Interesting to spot this link. When I started Autocade in 2008, I approached Haymarket, letting them know I was a Classic and Sportscar reader since it began in the 1980s, and I was inspired by the Sedgwick guides that it ran then. Autocade was to be an online cyclopĂŚdia that would use a brief format, with original research, of course, but I would welcome the input of C&SC if it so wished.
As I recall, the response from the boss was condescending. His staff were so busy there was no way they could ever contribute to such a venture, he told me. That was before the threat: if any part of the Sedgwick guides wound up in Autocade, there would be a lawsuit.
All this in a single reply, to someone who told him he was a customer since 1983.
This link illustrates that the first part of his response was complete bollocks, as the guide now exists online, and has done so for nearly three years. In fact, C&SC solicits input from the public. They have taken the Autocade approach.
And seriously, did he think another publisher would be stupid enough to reproduce the guides online for all to see?
No, Haymarket has not broken the law: anyone is free to do a guide with their own, original content, and they are free to solicit outside help.
Nor do I particularly mind seeing this guide online (right down to the ‘most recently updated’ column) because it helps with researchâanything is better than the inaccuracies, assumptions and rumours that pass for facts in Wikipedia. There’s only a tiny bit of overlap with Autocade in terms of the eras covered, so the two sites complement one another.
But it smacks of gross hypocrisy.
Not only are they doing something they said they would never do because they lacked the resources, they threatened a loyal customer when they had no basis to do so.
In essence: Haymarket Publishing once threatened me with a lawsuit for proposing an idea, one which they have since adopted. Yes, it really is that simple.
I lost a lot of respect for a certain Haymarket big-wig that day, someone whose work I had read and admired for decades. Itâs surprising to think he hadnât learned some basic rules in business.
Brands are not steered by market dominance or big corporate mouths. They are, instead, steered by everyday people, who you should work with, rather than make unwarranted threats against.
Oh, after reassuring the chap that Autocade would have only original content (after all, he may have not known that New Zealanders are generally law-abiding), I never received an apology for his unprofessional behaviour.
Even a note of thanks now would be nice for borrowing an idea they were presented with five years ago.
Archive for November 2013
Business etiquette 101: don’t threaten lawsuits against a customer proposing an idea which you later adopt
30.11.2013Tags: 2008, Autocade, branding, business, cars, customer service, Haymarket, JY&A Media, law, media, New Zealand, publishing, UK
Posted in branding, business, cars, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, UK | 3 Comments »
Google continues to blacklist innocent site, seven months after its owners cleaned it
22.11.2013Seven months after Google blacklisted our websites over false allegations of malware, I can say that the traffic to some has not recovered. And to prove that Google continues to publish libel based on its highly dubious systems, here are two screen shots from my browser tonight, which I saw when trying to access bjskosherbaskets.com, the site that hackers linked to back in April, where they placed some malware.
I’ve noted here that we were hacked back in April, and we fixed everything within hours. But good luck getting off Google’s blacklists. They claim six to seven hours, whereas our experience was six to seven days. (No surprise: it took Google four years to remove my private data from Adsense, while my dispute with them over retained Blogger data, which they promised to delete in 2010, is ongoing. Things happen very slowly in California.)
Bjskosherbaskets.com, meanwhile, is finding that seven months, not seven days, are still not enough to get off a Google blacklist.
Browsers will block the site based on Google’s claims. Yet when you read why Google has blocked it, there is no reason: even the big G says the website is clean, and free from malware. It says, rightly, that it detected some more than 90 days ago, but there isn’t any now.
The question is: why does Google continue to ruin the reputation of a website whose owners have, like us, done everything they could to remedy a situation? And why is libel permissible?
There are just too many breaches of ethics by this company, yet it beggars belief that it still ranks as the number-one website in the world.
At the very least, internet security companies need to stop relying on Google, whose systems are faulty, and who dedicates the grand total of two part-timers to the task of malware detection.
Tags: California, defamation, ethics, Google, law, libel, technology, USA
Posted in business, internet, publishing, technology, USA | 5 Comments »
Let’s improve on the Wellington logo
07.11.2013The city’s new logoâit is not a rebrand if the underlying tenets are the sameâhas not met with much support.
The next question must be: all right, if we’re all so smart, can we do better?
Ian Apperley and I think we can. Ian approached me yesterday morning to ask whether we should do a competition and open it up to all Wellingtonians.
At least that addresses the criticisms about getting people involved, and ensuring the internal audienceâthat’s usâis engaged.
But to kick it off, we can’t just come up with another logo. I think we need to think seriously about how we might replace the 22-year-old Absolutely Positively Wellington brand (in the widest sense of that word).
And here’s a head-start to make life easier: a discussion document with some Wellingtonians’ opinions on where the brand could go. In November 2010, I called a meeting with Hilary Beaton, Brian Calhoun, Nick Kapica, Christopher Lipscombe and Mayor Celia Wade-Brown to discuss the ideas about rebranding our city. (In other words, the fact that a city rebrand was of concern to Wellingtonians prior to the Massey UniversityâThe Dominion Post mayoral debate was foreseen by yours truly.)
The document was not released due to busy-ness at the end of 2010, then, the need to seek permission from the participants (which took a little while to secure). All have agreed that it can be released to the public.
I didn’t want to use it as something to do with my campaign when it belonged to everyone. With the discussion around a city brand arising again, this seems as good a time as any.
You can largely ignore the minutes of the discussion itself and go on to p. 6. In there, we felt that the Wellington brand should include these ideas, but stopped short at offering a concrete slogan.
Edge. The notion of âedgeâ came from this first part. Coastal cycleways are on the edge of the city, literally. Biodiversity is celebrated as an âedgyâ concept. Cutting-edge is a concept Wellingtonians can relate to. The Sevens are edgy as a concept; as is concentrated diversity.
Connections to science and technology. Following Brisbaneâs example, Wellington already has research institutes that can help with R&D in the city.
Empowerment. Other ideas that surfaced from the discussion of a producer culture led to the notion of empowering individuals, which could relate not just to technology, but simpler ideas of growing fruit trees in public gardens, or poetry readings when meeting together.
Encourage diversity. The carrot is better than the stick. Ideas of tolerance, and showing a better way need to be promoted.
Nimble. Wellington can move quickly thanks to size and innovation.
Contests. The idea of competition needs to be built in to the Wellington brand, as discussed above.
Youth. Get young people involved and allow them ownership.
Economic drivers. We identified the beauty of the city, diversity, public spaces, technology and the arts as important drivers for Wellington.
The waterfront. It is a public space that is at the core of much of Wellingtonâs beauty and is a driver of creativity.
Creative locations. Already Downstage is becoming an incubator for productions, allowing producers to retain their IPâa shift in how theatres could be managed, and totally in line with a creative city. This shift answers how we work today. What if it extended incubation to designers and other creatives?
The weightless economy. Design, IP, and related services can help raise New Zealandâs OECD rankings and can overcome the âtyranny of distanceâ. Royalty-based products, such as Apollo 13 and others, paint a way forward.
Ownership and shifting to an individual culture. By providing ownership of ideas, Wellington can shift to a more individualistic culture, rather than the team one that tends to hold entrepreneurship back.
A competition page for submitting your ideas can be found here.
Tags: 2010, 2013, Aotearoa, branding, destination branding, New Zealand, rebranding, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in branding, culture, design, general, internet, New Zealand, Wellington | 3 Comments »
Absolutely Positively Wellington’s new logo: where’s the plus side?
07.11.2013The below was written on the 4th inst., the morning of the release of Absolutely Positively Wellington’s “plus sign” logo, and ran on Scoop, where I am told it is one of the most liked for the Wellington section. As it is to do with branding, I have republished it in full here. (The parody image was done separately.)
As I learned of the story first through a story by Katie Chapman in The Dominion Post, out of courtesy, I sent the below to her initially, some hours before Scoop, where it was picked up as an opâed. As the only mayoral candidate with a master’s degree in the area, and as an author, and as an editorial board member on the Journal of Brand Management, I might be one of the better qualified people to discuss the topic. I might also have been the first to write about destination branding as a discipline in this country. A city rebrand was also among the topics I discussed regularly during the debating season during the 2013 campaign, and I first raised it at The Dominion PostâMassey University debate in September. (It turns out I also blogged about it in 2010.)
Let’s just say it was a topic that concerned meâas well as many other Wellingtonians, including councillors who began digging and found out the plus sign cost us NZ$25,000. So on Monday morning, I put pen to paper (figuratively). Other than Scoopâs publication, I was interviewed on Newstalk ZB about my thoughts.
Incidentally, Edinburgh has a particularly good destination brand for a capital city.
Iâm fairly certain that when Wellingtonians identified that our city needed a new brand, the one shown today in The Dominion Post isnât what they had in mind.
It doesnât matter whether you are branding for a company or a city, the biggest rule is: get your internal audience on side first.
In the case of a city, that internal audience is the people of Wellington.
And there seems to be less excuse for not engaging citizens in the age of social media.
Of course, if everyone were engaged, then the status quo tends to be preserved. People tend not to like change, even when they say they want change. However, the logic is that at least the cityâs opinion leaders must be involved in a rebranding process.
Maybe they were. Although if they were, it doesnât come through.
First up, as I said in my election campaign, this is a 22-year-old brand.
Today, it remains so.
It may have had touch-ups over the years, mostly typographicallyâmoving from typefaces like Perpetua and Baskerville under Mayors Wilde and Blumsky to an italicized FF Fago under Mayor Prendergast. But it reflects the aspirations of Wellington in 1991. What we saw today was the same brand, but a new logo. It comes across as a cosmetic alteration, applying lipstick to the bulldog.
Arguably, grouping the wording together into a single place is preferable to having it divided into three, with black and white bands. It would not be wrong to call the logo more âmodernâ in the formal sense of the word: it is reflective of modernism.
Ăsthetics will always be subjective, but there is a school of thought that a logo that can be easily replicated is a positive development. A plus sign is easily replicated, but then, thereâs the second rule of branding: differentiate.
The purpose of branding is to symbolize, differentiate and communicate.
The logo is original: while there are many with pluses (Google Plus, or our Plus One channels on Freeview), I canât think of any that are executed in this exact way with this colour scheme. But you get an underwhelming feeling since weâre the creative capital. A few more pluses would convey dynamism (although that has been done before, too)âas long as we stick with getting Wellingtonians on side first.
The brand itselfâAbsolutely Positively Wellingtonâdoesnât take into consideration those sectors that did not exist in Wellington in a major way, notably ICT. Maintaining it tells me that itâs more of the same. That message is backed up by the abolition of the portfolio within council.
It doesnât take into consideration the thoughts of any of our young people, who will be burdened with this as the cityâs brand in years to come. Those in their 20s might feel a familiarity with the term âAbsolutely Positively Wellingtonâ, but also a disconnect. They werenât consulted on where they see Wellington or what they aspire us to be.
The logo, therefore, reinforces the old brand. Comments on social media this morning highlight that: at the time of writing, I have yet to see a positive one.
They range from not knowing what the logo means to thoughts that it would be better applied to a church [one example shown at right].
That brings us to the third rule: tell the internal audience what it stands for before rolling it out to an external audience.
Yet this is all shrouded in mystery today.
Another point of interest is the logoâs removal from parking tickets. Itâs going to be reeled back from being a city brand to one that is applied in more formal marketing efforts. We go from the enviable position of having a city brand to a mere destination brand.
There is a subtle difference. A city brand is meant to unite the city, giving everyone who lives here a sense of pride. A destination brand is one aimed at marketing, the province of business and tourism agencies.
However, Iâd still like to see us all âownâ it because modern marketing sees citizens participate as much as organizations.
While I accept that thereâs a Resene deal that sees citizens being able to adopt the yellow ourselvesâwhich on paper is a fine ideaâwill the lack of earlier engagement encourage us to take it up?
So in the branding 101 handbook, there have been mistakes.
On the plus side, pun intended, Iâd be happier to see the yellow box in movie credits and on letterheads than its black-and-white predecessor. That was certainly unworkable in destination marketing and lacked appeal for years. One might say it has never had appeal.
Regardless of how negatively the Stuff reader poll puts the new logo, itâs not as bad as the Wellywood sign proposal.
I hope for our cityâs sake this works out and that stage two of the roll-outâwhere itâs sold to the rest of usâis far more convincing.
Tags: Aotearoa, branding, design, destination branding, Jack Yan, logo, media, modernism, New Zealand, rebranding, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in branding, business, design, marketing, New Zealand, Wellington | No Comments »
Explaining one of Dynamo’s card tricks, possibly
07.11.2013An interesting video from our friends at ITN, featuring magician Dynamo, who releases the third season of his Magician Impossible series on DVD.
Other than the sleight of hand, I’m guessing that there are two jacks with his signature, because he can duplicate that. The journalist is never given her own card to bite: Dynamo has the eight of diamonds all along.
As to some of the other illusions, no, I haven’t figured them out. Why is this here and not on my Tumblr, where I post most of my mindless stuff? The video embed code is for our company sites and I can stretch that a little here.
We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.
Tags: Amazon, celebrity, ITN, TV, UK
Posted in TV, UK | No Comments »