Next week officially marks my completion of two whole years in the advertising industry. Before this, I had spent half a decade in the world of corporates, before that small business for a short time, and before that, well, high school.

I've tried to keep a list of little observations I've made in my time working in advertising, and thought it an appropriate time to share them with the world. Rather than make one ludicrously long post about the topic, I'll split it into more digestible parts.

My first disclaimer to all this, is that none of this is meant to be mean-spirited or slander anybody, it's just thoughts and observations, many of which may be incorrect, or based on purely one point of view, so don't get all snarky if you get offended by any of it. So anyway, here goes.

1. Everybody wants to be the Apple of <insert industry name here>

One of the first trends I noticed when entering the exciting world of advertising, is that more or less every single client wants to be (or worse, thinks they are) the Apple of whatever industry they are in. I've now heard this said from a client in more or less every industry you can think of, and I can quite honestly say that I don't believe I've worked on a single company that is the Apple of anything. Sadly, in most cases, clients are unable to articulate exactly what it means to be the Apple of anything, thus it's usually just an analog for "we want to be successful, famous and adored".

Being successful, famous and adored is of course, perfectly fine. But the fact remains, that if you want to achieve those attributes in a manner even remotely resembling that of Apple, you've a lot of work to do before you get there, and chances are that your parity products, resistance to taking risk, and extensively complex and ill-definied product line up, all need work before you even start thinking about how the advertising portion of the problem should be solved.

At the end of the day, the only company I can think of that is "Apple-esque" in it's success would have to be Dyson. Everybody else needs to get into the "wanna be" line, not the "gunna be" line.

2. Everyday people don't know what Agency you work for, nor do they care

In my first week of working in the industry, I was absolutely overwhelmed with the amazing variety of advertising agencies that existed in Sydney alone. Most of them seem to either be initialisations/names of the founders (DDB, BBDO, Ogilvy, Saatchi's...) or some kind of completely random, and often silly sounding name (Three Drunk Monkeys, Host, The Campaign Palace, Tongue...). Regardless, it was amazing the amount of currency those in the industry placed on announcing the agencies they came-from/were going-to and the look on their face when you told them you didn't have the foggiest clue who "Droga5" was, or why it was in anyway relevant to you.

Now, obviously for those of us dedicating our lives to working in this industry and producing good, effective, creative work, those names are essentially badges of creativity, size, ability and achievement to be proud of and wear on our lapel. But what amazes me, is that so many in the industry don't seem to fathom, that the "every-day punter", the "normal guy" the "essentially anybody who doesn't work in advertising/marketing/media" (which, it should be noted, is a heck of a lot of people) don't know who any of these agencies are, and quite frankly, don't give two hoots who made the ad. They just remember whether they liked it, hated it, thought it was funny, or thought it was shit.

I guess it comes down to noticing the level of insularity in the industry. As most people will know, it's quite small (in Australia especially), and most people who don't work in it, don't really understand why we stay back late hours working on some sketches that will eventually become a television commercial, or how it is that staring at a blank page for an hour "thinking" about how you're going to word something is in fact an hour spent very productively. They don't understand that your two paragraphs of text on a website will be read by a million people, so it's vital to craft it just right. On the flip side, we shouldn't expect them to understand, after all, how much do you understand about how core banking infrastructure works?

3. Uhhh... whereabouts is HR?

Some agencies have a HR department, some have an HR Officer, some have neither. Any which way, what is apparent, is the "politically correct" corporate movements of the 90's seem to have entirely bypassed the advertising industry.

Now, I'm not a conservative right-wing nut or anything, but years spent in corporate taught me that somethings are "inappropriate" for office conversation and commentary. Not so much in advertising, more or less anything goes. Yes, there are a few lines here or there that shouldn't be crossed but overall it's an industry where people get away with more in one day than they would in a year of working corporate.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad or negative thing, after all most of it is done in jest and between people who've worked together for quite some time, but then again I'm not female (who seem to bear a lot more of the brunt of political incorrectness than any other specific group) so you'd have to ask them if they find any of it particularly offensive or crass.

4. A lot of people have never stepped foot in a corporate, let alone worked in one

I was amazed at the number of people who started their careers in advertising or marketing. I guess as I'd never considered it for a career myself I simply couldn't relate to beginning your working life inside an agency. But as a result of this, a lot of agency types have never ever worked on the inside of a big company (and by big, I mean a corporate, over 1,000 staff) and couldn't quite understand why "client-side" faces some of the challenges it does.

Agency land is so utterly different to corporate land that it's almost hard to imagine how you could possibly relate to the challenges of those who work in the big glass-and-steel high-rises, with it's seemingly infinite levels of management, it's bureaucracies and complex multi-departmental politics. Most agencies are split more or less in the same way, accounts, creatives, digital, planners, and studio (and/or digital production). To them, the thoughts of multiple teams working in a division of a department within a business unit is just foreign. So many moving parts of which you are just one semi-redundant gear. It's worlds away.

When you're in corporate land, working with 5,000 other people most of whom you will never ever meet, it's often hard for everybody to remember that you're all supposed to be working towards one common goal, especially when you're working in different functions and have differing sets of goals.

So, for all those agency peeps who've not ever worked in a corporate, all I ask is that you cut a bit of slack to your client-side brethren. Whilst you may think it's frustrating that you have to wait an extra day or two for that sign-off, your counterpart has to manage countless stakeholders, pander to inter-departmental politics, and many other hurdles, just to get your medium-rectangle banner signed off before 4pm on a Friday.

Okay, that's it for part one. More to come later in the week, and hopefully I haven't offended anybody in here. Feel free to leave a comment telling me how wrong you think I am, and that I'm a douchebag for making fun of your agencies name.

Cheers.

After buying my iPad over in the US, and spending time familiarising myself with the news apps from the likes of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, BBC and others, I'd become somewhat spoilt by all the different ways these so called "dinosaurs" of publishing could get me to read their news stories.

A week after I came home to Sydney, I heard all the hype about The Australian iPad app. The guys over at News Limited were determined to be the first Australian publisher to be out there with an iPad app, and they would only charge $4.99 per month for the privilege of reading their fine publication.

Well, now I've spent a few weeks with the app, I have to say, there is not a person alive I would recommend it to. Not for five bucks, not even if it were free. Allow me to explain why, using a few brief points, some pictures, and even offer you a (MUCH better) alternative.

Why The Australian iPad app is balls.

Reason 1: It's not "text" but rather a series of images"

So far as I can tell, and nobody has been able to indicate to me otherwise, the Oz's app doesn't actually bother to give you text to read like say, a website, or any other application. Instead, it renders everything as still images (PNG's from what I can deduce). Why, you might ask? BECAUSE YOU THIEVING PIECE OF CRAP, YOU MIGHT STEAL THEIR NEWS!

What other possible reason can there be for making a product, which is essentially based around giving you text to read, in a non-text format? God forbid you should be unhappy with the pre-determined text size due to your age, vision impairment, or just because you're sitting on the toilet and want to read the news from slightly afar. Because you know what, you can't. Not because the iPad doesn't let you (in fact, the iPad has a whole bunch of built in features to allow for text manipulation to make it easy for the elderly and those with poor eye-sight to read), but because The Australian is so incredibly paranoid that somebody might "copy and paste" the whole friggin newspaper, and pass it around to their friends, thereby robbing them of precious, precious revenue.

And if you happen to have a serious vision impairment, or perhaps happen to be blind? Well, in that case, the Australian would like to stick up it's middle finger at you, and tell you it doesn't give a shit about your money, because the built-in (and quite good) voice-over and text-to-speech functionality does not work one iota on The Australian's crippled iPad app. Why? Again, because it's all just a bunch of images.

Reason 2: Its interface designers seem to hate people

I've seen a lot of poor interfaces in my time, and I mean a LOT. But attempting to navigate through The Australian's iPad app makes me yearn for the early days of flashing lights and moving GIF's of Geocities. Why exactly there are drop down lists for sections of the newspaper that don't actually have a list for which to require a drop-down is not only stupid, but incredibly annoying. The "articles" panel on the left hand side of the story-mode is a hit-and-miss affair, and there is now way to simply overview all items within the newspaper, or god forbid, search.

Whether the team was rushed, trying to get the app out before the first iPad hit the shelves in Australia, or whether they were developers who'd never designed an interface before, or even if it was outsourced, does not really matter. There are at least 10,000 totally free apps in the App Store marketplace with better interfaces, that have been created with less resources than News Ltd has at it's disposal. Frankly, I feel like The Australian's iPad development team just didn't even bother thinking about how people would actually use the application, but rather just focused on how they could get ad's in there.

Reason 3: Most obnoxious adverts, EVER

Now, I work in advertising, so usually, I'm not actually all that bothered by ads. In fact, ads are good, they keep me employed, and are an integral part of a modern economy (well, that is debatable, but anyway), so when I tell you that these ads are obnoxious, you should take into account that this is coming from a person who sees ads day in, day out, and depends on them for an income.

The Australian doesn't just "show" you an ad like it would on the website, after all, why should it? This isn't the 'interwebs' where you can just get your news from other sources or anything, no, this is an application that you have PAID good money for. So here, whenever you click on a section, how about I put a gigantic ad covering the whole friggin page for you.

In fact, how about, instead of putting any kind of smarts behind the app, I will just put this ad here, in front of this section, EACH and EVERY time you go to that section, completely regardless of how many times you've seen it already.

There are an infinite number of ways a publisher could have integrated advertising into it's news application. This is a new platform, things are different, hey, why don't we try something new? NO! We must use the exact same model that we did for newspapers. Almost bit for bit.

Overall, after forcing myself to use this application for a fortnight, I finally gave up. I have to say, this is beyond a doubt one of the worst, if not THE worst, example of a news reading application in the app store.

What can you do instead? Well, here's what I did.

The antidote:

Reeder

Reeder is a fantastic little RSS Reader that was designed by one guy (or so I'm lead to believe). It is 1 dollar more than The Australian, but it doesn't have recurring fees, so you just pay it once. (download from iTunes here)

Reeder lets you take RSS feeds from any source, it will even sync with your Google Reader account (if you have one) and provides you not only with bucket-loads of functionality, but an interface that will make you want to keep reading.

In my case, I just went to www.theaustralian.com.au/help/rss which will give you a full listing of the available RSS feeds available. Then, add them into either Reeder directly, or to your Google Reader.

Once you've got your feeds sorted and grouped, you can access that "stack" of feeds from within Reeder. It will sort them by the latest news, it will remove items you've already read, and keep it generally clean and tidy.

Once you're in your stack, you should see all the news items in a nice clean list. You can sort multiple ways, including items you've not read yet, or have starred (made a favourite), or chronologically.

The interface is simple, and it feels as though no space has been wasted. Very clean and efficient, yet still pleasant.

When you turn the iPad sideways, you get your navigation, as well as reading element, side by side. Again, it's very clean, feels intuitive to use, and has all the functions you need to "star" and article if you want to refer to it later, or send it to a friend, etc...

Now, due to the fact that The Australian wants you to go to their website, so that it can show you ads, so it can make money (which is fair enough), the RSS feed is truncated, meaning only the first paragraph of the story comes through. When you click on the heading of the article, Reeder opens the link in a built-in web-browser, so you never have to leave the application.

Ironically, when the page opens in the browser, it suddenly has the text-size changing functions, as well as share functions that are notably absent from The Australian's paid application. And yes, now you can select the text, copy, past to your heart's content.

Reeder also includes a whole stack of functions that make the whole experience just awesome. If you use Delicious for bookmarking, want to tweet about what you're reading, want to send it to Instapaper, Email, or a stack of other services, it's all there within one button click.

The experience is really well thought through, and frankly makes The Australian's iPad app look like a complete joke. Reeder's use of standard RSS technology not only means that you can have news from more than one provider bundled into the one app, but also that it downloads a LOT faster than The Australian, and uses a lot less of your bandwidth.

Spending $4.99 per month on The Australian, at least in the current state of their iPad app, is ridiculous. Anybody who is even remotely thinking about it, should seriously reconsider.

As for the guys at News Ltd, you need to have a look at both The Financial Times app (which is phenomenal), and Reeder. Both of these will show you what a good news delivery application should look and feel like.

Cheers.

The more time I spend in advertising and working across a number of companies and number of brands in all kinds of sectors, the more I notice that what I previously thought to be an exclusive trait of the finance industry, is prevalent everywhere.

The trait I speak of is convolution. The near compulsive need for larger companies to make things as complicated and needlessly incomprehensible as possible, and more times than not, to their own detriment.

Finance and insurance have been doing it for eons. They drown their customers in complete gibberish they call "disclosure". They have far too many products with far too many variances, so that it becomes impossible to compare one to the next. Just think back to the last time you had to sign up for health insurance and the horrible process that can be.

Is it really necessary that for a corporate to turn a profit, they need to remove any resemblance of logic and clarity from their products, services, and business structure?

I've found that most of these giants cannot even grasp an understanding of themselves internally, let alone have any hope of conveying their structure and flow to an outsider. And yet most of them, when asked "If you could be any other brand, who would you most want to be", inevitably answer with 'Apple' or 'Google' or the like.

These companies want to be like Apple, yet seem completely incapable of comprehending some of the core philosophies that companies like Apple and Google are built on. Usually a mix of strive, simplicity, and customer centricity.

Instead, we continue to be offered a hundred different financial instruments from out financial provider, each only able to marginally effect your return, and essentially identical. We are charged different rates on our usage of wireless data, for no logical reason other than some product manager inside a telco decided to bundle it one way, and another a different way altogether.

Some people try to blame "shareholders" and the return they are expecting, yet Apple, Google, Disney, Nike, are all listed companies. They provide their shareholders with value that most corporates can only dream of. Not because they are risk adverse, but because they take the risks. They are willing to provide their customers with simple and effective offerings. They trust their customers instead of despising them.

I can only hope that perhaps in the retirement days of the Schmidt's and Jobs' of the world, they will take the time to sit down and articulate their philosophies into books. Perhaps we might even start to see a new movement in corporate culture.

A cure to this horrendous sickness of convolution, and the development of a corporate simplicity culture.

Telstra HTC Desire

Preamble

Writing up a holistic and fair-minded review of the HTC Desire was actually a much harder exercise than I anticipated.

To begin with, no matter how balanced and unbiased I say I am or try to be, the fact of the matter is that I spend more time with my mobile phone than with any other entity in my life. More than with any single piece of clothing, more than with my wallet or keys, and by a long shot more than with any person. My mobile is with me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year.

My phone of choice for the past 12 months has been a black, 32 gigabyte iPhone 3Gs. I have had this phone for exactly 337 days today, and with the exception of a 45 minute window in January where I accidentally left it in a friends car (instantly causing a state of panic, but with thanks to Find My iPhone, I had it back before the end of the hour), I have not been more than 2 metres from my iPhone in that time period.

Needless to say, I love my iPhone. I have since the moment I got it. It's help me find my way when I've been lost, it's settled many disputes, it's left me never having one of those "Oh, where have I seen that actor before" moments, it's let me show people my adventures and share in theirs.

It's enriched my life in so many ways, and that's something that few pieces of technology can honestly say these days.

So my goal with the HTC Desire was to try and see if it could not only replace my use of my iPhone, but also exceed my expectations.

The First Impression

Unboxing the Desire is much like unboxing most pieces of gadgetry these days, you're giddy with excitement, and cannot wait to take the device out of it's little cocoon, and show it the light of day. Whilst most people don't care about the packaging, it is worth noting that HTC is getting very good at making it's product unboxing just as exciting as any Apple product. Everything is geared towards you getting the Desire in your hand and booted up.

Once booted, I experienced something I haven't experienced in quite some time. The screen made me smile. If you've used any modern touchphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia) and you've not popped into a JB Hi-Fi or Telstra store to play with the desire, I suggest you do. The screen on it is just brilliant. It's brighter, the colours are better, it's crisper than any other screen you've seen lately.

The amount of pixels per inch is higher than you average laptop, higher than the iPhone, and WAY higher than any TV you've ever bought. The screen is the part of the phone you see and interact with more than anything, so having such a beautiful and clear screen just makes you want to USE this phone.

The customisation

Again, like most pieces of tech, the first thing I do is play around with the settings, open up all the applications that look interesting, and just get a general feel for how the thing works.

A few things came to mind after playing with the Desire for a good half hour. Firstly, I'm going to get this out of the way (and I know some people will get angry at me for saying this, but) the responsiveness of the touch interface just is not as good as on the iPhone. Things jitter more, or move a split second after you've told it to. Not all the time, but enough of the time that you notice it, and that can make a difference if you're the type of person who gets irked by little things like that.

Having been used to the iPhone paradigm of "your applications ARE your home screen", the idea of having an actually home screen that streams information and widgets was a bit foreign. But after I got over my Apple brainwashing, I realised that I actually really love the idea of having widgets and shortcuts on my home screen.

Needless to say, the discovery that I could put instant shortcuts to common things (such as sending an SMS to a specific person, or signing into a specific venue on Foursquare) started making me ask why the heck this feature isn't on an iPhone.

I happen to be one of those people who sync all their contacts to Gmail, so when it asked me for my Google username and password, it just brought everything down 100% hassle free. If you're one of those people who use a Mac (like me), I suggest using Busy Calc or similar application to get all your contacts into Gmail. If you're on PC, you should buy a Mac or ask someone else how to go about syncing your contacts into the cloud.

The Workflow

So after customising my Desire to a satisfactory level, my next key task, was to set up my Desire so I could use it with work applications, namely, setting up my email and calendars. My workplace uses Microsoft Exchange for mail and calendars, so I was pleased to discover than unlike other Android handsets (Hero, Nexus One, etc) the desire actually has full Exchange support. It lets you view multiple calendars, lets you accept, decline or even create calendar events. It does all the stuff that up until now made the Android a no-go for business use.

The mail application itself isn't quite as fantastic as I thought it would be, but then, the iPhone's mail app isn't the best either. The HTC mail application, despite being well designed and laid out, feels like it's wasting a whole bunch of screen space by rounding corners and making bubble effects of icons. I think mobile email is still one area where the physical-keyboard Blackberry handsets rule, and phone manufacturers need to remember the mindsets that people are often in when using these apps. You want to get through these emails as quickly and efficiently as possible, so don't waste my time with massive polished icons that add nothing to my experience.

Other than that small gripe, the productivity tools are fantastic, and very usable. The calendaring tool lets you instantly bring up maps of your meeting location, and all that jazz that you'd expect of a modern smartphone.

The Marketplace

Now that everything was in place, and my phone was essentially where I wanted it to be, I thought I'd start by getting some fresh apps onto the device. I'll start by saying this, the Android Marketplace truly does feel like a marketplace. Other than a couple of filters, it feels hard to find good apps. You pretty much need to search for anything you want to find. There doesn't seem to be that same showcasing of interesting apps that you get in the iTunes store, nothing to inspire me to just browse for apps rather than search for specific ones. None the less, the selection is pretty vast, and there's more or less and app to fill any need you may have.

The downside of being an iPhone user, is that you go into Android expect certain apps to be there. Tweetie for example (now known as Twitter on iPhone) is beyond a doubt one of the best Twitter applications out there, but sadly, it's not available in Android. Twicca seems to have settled in as my Tweeting application of choice.

Despite there being a wide selection of applications, including some phenomenal Android-only applications (Google Goggles, Barcode), the quality of Android apps feels to be a little lower than that of iPhone apps. They all seems to be slightly less polished, slightly less thought-through and slightly more rushed. Almost like the iPhone apps felt back when the App store first opened, which is why I hold hope that this is only a temporary state of affairs for the Android Marketplace.

So most of the apps I would want and use are now installed. I have my three most important apps (Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter) and a handful of fun different ones that I'll only every use once a month (Urbanspoon, Ustream, etc..). What I notice is missing from all this, is the games. I hunted down a few interesting games, but again, the quality of gaming on Android doesn't seem up to par with the iPhone experience. Whenever you talk to somebody who's just bought a new iPhone, they're almost guaranteed to tell you about some interesting game they've installed as one of the first points of conversation, "Oh, I installed Bookworm, and it's awesome, and my score is blah blah blah". Android doesn't seem to have that effect, and I'm not sure if it's because all the game developers haven't embraced the platform yet, or because games aren't pushed as much by Android or what, but the selection just isn't as good.

The Surprises

After several days of use is when you start to get the real surprises by the device. The things that you might not have known to be possible, that make you smile and go "damn, that's cool". My first one of these was after installing a little app that adds a microphone icon to the keyboard. It essentially lets you voice-to-text anything anywhere across the device. So when I am in the car, driving along the motorway and I want to write somebody an SMS, I just press the little icon, and say what I want to say "Hey, just on the M4, running about 15 minutes late" and it translates my voice into text! Purely amazing, and infinitely useful, especially if you spend a fair bit of time in the car.

Now, the more you say, the longer it'll take to turn it into text, but it usually does it in no more than 20 or so seconds, and usually pretty accurately (as long as you speak slowly and clearly). I truly hope that this is a feature that can be built into every phone with in the next few years, as I found myself using it more and more often.

A bad surprise I discovered was the keyboard. Now, yes, it is a software keyboard, so much like the iPhone, if you're not used to it, it takes a bit of a learning curve. But after a full week of use, I just could not get the Desire's keyboard to do what I want it to. It constantly thinks I press different letters to the ones I do, and it has a predictive input algorithm (kinda like T9 on the old Sony Ericssons) that just always gets it wrong. And the space bar isn't long enough, so all my words are separated by full stops instead of spaces.

My biggest surprise was actually a comparative one. After using the Desire for several days almost non-stop, my iPhone's screen looked completely washed out. The colours looked dull, the blacks looked grey, and it just my iPhone look dated. Again, the power of a brilliant screen should not be underestimated.

The Verdict

All in all, I'm not almost three weeks with my Desire, and I have to say, I plan to continue using it. Not on it's own, but in tandem with the iPhone. Having been an Optus customer for the past two years, and Vodafone for 10 years before that, using the Telstra Next G network has been eye opening. I cannot remember ever having been able to make a phone call from a lift or a carpark before, and data is just blazing fast. The HTC Desire is a fantastic piece of hardware, and with the pace at which Google is updating Android, I think most of my gripes will be answered within the next release or two, and is enough to keep me using the handset.

Would I recommend the Telstra HTC Desire to you? Well, that depends. If you want a modern smartphone, but hate Apple or hate iPhones, then yes, without a doubt. I would buy it in a heartbeat over any BlackBerry or Nokia out there and don't even get me started on Samsung/LG phones.

If you are looking to buy a new iPhone and want to be swayed? I'd say if you're the kind of person who likes to tinker, and wants to be able to highly customise your phone, then yes. If you just want a phone, and don't care for customisation, but want to be able to do multiple things with it, then I'd still say go with the iPhone.

If you have an iPhone right now, well, this device will certainly build on many aspects of the iPhone that you have and love, but will fall short if you're addicted to specific apps.

So that's my thoughts on the HTC Desire, and a big thanks to Telstra for letting me be part of the reviewing experience. If you have any specific questions about the handset or my experience you want to ask, just hit up a comment below, and I'll respond.

Some of us might remember the 'good ol days' back in the mid to late 90's when everybody was getting a Hotmail address. Back then, Hotmail was an independent startup that was doing something nobody else was, giving away web-based email for FREE.

Fast forward 15 years, and since Microsoft bought the platform, barely any real changes have been made. It took Microsoft years to offer a similar amount of storage on Hotmail that Gmail had been offering for years, they still don't have an IMAP option, and up until recently, you couldn't even auto-foward emails to a non-hotmail address!



So Microsoft have announced today that they are "re-inventing' Windows Live Mail. Watching this little video is meant to inspire you to realise that the future is NOW with the new Microsoft Windows Live Mail. Despite the horrible name (which seems to be a wonderful trend with Microsoft lately, giving products appalling names), Microsoft wants to show you that they are doing much to ensure that your email experience is as modern and useful as you expect it to be.

Sadly, much like the last few updates of Hotmail, this one will no doubt leave a lot to be desired. When it comes to web-mail, Microsoft seems to have been lagging behind Yahoo and Google for quite a few years now, and I'm not certain that this update will do anything to fix that.

To read up some more on it, hit up the Windows Live Preview site for 'inspiring' videos on "people like you".