You can now purchase on line Harold's recently released autobiography "Living Large - the world of Harold Mitchell - from sawmiller's son to multi million dollar man"
http://catalogue.mup.com.au/978-0-522-85657-6.html
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The Good Old Days Now
School reunions can be great. But they can also be a big wake up call to the fact that we’re getting older and that perhaps the good old days have gone forever.
After my last reunion, where we counted how many old school mates were no longer with us, I – like most of the others – went on a diet and did some more walking to try hold back time.
But the old-fashioned values of the good old days don’t always seem to be quite as important any more. Our old pal Charlie has produced some excellent research that shows that these tougher economic times have sent us back to relying on the things that have always been important. In tough times we look for comfortable safe havens.
So staying home is in fashion again along with DVD sales and fish and chips. And we didn’t cancel the Foxtel in the family budget cutting, although the news this week from the Government is that it looks like Foxtel got canceled from its Telstra ownership, but that’s a story for another day.
Attendance at church has also held up, even if we are going to the newer churches.
Louise always has a running commentary on life and she was telling me in her role as an arts aficionado that she was recently at a sell-out concert by James Morrison accompanied by one of our great symphony orchestras. James performed a new work written especially for him to a standing ovation. He then brought the house down at the after party with a scintillating trumpet solo of the timeless standard “The
All the marketing people reading this column know how important it is to be innovative and up with the latest.
In fact, if you don’t throw out the old stuff and come up with something new, you’re seen as being a bit of dinosaur.
I think we might have misread people a bit about the things they hold dear to them. This week in
So Louise says to me, “what has advertising learnt from all this back-to-the-past stuff”?
I always like to defend my colleagues, so I trotted out examples of some clever campaigns that were really good and are still going - ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’, ‘Is Don is Good’ and ‘I’m Loving It’ from McDonalds.
That defends advertising people I thought, until Charlie reminded me of a meeting he attended years ago with a young advertising agency executive. Wanting to show how clever and modern he was, he questioned the group by asking if they couldn’t come up with a better line than the one that they’d been using - ‘Oh what a feeling’?
Just as well they didn’t throw that out.
http://haroldcharlesmitchell.blogspot.com
Apple Isle - Again
TASMANIAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Thursday September 20
I am here tonight to put to you a very simple proposition -
And I am going one step further –
Our people are our greatest asset in this incredible country - you can start at the bottom and finish at the top. And that is going to continue to make us as good, if not better, than country in the world. This is the Australian way, this is the people that we are - trusting and helping of each other and determined to succeed for ourselves, our families and our communities.
Wave after wave of migration has filled this country with people who have very powerful motivations to make their life, and more importantly their children’s lives, better than it was before. We are a combination of people from over 200 countries and still less than 250 years old by one measure and 60,000 by another. We are one nation – and that is a huge advantage in a world where so often, what passes for a nation, is a deeply divided, unjust and corrupt society.
And our sense of justice is at the heart of our cultural make up. The idea of a “fair go” has imbued and inspired generation after generation and given enormous strength to our most defining and unifying characteristic – our rare and priceless democracy.
No matter how self critical we might be, no matter how much we might be, from time to time, the “knockers” of our own self generated folk lore, no matter how many tall poppies we might have a go at, in the end we are an informal and fair-minded people by world standards with few serious divisions and a real belief the democracy and rule of law.
In addition to our people, our geography is also one of our great assets.
We are in the 6 hour Asian time zone which will be the engine room of economic and cultural development for the next 50 years.
This region will become a much bigger economy that the
Add to this the fact that we have vast open regional areas that are environmentally clean by world standards.
So to put it simply – any place where you can drink the water, not get mugged going to work and don’t have to bribe people to get what is rightfully yours is light years ahead of most of the rest of the world.
But we do face real challenges.
In 2003 I gave the Andrew Ollie lecture in
1. Poorer employment prospects
2. A poorer education system.
3. A housing and land crisis in the major cities
4. Major water and environmental problems
5. and a collapsing health system
We simply can’t go on having 70 % of our population crowding into a handful of eastern seaboard cities.
We can’t just rely on digging up raw natural resources and shipping them to other parts of the world. And, as well all know, the days of “riding on the sheep’s back” are over for ever.
But all challenges exist to be overcome.
True progress that can realise and sustain the hopes and dreams we have for the future must use our natural advantages to solve the challenges that present themselves
Let me bring this together now – first for
Transport and communications was what opened up
Broadband is the new road, rail and phone system in one tiny cable.
I come from the world of advertising and marketing. Let me tell you a few things about my world which is going to affect yours in a very big way.
From the beginning of my career, TV has been the major force in the advertising industry but that is now changing rapidly.
We spend 8 hours asleep, 8 hours working and 8 hours with the media.
For the past 40 years, our 8 hours with the media was dominated by TV which changed everything about our lives – our tastes, our news, our products, our sense of our selves and our economic, social and cultural opportunities.
Now, as we enter the digital age, this 8 hour contact time with the media is going to change again and range radically. It will produce change and opportunity that we can’t fully imagine today.
If we are not smart in this instantly global environment we will have no chance of building a better future for our kids and their kids – we will have no chance of meeting the challenges I listed in the Andrew Ollie lecture six years ago.
The digital world is no sci fi dream or romance. It is here now.
Right now, 14% of advertising is on-line – bigger than magazines and radio. Within just 8 years it will grow to 25% and that will come from TV and Newspapers. Already the classifieds have gone to the internet.
As I said to a publishing group earlier this week, if you don’t get the digital age then leave the building, leave the city, leave the planet.
We are fortunate that the Federal Government has seen the potential and the necessity for
This brand new era for Australian is about to have its dawn right here in Tasmania – Tasmania has been delivered first mover advantage in the biggest economic, social and cultural revolution to hit Australia since the first bullock track from Melbourne to Sydney became a dirt road and the first Morse messages were tapped out from Adelaide to Darwin.
I am sure that the powers that be in all sectors in
You are about to become the high tech hotspot of the South Pacific and your well honed sense of isolation is about to be blown away.
You are about to become a magnet for people and businesses wanting to deal with the world via the internet – and who doesn’t – only the neo dinosaurs and neo luddites whose inevitable extinction is much closer than they realise.
History has shown us that when the conditions that inspire opportunity exist, entrepreneurial people flock to particular cities and regions and transform them.
J S Bach’s musical genius transformed the tiny city of
In the 13 century Angkor in
In the 21st century, this new digital world that we are inextricably part of, breaks down the barriers of time and space – “the old tyranny of distance” if you like, that we have been so fond of using as an excuse for not engaging with the rest of the world.
Regional areas all over the world have the potential to come into their own in the digital age. Look what has happened in the
And you in Tasmania are already underway – you had the first digital only commercial TV network in the country and you have the very best example in Australia of creative young minds using the internet and ploughing both their revenue and their intellectual capital into this community - its Mona - David Walsh’s multi million dollar Museum of Old and New Art – Australia’s largest privately owned and funded museum. And this is just the beginning.
It’s important to remember that this revolution, which will begin here, is not just about “business” in that far too limited sense of the word. It will stimulate all sectors of
As American economist Richard Florida says “in today's idea-driven economy, it's time costs that really matter. With the constant pressure to be more efficient and to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So the most efficient and productive regions are the ones in which people are thinking and working – not sitting in traffic."
He goes on to say
“Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steelmaking.”
This is your future – make the most of it – for your children’s sake – and their children’s sake.
And while we are thinking about our children and our grandchildren and their capacity to be creative and prosperous into the future, listen carefully to this quote and see if you can tell me who said it
As tools for learning, the arts and humanities have a positive impact on our children's cognitive development, their confidence, and their motivation. As we face the challenges of a new era, the arts and humanities will be vital to a future of innovation, opportunity and hope.
--George W. Bush, President of the
The most conservative American President in living memory was not a natural ally of the so called “soft” education options and the touchy feelies of the arts world.
What hard headed conservative George Bush knew and was that innovation from information and communications technology is the biggest single driver of business productivity.
It has been estimated that it drives around 80% of productivity gains in the service and manufacturing sectors.
George also knew that American civilization depends on the civilising forces of creativity and the arts and humanities just as much as the sciences and our abilities to effectively and productively organise ourselves.
The same is true for the entire world – including
I can see some of you flinch.
But who would have thought that this old rejected slogan and image would be reborn as one of the most potent brand names in this brand new world.
So nurture this new specie of apples and it will become it will become one of the powerful brain foods on earth. It will make everything in
Good luck to you first movers – make the most of it.
Gear Up and Peddle Faster
Some of the regular readers to this column think that there is no such thing as over-gearing. And you may be surprised to hear that our Charlie, the conservative realist, thinks this way too.
I can already see that you’re thinking we’re talking about business and the economy when we talk about over-gearing. But not Charlie. He’s recalling life as a seven year-old in the 50s he got his first second-hand single sprocket pushbike. It cost his parents 10 shillings – a lot of money in those days. The big movement to gearing came in his twelfth year when he took possession of a brand new three-speed Malvern Star with head and tail lights. At that point he became totally hooked on gearing. His capacity to take on the steep hills and the long slow climbs with a single sprocket was destroyed forever and now, at a much more mature age, he heads off each Sunday morning in his lime green Lycra with the latest twenty four gear, yes, twenty four gear Shogun. He knows he is over geared because he only uses seven of the twenty four but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Louise on the other hand, has always gone out on a Sunday on her tandem bike with partner, Max. Remember the tandem? The one at the back was always pedalling harder than the leader. That’s the trouble, of course, with joint ventures or partnerships. One is always working harder than the other, and it’s rarely the one who is up front.
So its true – our childhood experiences with our bikes is important preparation for our business life. It’s easy to borrow and get over-geared and the more you do, the harder it is to pay back and the more impossible it becomes to get back to where you started. And as for the joint ventures, forget it.
Our media owners have had a fair go at the gearing too. It works if it means you can go faster, just like a bike. Kerry Stokes seems to have worked it out pretty well, but the private equity funds that own the major parts of our media are finding it harder. Some advertisers are faced with the same problems, although advertising here in
But if you are in a position to expand, this is the time to do it. History has proven that advertising in a downtime can be effective. Advertisers that kept up their activity in the 1920s and 30s through the great downturn are still with us today. In the
In 1991, in the midst of the last recession, Barclay Card was the second-largest credit card brand. The market was dominated by Access Card. During the recession, Barclay Card doubled its ad spend to launch a long-running campaign featuring Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling secret agent. Within three years, it was the number one credit card brand. Within 10 years Access Card no longer existed.
Gearing is good as long as it makes you go faster.
Harold Mitchell http://haroldcharlesmitchell.blogspot.com
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