern English. Many can even place my accent in the south east. But am I from Basildon or from Basingstoke; from Berkshire or from Kent? My part-BBC, part-Estuary English style of speech gives few pointers to a precise location. The fact is, millions of people across a large part of the country speak in much the same boring way as I do. My voice is a poor compass. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I dreamt of having a real accent. Continue reading

Defining Your Audience

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 23RD JANUARY 2009 BY RED C MAGAZINE]

What do the best advertising campaigns have in common? Well, a good advertisement has to work all the way from conception to execution. It has to really understand the product it is advertising; from its unique selling point and inevitable faults to the competition and market performance. The best advertising campaigns are honed and finessed, skilfully constructed with copy and design that communicates the message without relentlessly screaming in the consumer’s face. But the most important element of a successful campaign is empathy with the buyer. The fact is, an advert can never really succeed unless it gets to know its target audience. Continue reading