Autobiography Now On Sale

"Living Large - The World of Harold Mitchell - from sawmiller's son to multi-million dollar man"

is now on sale in bookshops throughout Australia
http://catalogue.mup.com.au/978-0-522-85657-6.html

Porridge - Read All About It

Magazines are in the news, so I headed off to the supermarket to get the latest.

It’s another world in there.

Last summer I managed a four wheel drive track through the Australian Alps with nothing other than a SatNav. But a supermarket! More aisles than fire trails. And all I wanted was a little reading matter to have with my traditional breakfast porridge.

Remember porridge? It was simple in the old days – one cup of oats, two cups of water, a pinch of salt and Bob’s your long lost Scottish uncle – a healthy hearty breakfast to set you up for the day out on the moors or deep in the stock market jungle. Although for some it was a bit too healthy and the palate required the decadent stimulation of brown sugar, honey and bananas.

Now I find a bewildering array of porridges in the supermarket. There’s “traditional” oats, “quick” oats (whatever that might mean), oats with apple and cinnamon, “fitness” oats with powerful enzymes - even oats turned into dried porridge bars called “brits”

Porridge is now so complicated because of the individual markets that have been created – except for my English friends for whom porridge is still really simple – two years in the slammer– not two cups in the bowl with sultanas and your choice of milks.

Armed with a box of spicy Moroccan flavoured cinnamon and paw paw rolled oats (and a six pack of porridge bars), I headed for the magazine section looking for a simpler world.

Older readers will remember The Women’s Weekly in 1983 and its 1.2 million copies - it had everything in it we ever needed. What a year 1983 was! Bob Hawke was elected Prime Minister for the first time. Now the dear old Weekly is down to just 493,000 copies. But don’t worry, they’re doing okay and they are happy with that.

And just like the porridge, there’s an unbelievable array of magazines proving that they’re far from dying. Currently there are 1,200 different Australian magazines plus more than 3,000 magazine titles shipped in from foreign lands - a total retail sales value of $1.2 billion - more than we spend on soap.

According to Nick Chan, the big boss at Pacific Publications, Australia is close to the world’s largest per capita consumer of magazines. And we don’t just use them to decorate coffee tables - Australians spend a bit under two hours a week reading them.

But it’s more complicated than 1983 which is why the industry is currently in uproar as to how to measure the readership in a research hungry world.

They reckon the current system is about as old-fashioned as the compass and the RACV map of the Australian Alps which I ditched on my last trip and went with the modern technology of the SatNav.

Our querulous editor has been on about this subject this week. If you wander around the rest of this page you’ll find his musings about trying to get our research up to date by the use of the latest techniques.

I think he's onto something.

There seems to be a good argument that we’re stuck in the old days of porridge with a pinch of salt when it’s time to use all the ingredients in the pantry.

Autobiography Now On Sale

My autobiography
"Living Large - The World of Harold Mitchell - from sawmiller's son to multi-million dollar man" is now on sale in bookshops throughout Australia

http://www.mup.com.au/

Where Have All The Papers Gone

Lino is on the way back. I will tell you why in a moment.

But first newspapers - they are supposed to be on the way out.

People have been writing newspapers off since the arrival of the B&W television in 1956.

But as the growing number of regular readers to this column well know, this good old rag still arrives every morning to announce the news, forecast the future and fearlessly maintain our freedom of speech. Not to mention entertain us with an outstanding supply of advertisements that oil the wheels of commerce and the modern printing plant.

But now something else is happening.

The latest circulation figures show that the number of newspapers purchased is holding up despite the readers giving up the idea of purchasing of a new Lamborghini or a supersized duel pool holiday shack down the coast.

So it was a shock to the system when the latest Roy Morgan survey of readership arrived. This is the poll that tells advertisers how many readers each paper has and digs even deeper to show the marketing world what type of people the readers really are and what they buy. Inquisitive advertisers then know that they are getting real value from their ads.

The other way of course, is to put the ad in the paper and see if the cash register rings - a bit old fashioned but still a good idea.

However the latest readership figures, unlike the circulation figures, have dropped. Charlie, our seasoned researcher, thinks that’s because Morgan is asking different questions. Morgan used to combine readers of the paper with those who read it online. Apparently, not only are “oils ain’t oils” but “readers ain’t readers” either.

But newspapers are still in rude health - it’s only the figures that aren’t and they seem to show that some people are buying newspapers but not reading them.

Here’s where the lino comes in. As you know, Louise doesn’t like slang so I will call it linoleum so we all know what I mean.

The traditional use of newspapers, after you have read them from front to back, was to store them in the woodshed and then later put them under the brand new lino. (Why did you have to do that? Louise is still researching this - perhaps a reader knows why a newspaper underlay was a necessity.)

But when wall to wall carpet arrived in the 60’s and the polished board craze of the ‘70’s took over, up came the lino and suddenly the national archives had a competitor as perfectly kept newspapers from before the world war 1 started to turn up in pristine condition.

So lino must be making a coming back. How else can we explain this continuing use of newspapers if the official readership figures keep dropping but the same numbers of people keep buying them?

Unless of course the readership figures are a bit strange which is where I am currently leaning.

But it’s all good news any way you like to look at it.

The printing presses are still running, the researchers have plenty more work to do, the advertisers are getting ready for the spring sales and the readers are either admiring their new kitchen floor or opening fish and chip shops.

All good by me.

One Way Or Another We Will ALl Be Paying

So the big news is who is going to pay for the news? Charlie tells me the internet is taking over the world.

Usually if I want to know anything, I just ask Charlie. After all he picked the economic downturn before the World Bank and he told us about the signs of recovery ten weeks before the IMF worked it out. So when I asked Charlie about the future of news on the internet he referred me to his personal trainer Marty. I know Marty. He’s a cluey bloke - on top of everything and gets it all from the internet. Does he pay for it? No. Will he? Not likely. Marty talks like that - short sentences.

But someone has to pay. Good news is expensive. Someone has to dig deep to get the facts to see who is telling porkies. Louise hates me using slang so I will fall back on the line that Louise asked me to use. “Who is it that is breaking the ninth commandment?”

I know what you are thinking – “what is the ninth commandment and where is that Gideon’s Bible that I nicked all those years ago? “

And then I hear you say “Oh, doesn’t matter, I’ll just Google it.”

We know that the Gideon’s was free and we can be pretty sure that the Gideon’s people don’t mind us pinching them even though it costs something to print and distribute their 60 million copies of the good book.

But the Google info really is completely free. We pay for the printing if we want a hard copy and we pay for the distribution with our internet account.

Increasingly everyone is getting the information that they want, including the news, and not paying for it. But now the big publishers have started a world wide program to get readers to pay for the information that they have been giving away for the past ten years.

It won’t be easy. The move to the internet has been happening so quickly that publishers have redoubled their efforts to make real dollars directly from the virtual world.

Everyone, sellers and buyers alike, are going to web. The next big wave on the internet will be surfed by the retailers as they find clever ways to sell their products. And that’s a worry for the traditional news papers and magazines. The retailers have very big advertising funds that no print publisher wants like to see walk out the door as the classifieds have done.

And the ways to use the web are exploding as mobile phones continue perform more and more functions – everything from global positioning to sports telecasts – even phone calls. There are two million new handsets each year making a total of over 24 million mobile phones in Australia.

My bet is that one way or another we will all pay for what we use. Exactly how this is achieved is exercising some of the smartest commercial brains on earth.

I tried to convince the Editor to experiment with this column by publishing a blank space with a headline that is link to a paid website. He’s not quite ready for it yet, but I reckon his owner is.

And by the way, what about the ninth commandment? Have you got it yet??

Forget ABout Hitting Winners - Just Get In Back Over the Net

The past and present tennis players that are readers of this column (and I assume that is most of you) will enjoy this story today.

I gave up playing tennis quite some years ago when my son started to beat me. He was aged nine so I thought the time had come to hang up the Wilson. It’s hard to keep up parental control when you go down down 6.0, 6.0 to someone who is in short pants off the court.

“Stick to what you are good at” that’s always been Louise’s wise words to me. Never touched a court or a racquett since.

But what I have learnt of from a lifetime of watching from the sidelines is that you don’t win by trying to serve up an ace or hit a big winner with every shot. The rules are 1. Keep getting the ball back over the net. 2. Never hit the same shot twice and, 3. be mentally tough.

Pat Rafter was as tough as anyone and like all the champions he always had the last shot. And he let his opponents make the mistakes. Pressure will do that.

The lesson seems to have been lost on a few in the media in the last week. The unfortunate events initiated by the disgraced shock jock Kyle Sandilands is a good example. Don’t go for the big winner “down the line” as they say in tennis , the long steady game will win. It may be a bit boring sometimes but the odds are that it will be successful.

We’ve seen it in the long running battle between the TV networks. The late Kerry Packer set the Nine network on a thirty year run of making money by regular programming. Every night, the highest rating news was followed by the equally successful A Current Affair. David Leckie, CEO of Seven, in the six year battle to put Seven on top by taking the lead from Nine did it by regular programming every night. Mind you Nine is fighting back – David Gyngell has given up surfing and is now playing tennis.

Louise says that I should pause at this stage, as they do at the critical mid point of a tennis game, and deliver the match winning stroke which in her world is the use of a carefully placed long word: Ignominious! Indeed! That’s what the rise and rise the Seven Network was to Channel 9, because the people who Leckie got to do the job on Nine were the ones who had built Nine in the years before.

Back to tennis.

“Excuse me Roger you seem to be beating me, can I borrow your racquet.”

Not likely says the Swiss.

A good lesson for life and business isn’t it. Just keep getting the ball back over the net. Rafter and Hewitt and all our tennis champs back through the years – Newc, Laver and not forgetting my mate Ashley, did the same. They talk about never giving up, never say die and having the last shot.

Louise and I are off to have a game of tennis. Should be a hoot. I want the last shot, she wants the last word. Sounds like a five setter.

“C’m on” I say as I turn my cap to the backwards position.

London Calling

We know that the economy has been in trouble - we have had two recovery packages and it’s not even Christmas. Advertising has benefited and retail sales are up in many categories. The signs are good.

Charlie has been telling me that the tough times aren’t over yet but it has stopped getting worse. Or as Churchill said in the middle of WWII “it’s not the end, but it is the end of the beginning”.

With thoughts of Churchill in mind, I headed for London last week.

Our advertising industry has always had an affinity with the English. For a start we speak the same language or so I thought until I started to talk to a Cockney tout about getting a couple of tickets to the Wimbledon final. He just didn’t get it when I suggested that 2000 pounds for a single ticket was a bit rich.

Back in the world of commerce, I lined up meetings with as many important people that I knew. Over the years I suspect they have looked down on us convict bred larrikins but not these days, particularly as the “old country’s” economy is in real trouble. By comparison, we have handled our economy well.

Advertising in Australia will be down around 7% this year, but try 30%+ in some European markets, and as for Russia well just don’t go there.

The message is simple; don’t get carried away with the news from abroad. We will come out of this downturn better than most of the rest of the world.

Before I left, the editor had filled me with questions to ask all the big wheels I was to meet in some misguided hope that he could turn me from a columnist into a journalist. No hope of that: some of the answers they got were so good that I am sworn to secrecy. But thanks boss – the questions were terrific!

The story with all the big wheels in the UK advertising community is that this downturn is frightening.

They didn’t see it coming and when it happened they didn’t realise that it would be so severe. Their confidence took a beating.

So with the knowledge that the rest of the world is pretty well shot and that Australia will be okay, I decided to revive negotiations with the ticket tout. By this time the Englishman Andy Murray had lost the Semi Final and the price was coming down. And he was a Scot again.

So off I went to the tennis last Sunday - big crowd, happy people, merchandise turnover booming.

In his acceptance speech, Roger Federer mentioned his disappointment at missing out on winning the Australian Open last January. Suddenly, at this magic time in England the old colony was back in the news on centre court.

But there is one worry on the horizon. One of our former Australian cricket greats told me over dinner that the first test that started last night in Cardiff is a plot. The wicket is a dream for spinners and they have been waiting for Warne to depart before luring us to the land of leeks.

That may be so, but the gentle resurgence of our advertising industry in Australia is a win for us ….. and it has the Poms in a spin.

Toursim Depends on Pest control

Don’t get Louise started on white ants. As far as she is concerned they are a bigger problem than climate change.

They can gobble their way through your house without you knowing a thing about it. You see, unlike the rest of us they are happy to work in the dark. They eat the wood away from inside the wall and you don’t know that you are in real trouble until you push your finger into the wall and it collapses.

And they will do anything to get to timber of any kind. Charlie has had a small and precious collection of old wines which includes several bottles of Grange. He was devastated when he found that the white ants had marched into the cellar, past the bluestone walls and got into the wooden boxes that he had protecting the Grange.

That then allowed the moths to feast on the labels.

It was devastating in Charlie’s case as he tried to convince his guests as they sat down to an Indian curry that the anonymous bottle of wine that they were quaffing without due regard, was really a 1989 Grange.

It’s the same with modern day media and marketing. You can keep the public image looking the same for a while, but without all of the backup and support working, someone is going to come along some day stick their finger into your image and find that there is nothing there. It’s just all front.

There are many marketing campaigns where a clever line seems to carry the day but unless it can be supported, it falls by the wayside. This has always been the great problem of tourism campaigns. The tourism industry of any country is vital but in Australia it is critical. We rely on it heavily and with a world wide economic slow down, it is paramount that it is working properly.

The global financial crisis has caused tourism around the world to fall by 7% but Australian tourism has only declined 1%.

Tourism is critical for our economy and it alson contributes significantly to social cohesion through the jobs for young people and the opportunity for economic independence and cultural understanding of our indigenous communities.

Tourism Australia has been very clever. They committed a massive sum to promote Baz Luhrmann’s epic to overseas audiences. I think they got their money’s worth. Globally, 4 billion people read press articles or saw TV items about Australia as a destination and that is a staggering 60% of the world’s population of 6.8 million.

Tourism Australia’s research found that people who saw the film were 22% more likely to plan a trip to Australia. And its interesting to note that Australia’s most expensive film at $197 million is now Australia’s third highest box office generator behind Crocodile Dundee and Babe.

The film was considered a disappointment in America but it still opened at number five on the box office chart and was number one in Spain, France and Germany. The Brits had it number three.

Now we need to follow it up with a campaign that will last and portrait us as we wish to be seen around the world. The ad agency charged with the job is DDB Needham and it’s a huge responsibility to make it work while keeping all the stakeholders happy. They have had time to consider the matter and there is good reason to be confident that they can do the job. They are a pretty good agency that has had a lot of success recently.

We need it to work and this nation of knockers has no reason to white ant them!

The Bloomin Internet

The PM spoke recently about green shoots starting to poke their way through but to my great surprise this past weekend, I finally saw the fruits of my winter labours in planting a thousand bulbs in the garden.

Far be it from me to try to one up the PM, but my green shoots have just turned into the first golden blooms of spring. They are the Narcissus Tazetta - otherwise known to our occasional readers of this column as the daffodil. Louise says that I shouldn’t explain too many of the long words as it lets a certain level of riff raff into the column.

I disagree. Common folk can do with a learning experience.

In the depths of winter, I planted many different bulbs so that they would continue to arrive progressively over the next six months. And with each new arrival would come a new experience of the wonder of life. No big bang theory for me with everything arriving all at once and then nothing. Not like my wife’s tomatoes. I am sick of pickles and chutney.

With my bulb planting strategy I was trying to replicate the revolution that is taking place with the media with the arrival of the internet which has something new emerging continuously.

The digital age is the greatest structural change in the media since the arrival of television more than 50 yeas ago. Charlie tells me TV built brands, changed attitudes, found heroes and villains we never knew we had, quicker than any other media in history.

In just ten years the internet is doing the same thing at a far greater rate. Just like my bulbs, there is something new every minute. And once it’s arrived and weaved its magic, it disappears.

This is a major change to the modus operandi of our current media that had always relied on the daily fix with a couple of updates.

A constant flow of information is what the increasingly avaricious consumer demands. Like that word Louise? I am not going to tell them what it means.

Charlie hates me talking about average people. As a leading researcher he says there is no such thing. But I will take a chance and tell you that the average person now consumes the internet for more than an hour a day. This is not lost on the advertising world - more than 14% of all ad dollars go to the net. More than radio alone or magazines.

Charlie’s assistant John tells me that if the Government’s broadband plans kick in, within five years internet advertising will be the biggest medium of all - exceeding TV and newspapers. It has already happened in the UK. Content and a new set of bulbs coming out every day, is what it is all about.

Who would have thought that we would be looking at Google maps to see what has changed and be annoyed when the image is a few months old. We used to have to wait years for a new edition of The Altas.

Louise likes to have the final word, in fact she likes to have every word. “Harold, if the readers don’t keep up with this internet thing, they will be on gardening leave – permanently.”

Final word “Oh do be quiet Louise our readers get it.”

The Worm Turns Master Chef Master Stroke

I wanted to write about worms and their importance in the evolutionary process but Master Chef came along - equally evolutionary, but this time for Channel Ten and our specie of TV viewers.

Yesterday we saw the publication of the half year market share of revenue. Seven continues to lead with 38.5%; Nine 32.5% and Ten with 27.4%. But don’t worry about Ten. They set the TV world on fire this week with the incredible ratings of MasterChef Australia. The nail biting final contest between Poh Ling Yeow and Julie Goodwin was the third highest rating program since the current system began in 2001. Only the 2005 Hewitt Australian Open Final and the 2003 Rugby Word Cup Final between Australia and England did better.

The story for Ten is good if you are counting bickies not calories. A sixty second ad in MasterChef cost $60,000. Multiply this by the 5 hours of programs across the weekly series and there’s not much change out of $40 million. And when they start to taking bookings for the next series from the sweaty palmed media buyers wanting to join in the success it will be $80,000 a minute and going up. The halo effect will probably add another $25 million.

So what is going on? Why are cooking shows so popular?

Charlie tells me that confidence is returning and people are feeling better but they are looking for simpler things and a more authentic lifestyle. No more conspicuous consumption.

We should all listen to Charlie. As regular readers will recall, Charlie told us in the first week of April that the downturn wasn’t so bad and our economy was on the way back. Our advertising bookings were telling us the same thing. Charlie is now beside himself with glee because on Tuesday this week Access Economics and the Reserve Bank both said the same thing - two months after Charlie.

We could have seen this trend for a simpler life coming by noticing people planting vegetables in the back yard, even in the front yard. Trendy people in flats are putting planter boxes on the balcony with what the American TV Chefs call ‘erbs. The “H” of course is silent but I will hit the next person who says ‘ ullo ‘arold like that cockney spiv who fleeced me for two tickets to Wimbledon.

But you can see how the worms are making a comeback with all of this gardening and consequential cooking going on. Clever things worms, with their front end looking just like their rear. Very efficient little factories all in the one unit.

Many have tried to copy the worm. There’s old Volkswagon which looked the same coming and going and the original W Class tram which could be driven from either end - modest but effective inventions that changed the lives of ordinary people just like Master Chef which has turned the every day ritual of cooking a meal into our highest ranking spectator sport of the year and made a homely IT consultant a celebrity chef with plans to open a cosy simple family restaurant on the New South Wales coast.

And my advice to Julie?

Restaurants can be a risky business. Don’t give up the day job but by all means plant a vegetable garden and start a worm farm.

And my advice for the networks?

Home grown product is the way to go.

In The Media Its Survival of the Cannibals

Louise is telling me that history is important. She is very clever with words and says we must look back so that we can look forward. Her advice is timely. The crash of Wall Street in ’87 seems a long time ago and the lessons for the media are perhaps long forgotten.

But Louise loves to nag.

The collapse of all our great media companies in the late ‘80’s led to a change of ownership of all but one: News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch who went from strength to strength over the next 25 years apart from a blip of debt management when a small Irish Bank held out until the owners got the phone call.

The new media owners of the 80’s arrived like conquering giants and went to work enjoying the running of their new toys- Bond, Skase, Lowy, young Warwick Fairfax, the list goes on.

But back to Louise and the history lesson. What we saw then was people in love with the asset but no ability to run it. They had a burden of debt and an advertising market that was negative for four years. They were owners but not managers and they failed. And then the Australian media landscape changed again, mostly by the assets returning to the owners who knew what they were doing. This is the important bit of the history because many of the owners in recent years have let the experienced specialist media managers manage. Leckie at 7, Gyngell at 9, Blackley at 10 and McCarthy at Fairfax know what they are doing.

The end of the 90’s saw many changes in many sectors of our society. One of them was the emergence of our great Melbourne Museum in its award winning building in Carlton with its 16 million items and a dazzling exhibition program. In my time as President of the Museum, still the biggest in the southern hemisphere, one of the great shows was “Bugs Alive”. Not for arachnephobiacs though. There’s a new good word to look up, but not for regular readers of this column who will know what I mean.

What could the study of spiders and bugs tell us about the media landscape of today?

The answer is “everything”. Bugs are more than 10 million years old and they were probably here before us. The “Bugs Alive” exhibition included a few deadly tarantulas in a display case that was spot lit 24 hours a day – a bit like our present day media owners. As I was standing there looking at them with Dr Patrick White, CEO of the Museum I asked him what they ate. The erudite Doctor, and world renowned museum expert, pondered for a moment. His answer was as insightful as it was short - “mostly each other”.

So there it is Louise. History wins again and in all probability we will see a return to the millennia old tradition of the bugs eating each other and creating a new environment where the big strong ones will prosper until the next feeding frenzy begins.

In the world of the media, the smart ones, who are in a strong financial position and know what they are doing will expand, probably at the expense of the others, until we finish up with “ tarantulas giganticus medias”

Check The Label Matches The Price

As I was courting my wife in the early sixties I found it helpful to spend time with her brothers and their mate Bruce. On weekends we would venture out to the local pubs in Port Melbourne, the suburb by the wharves in Melbourne - Woolloomooloo in Sydney had many similar establishments.

This was where I first learned the value of brands.

Many of the locals in the front bar had things to sell. Usually from the boot of their car behind the pub. Crays and portable TV’s were the hot items then. The products on sale were mostly highly portable because they had been moved quickly to and fro someone’s house nearby. Car radios were another hot item, to use the expression loosely.

But I was mainly interested in clothes. Being a young underpaid advertising junior, I was always looking for a bargain. You could buy jumpers I recall, but like all the “merchandise”, the brand tag on the collar was cut off – perhaps because they scratch your neck, or so I thought initially.

While I wouldn’t say categorically that they were stolen goods, I do know that the cops had trouble pinning anything on you if you couldn’t trace the merchandise by its brand – a bit like the famous email floating around Canberra this week.

Back to the brand less jumper. The colourful characters selling them had a pricing rule - always one third of the retail price of the branded product. They were honourable people in a dishonourable sort of way and I learned an early lesson on the value of brands.

Later in my advertising career I learned that a brand can be the most important thing for a company’s fortunes. Quite simply, if people believe in your brand they will pay more for it.

My early learning experiences from the blokes in the pub were occasionally interrupted by their sudden episodes of sabbatical leave for 12 to 18 months but they would always return with their low price brand less merchandise. It’s hard to give up a steady job - unless of course it is for life.

Brands are always under attack but usually because the owners don’t support them. A downturn like the present might seem a good reason to ease off but history shows it is best to keep supporting your brand. If you turn your back on your brand someone will fill the space.

The current trend is the growth of the “house” brands which are now mostly of comparable quality to the real thing. Many people think they are the real thing. Coles, and my good friends at our client Woollies are showing the way, along with others.

Recent research says that purchasers of house brands continue to grow with 40% of people buying more house brands than a year ago.

And there is plenty out there with Woollie’s “Select” having 1300 products in 60 categories.

The great David Ogilvy, the master of brands, would turn in his grave. He built and protected brands through great advertising. He had many imitators but few equals. Always the master with the wise word I still keep his quote “If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.”

My colourful mates in the pub at Port Melbourne probably didn’t realise that they had started a new trend in retailing. They knew they were marketing house brands alright, but in their case it was always from someone else’s house.

Do What You Cannes To Tighten The Belt

Excess baggage is the blight of air travel. You know the problems: it costs you an arm and a leg, you have to go and stand in another queue, your partner shouts at you for buying too many books and if you are as heavy as I used to be, you worry each time you go to the airport that you will be charged extra just for being yourself.

Robbo once had to pay the EB fee to get himself aboard a flight back from East Timor – he was a big boy on a small plane from the land of little people.

Excess baggage is also a problem for big companies. Some have made it redundant by cutting out the travel itself.

We are all trying to loose excess baggage - even Government claims to be doing that. The Opposition did their bit earlier this week.

In my case I have lost 42 kilos of excess baggage in the last 6 months but more about that in another column when I know Wilcox, the cartoonist, is on holidays.

But travel hasn’t entirely come to halt. Ten Australian advertising executives are jetting off to Cannes this weekend to judge the Cannes Lions Awards. These are the industry’s world awards to show how good you are at winning awards.

The dilemma we all have, including Louise who knows the name of every town in provincial France, is “how do you pronounce it”? Is it CARN, as in “carn the blues”, which is what people say who still wear corduroy jackets and listen to Philip Adams on Radio National.

The other camp pronounces it CANS, but we all know that they don’t what they are talking about.

The media section judge from Australia is Henry Tajer of Universal McCann (not McCarn) who I think sees himself as a bit of a young lion anyway. Tajer’s company won an award last year for the campaign for Meat (carne in neighbouring Spain of course) and Livestock. Henry must have thought that this would have been a monty to bring home the bacon but not necessarily so. Winning international awards doesn’t always guarantee success in the real world - Tajer’s company dropped 21% in billings last year – no bull.

With that in mind the agencies of the world seem to have got the message that staying home is a good thing. Campaign submissions this year are down 20% from the last year to 22,000 and the drop of delegates getting the excess baggage story on the way home is a crushing 40%. Traditional media categories took the biggest hits. Press entries are down 32%, film entries dropped by 25% and outdoor entries minus 23%. Promotion and Design entries increased as advertisers put more weight into this type of work.

The ten Australian judges might look a bit conspicuous given the size of our industry beside the giant US Ad sector that is15 times bigger than us with just 27 judges. Seems that the champions of free enterprise are taking over government to surprising new lengths.

Charlie has been predicting for a while that we are at the beginning of an upturn in the advertising business in Australia.

So being away from the office chewing the fat on the French Riviera might not be such a good look to the client’s back home. Louise thinks that my worrying about Australian judges at the Cannes LIONS might be a bit of paranoia and sour grapes. I have been invited a few times over the years but never thought I would look good bathers along side the industry big wigs – but if I keep shedding the excess, who knows!

Free To Air TV Tries To Be Individual

When I was growing up the only people who had tattoos were those who has been in the navy or in gaol. It was a very male thing that was frowned upon by parents. So was going to jail, although being a sailor was seen as a good thing.

It was the early sixties and memories of heroic returned servicemen were still vivid.

Well, all that has changed.

Now having a tattoo is the new black. Everyone has got one and not just on their arms.

Wilcox, who does our clever cartoons, tells me that people have them all over their bodies. Although how a cartoonist knows that is still a mystery to me.

The women are really into it. Laura Bingle, the model famous for the Australia Tourism campaign, has just got one, but, “where the bloody hell is it”? I don’t know.

Lachlan Murdoch has one.

And it’s no surprise that Barry Hall, the Sydney Swan’s strong man, has got one too. He seemed to get overly agitated during last weekend’s game against Hawthorn. I suspect that the Hawk’s Jarryd Roughead go him going be saying“Hello sailor” or something like that.

What are these tattoos all about?

The answer lies in what is currently being played out in the media. People want to be individual in every way. The tattoo says “I am unique, there is no one else like me”.

The way people express themselves and what media they absorb are all important in the new world. The big threat to the free to air networks in the future is Foxtel. Free to air has always been about mass media and relatively limited choice - the choice that the networks have made for you.

For more than 40 years this worked as people watched more than three hours each day but the new tattoo mad viewers have a different view in this digital age. They want a choice even if it is something that others want also. So Foxtel , with it’s 100 plus channels is the danger to the networks. Always has been. With its 50% ownership by Telstra it is no surprise to see Kerry Stokes creeping up the share register. The networks are fighting back with extra digital channels. Ten has kicked it off with a sports channel. The ABC has news and kids channels and SBS an extra channel.

The challenge for all networks is to be different and that’s not easy or cheap to do. And the battle is personal too as Kim Williams, the chief of Foxtel, is no pushover. I wonder if Kim has a tattoo.

Louise tells me she was going to get a tattoo but wimped out when she was told that they hurt. She did tell me that the tattooists are also doing a roaring trade at the moment having tattoos removed.

That’s the other thing about being an individual, you reserve the right to change your mind, but it hurts.

Or as James Thurber said "Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everyone else"

Lamborghini Led Recovery

This column is about Generation Y. The people we love to hate. Marketers are always talking about them.

Just so there is no confusion, I asked Charlie to define Generation Y. “Easy” he said. “They are aged between 18 and 30”. And marketers aren’t the only ones to conveniently tag groups of people. The new Government was elected to help the folk they identified as “Working Families”.

We haven’t heard too much about them recently. I can only assume that whatever problems they had 18 months ago have been overtaken by the global financial crisis - either that or they are in hiding from swine flu.

Louise, who knows everything, tells me that the mob we used to call the “John Howard battlers” are the same people as Kevin Rudd’s working families. It can get a bit confusing and for that we can blame Sir Robert Menzies. He started it all in 1942 when he invented “the forgotten people”.

In simple terms they are all talking about the great Australian middle class.

But back to generation Y. Charlie tells me that they make up a quarter of the adult population - around 4 million of them!

These are the people who have been changing their job every two years and it is really annoying their bosses.

But they are also the most educated in history and they are confident to the point of being cocky.

Researcher Bernard Salt says, “this is a very switched on group”.

A plethora of studies tell us that they don’t read newspapers, they don’t have mortgages because they still live at home, they don’t pay rent, or board as we used to call it, and they don’t think about superannuation like the rest of us.

We have made them the best educated ever. They have been brought up carefully and constantly told by their parents how good they are.

They can’t remember the downturn of the early 90’s and they have never really had to worry about anything.

But times are about to change and that might not be such a bad thing.

Mike Conaghan the CEO of John Singleton’s old company STW Group thinks that time is up for the Gen Y people.

(By the way, Conaghan is doing a good job at Singo’s old haunt but its not easy keeping to costs down when you inherit the job from a bloke who used to drive a Roller)

Conaghan has obviously had enough of the “moving every two year type” and thinks that the time has come for a wake up call. And I suspect, he intends not to employ as many of this cocky group in the future. As a boss he is not alone.

But let’s not give up on them just yet.

It’s quite a dilemma for Australia as Gen Y will be the engine room for future growth and we need them to be working twice as hard and loving the job rather than telling the boss that they are lucky to know them. But why am I writing this when they don’t read the papers?

Perhaps there is a Mum and Dad out there known as Generation X who could tell their off spring that it’s really time to go to work and stay there. Perhaps they could tell them that their country needs them.

You see, there’s a thronging mass of more loyal, smarter and harder working people just around the corner - Generation Z. The Gen Y’s need to change their ways or their next boss will be a younger and smarter kid from the Western Suburbs.

To Survive These Times Look To The Rabbits

Never waste a crisis.

It works for everyone who is game enough to try it. Just ask the rabbits. The last census of rabbits put their numbers at around 150 million.

Nothing we have even done has been able to wipe them out.

My good friend Louise who knows about these things, but poor thing lives in the city, said to me the other day “Rabbits, I thought we wiped them out in the 50’s with that Myxo stuff ”.

Well we thought we did Louise. Scientists invented Myxomatosis to eradicate them from the landscape. A crisis for the rabbits!

They were all supposed to die, but they didn’t. They worked out how to overcome the threat - the bigger and better rabbits survived to breed on, and on, and on.

During the next fifty years we tried to wipe them out with new scientific discoveries. After Myxo in the ‘50’s there was the Calicivirus in the 90’s not to mention a century of shooting, bating, ferreting, trapping and of course the rabbit proof fence. All useless.

The latest I heard this week was that in the suburbs of Canberra at the foot of Mt Ainslie they have created a new crisis for the rabbits (and the residents) by gassing them in their burrows with phosphine gas. They obviously haven’t heard of ferrets which would do the same thing but much cheaper. Killing off families of rabbits - I wonder where Senator Fielding stands on this one.

Each time there has been crisis for the rabbits they have survived and continued breeding. But why am I telling you about the rabbits? It’s because the world is in the biggest financial crisis in 80 years and the rabbits can teach us something. The rabbits that were the strongest and the smartest survived to be bigger rabbits than ever before. This column is about marketing and the media and so it is the brands and services that build and grow now when media rates are lower and their competitors down and out, that lay the base for the better times ahead, as Charlie told us last week in this column.

Look at what people like Woolworths are doing and you will see how it works.

Elsewhere, the AFL is planning moves into foreign lands for them like the western suburbs of Sydney: classical anti cyclical strategy that will be a winner.

The big four Australian banks are on the march doing the same thing turning this crisis into an opportunity. So is Kerry Stokes and the Seven Network. And the list goes on.

I built our business in the mid seventies out of the world oil crisis, galloping inflation and troubles everywhere. Gough had just been sacked, the country was in crisis and confidence was rock bottom – I must have been mad. But in fact what was happening was advertising agency cutbacks aimed at our competitors at the time and they weren’t looking for any new competitors like us.

Politically John Howard has us shown how to turn a crisis into a victory on a number of occasions. Twice leader of the Liberals and twice dropped, he fought back and became PM. And then he was confronted with the massacre of Port Arthur. It was that crisis that brought him the admiration of the Australian people that hadn’t wanted to know him for the 20 years before.

George Bush was getting nowhere as President in 2001as September 11 arrived: a crisis to be embraced and it was the making of is Presidency.

So think of your own circumstances because this is one of the best times to build for the future. And if there needed to be a final word on the subject, just look at South Sydney - the Rabbitohs on 14 March this year had their best win in 29 years.

Its not over but the end is beginning.

So, I said to my mate Charlie “What’s going to happen with this economy?”

We all get forecasts but we don’t all have my good friend Charlie Nelson.

Why should I be telling you this?

Well, in early 2007 I knew we would have a downturn in the next 18 months. I didn’t pick a full blown global financial crisis but I knew something had to happen. We had been riding high too long in too many ways.

So we set up our life and our business up to weather a storm.

And, the storm came.

In November last year we forecast that the $10 billion financial stimulus would see 80% going into savings and only 20 % being spent. And so it happened. And again we made the correct call.

Charlie has been helping me pick trends for more than ten years and I haven’t seen him get it wrong yet. So when he told me on Monday this week that there is the beginning of a strong recovery I started to feel better about life.

I have been through four downturns in my 40 plus years in business and I have learned two things. One, they start and two, they finish. That’s the easy bit. The hard thing is to pick the dates. We have a world full of experts telling us what will happen. The IMF is now forecasting a long downturn. Well, the IMF didn’t see this downturn coming, so I don’t know what would make us believe they know where it’s going.

The latest book about Warren Buffett was a big seller all around the world as people looked to the wisdom of the world’s richest investor. The question we all wanted to know was how did he do it? So I read the book like everybody else. And it seems that what he does is simple. He buys shares and keeps them for fifty years. But who can wait that long for recovery?

I have always thought that spending in advertising industry is a good way of reading the tea leaves of the economy. So when Stuart Mitchell, the CEO of our company, told me that the February just past was a shocker but on the improve, I knew that we had bottomed out and that we were on the way up.

When I sat down with my mate Charlie this week, he said that there has been a strong recovery of willingness to spend which suggests that a pick up in consumer spending growth is on the way. I have no doubt that we are starting to see our way out of this downturn.

This $42 billion Government package is a large figure and this time at least 30% of it will be spent. Putting aside falling petrol prices just look at the interest payment bill that was running at 15.2% of household spending in the June quarter last year. By this June will be 10.7%. That’s an extra $35 billion available in family budgets.

So whilst we have had booms and busts since 1788 and while we think they will never end when we are in the middle of them, our forecast is simple. The worst of the fall is over and we are on the way up again. And for every household that’s very good news.

Of course there will be bumps along the way out of this and like every downturn there are still plenty of bruises that have to work there way out of the system. Its not over but the end is beginning.

I’m betting that my man Charlie has picked another winner!

Nice Try But Blowing the Whistle on Grog Won't Work

No thanks – I don’t drink. I have been saying this to waiters and hosts for more than 40 years, knowing that alcohol and me don’t mix.

But that’s just me. To 95% of the community alcohol is a good part of life, and good luck to them.

It’s hard not to be emotional about grog, as the first fleeters called it when they arrived here with alcohol more than 200 years ago.

The facts are that alcohol is part of our society, and of course for the past 60 or 70 years an important commercial consideration. It is a great contributor of tax to Governments and an employer of hundreds and thousands of people. And of course its use is perfectly legal.

But all that we know.

Now it’s about to come to the forefront again. The Federal Government plans to bring before the senate the “alcopops” legislation again in an effort to reduce binge drinking.

I am for anything that reduces binge drinking, so I think that it is worth giving it a go.

Presumably Turnbull and his mates will vote against it although I don’t know why, which will again leave it to the Family First Senator Steve Fielding who last time around wanted to do a deal and trade his vote to get alcohol sponsorship out of sport.

It’s a dilemma in two ways.

First, taking alcohol out of sports will make absolutely no difference to the pattern of how much people drink.

Secondly, the major sports will be left in an extremely difficult position because they have a belief from the highest levels of Government that there would be no move against alcohol in sport sponsorship. This would be a retraction of that undertaking.

But the stakes are high and perhaps the Government believes they have to give in to the Senator and his crazy ideas.

Alcohol contribution to the sponsorship of sport now covers the complete range. It’s not just the blokey rugby league but also the gentile world of tennis, the highly successful family orientated AFL and our great Australian cricket, and everything else.

The sponsorship dollars that support sport are in the hundreds of millions. Not to have it would be a disaster. But more importantly, banning alcohol sponsorship would make absolutely no difference to any perceived alcohol problem.

I hope the good Senator does a bit more research and changes his mind.

If Senator Fielding thinks that banning alcohol sponsorship in sport will have a major impact of messages to youth then he should think again.

I quote from a 2003 US report.

"The Centre on Alcohol Marketing and Youth's own research has demonstrated that overall alcohol advertising on televised sports programming in 2003 was more likely to be seen by adults than youth: youth make up 13.3% of the national television viewing population but on average only 9.1% of the audience for televised sports with alcohol advertising.⁵ In most cases the youth share of the audience for this advertising was lower than the proportion of youth in the television viewing population.

The situation is much the same in Australia.

Despite Senator Fielding's good intentions, it is highly improbable that isolating sports coverage will serve his ends whatever they may be.

And with Anzac Day approaching General Cosgrove talks about his mates in a VB commercial that is on air now. Should we ban the General as well?

If I was to talk to the Senator I would tell him of two people that I know who spent their whole life troubled by alcohol and were in fact alcoholics. They would have hardly watched any sport in their life. Sport had nothing to do with their drinking.

Sadly, they both died in the last year and I paid for their funerals, as I should.

You see Senator one was my younger brother and the other one my mother.

Senator, before you blow up sport for the ordinary person, give me a call.