This is part three of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

More on driving, because that’s what you do here. (Dubai isn’t a place to stroll anywhere – it’s too hot, there are too many roadworks, fuel is too cheap.) Anyway, in Dubai, car number plates are allocated according to one’s place in the world. The lower the number, the greater the owner’s power and influence. 1766 might belong to a high ranking official, 45, a cousin of the Sheik.

Whatever you do, you don’t cut one of these low numbers off or flip ‘em the middle finger.  Grave punishments would be likely to befall you. Seriously. I saw a pimped black Mercedes G-class pass us at a leisurely 140km/h. His plate displayed the number 22. The traffic ahead was like the parting of the Red Sea.

Arvo of Day 3 – It’d never happen in Oz.

We took our QUT star out into the desert to shoot him (with a camera) on a sand dune.

At three o’clock, Maleet from Manila picked us up in his Landcruiser. 90 minutes and one stop at a reeking Pakistani tourist trap later (camel snow domes – 24 Dirham, frozen chicken gizzards – 12 Dihram), we paused at the edge of the road and waited for the 4WDs of some other tour companies to assemble.

And then, they came. Not 10, not 20, but more than 200 white Landcruisers slowly formed an endless line on the edge of the burning sand – like wildebeest gathering to drink at a waterhole.

When someone gave the sign we were off.

Up the first of a violent series of orange sand dunes, nose to tail, mere metres apart, in first gear the whole way, revving the bejeezus out of the engine. Maleet would play chicken with the other drivers, flooring the pedal and taking us to the very crest of a dune before chucking a 180, sending a wave of sand over the car, and sliding the 2-tonne vehicle back from whence it came. Impossible to see if another similarly crazed maniac was approaching from the other side of the dune, but amazingly, we witnessed no collisions.

This sort of hair-raising, public liability-warping stuff could never happen in Australia. Then abruptly, we stopped. 200 groups of gasping, giggling tourists poured out into the 47 degree heat. We caught our breath and reeled off a few feet of tape. Then one of the Indian drivers cranked up his car stereo and shook some impromptu booty to that classic 70s track from the buck-toothed boys from Woody Point: ‘Stayin’ Alive’.

Truly surreal.

This is part two of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

Shooting begins in earnest.

First stop, the Dubai HQ of the engineering firm our young QUT student already works for. They’re using a brand new and highly secret welding method to build secret components for a top secret engineering project I’m not at liberty to discuss here.

We continue on to various Dubai engineering landmarks. Our young star (a real student; no prior television experience) makes a good fist of repeating his lines to camera half a dozen times in eight different locations, in conditions that’d have an Aussie actor calling for his union rep.

Arvo of Day 2

Aston Martin DB9. Bentley Continental GT. Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Of the many exciting ways to die in Dubai, being mown down by a half million dollar supercar is just one.

Look left as you would in Brizzy and you risk becoming a new hood ornament for one of the countless exotic vehicles oil money has bought for the lucky Emiratis. For such a highly regulated and dare I say, punitive society, the average driver’s behaviour on the road is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Everywhere you look, Pirellis are being shredded and redlines are being ignored.

As for the Dubai cabbies… even though they drive Toyotas, not Lamborghinis, they still make like Dick Johnson at Mt Panorama. To a Dubai cabbie, speed signs are invisible, indicating to change lanes is for wimps, and if you can see bitumen between your cab and the car in front, it’s just not tailgating. I was sure our driver had a dicky throttle, such was the randomness of acceleration/deceleration on our drive from the airport. At least the violent motion helped loosen up my fused vertebrae from the plane flight.

This is part one of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

God gave man hair for two reasons. To stop him passing out after banging his head on the floor joist when doing a bit of illegal wiring under his old Queenslander. And, to prevent his scalp from being blow torched off by the Dubai sun while shooting a TV commercial for QUT.

The desert in May is no place for bald men. But true to the BCM never-say-die spirit, two of us have been doing just that.

What a blast. Dubai is insane. The whole place is a construction zone (despite the GFC having kicked in big time). The money they continue to spend on building engineering marvels is astounding. Everything is the world’s biggest, the world’s best, or the world’s most mind-boggling.

• A building just shy of a kilometre high? Check.
• A four-level shopping mall that would fit two Westfield Chermsides on each level? Check.
• A 400 metre ski-slope in the middle of a desert? Check.
• A 5×5km group of man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree? Why not two of ‘em?

When you’re shooting an ad which, in part, promotes the possibilities of a career in engineering, you’d be hard-pressed to choose a better backdrop than Dubai.

A 3am departure from Brisbane followed by a 19 hour flight made comprehending the place even more difficult upon arrival. I think my brain’s about to explode. Is it because it’s 45 degrees, or because the airport contains a 100 foot waterfall? Pass the tube of 30+ would you?

The hot topic over breakfast this morning was the new internet search facility, Wolfram Alpha.

Discussion soon ensued around the service’s name. Next time you want someone to do a search to answer a question, are you going to ask them to ‘Wolfram Alpha’ the question? Seems a bit clumsy to me. Google have well and truly nailed it – how many times do you get asked to ‘google’ a topic? And where do you go to undertake the search? Google.

As my other half and I chatted over weet-bix, it got us thinking, what’s in a name? This is what we came up with:

When unique brand names become household names, through mainstream acceptance and popularity, the line between ‘who’ and ‘what’ can become blurred. On one level, it’s the ultimate compliment when the public refer to a particular brand name as if it were the generic term within a given category. Some examples being: Vegemite; Kleenex; Aspirin; Band-Aid.

However, generic acceptance is also a two-edged sword, a blessing and a curse, because massive brand recognition would no longer translate to sales if the company was to ever lose control of the brand name, for example, exclusivity over the very word itself. When a trademark loses its legal status, can it become a free-for-all?

Perhaps the ultimate marketing success is when a specific brand name makes the shift from a noun to a verb. When it’s no longer enough for someone to simply be ‘using’ that brand. After all, what could be better than someone actually ‘doing’ the brand? This kind of public perception is at least more likely to retain the original company’s customers through constant reinforcement of the name and by ‘the act of engaging with the brand’. Some well-known examples of such verb shifts are: Google; Napisan; Xerox; Hoover; and Photoshop.

Got any other examples? What do you think?

Given the rapid growth of our Sydney office over the past year, it made sense for BCM to have a Creative Director looking after the creative aspects of our Sydney accounts.

This is why we are pleased to announce Geoff Reid, a highly awarded Senior Creative with nearly 20 years industry experience at leading agencies Leo Burnett, Batey Kazoo, The Campaign Place, JWT, and most recently Human, as the new Creative Director for BCM Sydney.

Geoff has worked on many well known Australian and international brands including NRMA Insurance, Kellogg, HSBC, Nine Network, Target, Audi, Telstra, Singapore Airlines, Subaru, Coles Myer, Woolworths and the ABC.

‘Greidy’ joined BCM Sydney in October last year as a Senior Writer and he’s been responsible for producing some great work.

In addition to his new CD responsibilities, Greidy will continue to partner with our Senior Art Director Tony Sutton, managing the creative requirements for BCM’s Sydney accounts including Radio Rentals, bigbrownbox.com.au, Surf Life Saving Australia, New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Pelikan Artline and Sunbeam Foods.

Congrats Geoff! We’re happy you are filling this new role and to now have two CDs, with Nick Ikonomou remaining as Creative Director for BCM’s Brisbane office.

Like with our recent Aprils Fools Day microchip campaign, it was satisfying that our client Pelikan Artline implemented our idea to take the only responsible course of action in The Weekend Australian, The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age by informing the country of the upcoming federal government budget deficits.

It was not something that Artline took any joy in having to announce. But when we suggested that last Tuesday night Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan neglected to even mention what must be now known as the ‘D’ word in the halls of government during his budget address, they asked BCM to book some ad space in the weekend papers.

We obliged knowing that Artline are providing the necessary written public service announcement for when the thought of saying deficit was a little too much for the country’s Treasurer.

Still, chin up Wayne. We know that you, Kev and Julia are hard at work helping to get Australia through the seven difficult budget years ahead.

I’ve always loved reading reference materials, and probably always will. So if anyone out there had any doubt left in them that I’m not a total dweeb, banish those doubts now. But I’m unashamed in my love of absorbing facts, figures, diagrams and histories.

Growing up, those facts came almost exclusively from the set of encyclopaedias that my parents had filled a bookshelf with. These days, I’m guessing kids cruise round on Wikipedia or just Google whatever it is they’re interested in.

This week, to much fanfare, a new search engine was launched which adds another weapon to any fact-finder’s arsenal. It’s called Wolfram Alpha, and bills itself as a ‘computational search engine’. It’s built on a well-known scientific database called Mathematica, which was built by a genius by the name of Stephen Wolfram (hence the name of the search engine).

Wolfram Alpha is a little different from Google. It’s very powerful, but only within the constraints of the Mathematica database. Ask it a question about any science-related field, such as maths, engineering, geography or physics, and it will tell you everything it knows about your search query, in a nicely presented layout. It’s not too bad at some more ‘humanistic’ questions too, concerning music and sports.

The best way to get your head around it is, of course, to give it a go. Here’s some sample searches I tried:

• GDP Australia Switzerland
• Distance Brisbane New York
• Probability Royal Flush

Check out the examples section for some more great stuff.

Worlfram Alpha is like taking all those reference tomes I devoured as a kid and being able to cross-reference them in any way imaginable. It’s a great insight into how search engines will evolve to contain more ‘deep web’ information – all the juicy stuff stashed away in databases at the moment. And for a fact fiend like me, it’s also quite a bit of fun.

Is there anything more annoying than the sound of fingernails screeching on a blackboard? Not much. Though, I have to admit that the ubiquitous use of the word ‘ubiquitous’ comes incredibly close.

I’ve tried to ignore it – honestly I have – but every week when I open What Next that bloody ‘u’ word is there, taunting me yet again.

Surprisingly, ‘ubiquitous’ is a word I don’t seem to come across very often anywhere else, though I do remember it very clearly from religious instruction classes when I was a kid. Back then (in the olden days), I seem to recall it was only ever used to describe the ‘omnipresence’ of either God or Christ or the spirit of one or the other. Regardless, to a nine-year-old girl, the whole concept of ‘ubiquitarianism’ – of something or someone being anywhere and everywhere at the same time – was profoundly unsettling. In fact, I remember wasting ridiculous amounts of time peeking furtively under tables, behind curtains and under cushions in the hope of spotting the ubiquitous spiritual beings lurking there.

With this in mind, I’m prepared to accept that I am a little more sensitive to the word ‘ubiquitous’ than your average Australian. But I’ll bet I’m not the only ‘What Next’ reader who’s threatened to scream if they see that word again. So, in the interests of saving myself and others from such public embarrassment, I’m sending the authors of ‘What Next’ some new words and phrases which I hope they will use instead. Depending on the context, ‘omnipresent’, ‘universal’, ‘pervasive’, ‘all-pervasive’, ‘abundant’, ‘permeating’ and ‘ever-present’ may come in handy. Even better, why not take a tip from ‘Weasel Words’ author, Don Watson, and try ‘everywhere’, ‘commonplace’ or ‘all over the place’?

I look forward to enjoying the next ‘What Next’ without finding that infuriating ‘u’ word everywhere. And just to show there’s no hard feelings, I’ve decided it’s high time to spread the joy of ridding the world of weasel words, jargon and meaningless jibber-jabber by attaching a Weasel Word Bingo Card containing 10 words and phrases even more annoying than ‘ubiquitous’. Take it along to your next meeting and every time a trite jargon word or phrase is used, cross the relevant square off the card. You’ll be surprised how commonplace these ghastly words and phrases are – in fact, you could say they’re ubiquitous! (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

(click on image below for hi-res version)

Are we all loving Mad Men? I am. Just finished watching the 1st season on DVD.

There’s a scene in one of the early episodes where a slick young account exec is having martinis with his high-powered New York City lawyer father who asks him, “So, what exactly is it you do?”

This reminded me of conversations with my parents and friends and how they don’t really know what I do. It’s all a bit abstract.

“So you film ads, that’s sounds interesting.”

“Oh, you’re in ads, that must be fun.”

The ad industry is currently in the spotlight thanks to Madmen and The Gruen Transfer. BCM’s appearance in ‘The Pitch’ segment a couple of weeks ago has brought up the subject (and confusion) again with my friends and family.

So all this exposure has amped up the interest, and the business is sexier than when Bewitched was a top rater (the less said about Melrose Place and D&D Advertising the better). Though I don’t think any of this has cleared up what it actually means to ‘work in advertising.’ Apart from coming up with cheesy slogans Darren Stevens style (which is one of my specialties).

So, what do you other advertising and marketing guys tell your parents or friends you do? Or what do they think you do? Are strangers you meet at parties more interested when you tell them what you do, now that it’s a lot ‘cooler’?

I’d  love to hear about your experiences.

To avoid the subject, I once lied, said I was an architect and gave out false information about council regulations… live on ABC radio. Full story upon request.

Has the world of social media grown so big and so quickly that the rules and protocols haven’t quite caught up?

What’s acceptable? What’s not? Where are the lines drawn?

Well, to answer this let me pose some questions.

• Is it OK for your boss to ask to be your friend on Facebook?
• As a ‘40 something’ married man, would it be ‘weird’ if one of your daughter’s school friends started following you on Twitter and you her? Is it less ‘weird’ if she initiated the contact?
• Would you modify your normal activity on your Facebook profile if you knew some of your company’s customers, who are friends of yours, were watching your posts?
• Is it standard practice to say no to a work colleague who asks to follow you on Twitter?
• Do you have to think about what you write on a personal blog in case your boss sees it or is your blog your personal business?
• If a prospective employer asked to look at your Myspace page during an interview would you be freaked out by that?
• What would your parents think of the content of your Facebook page?

If you baulked at any of these questions or found yourself struggling to answer one or two then you’ve confirmed my theory.

We aren’t quite sure about the ethics of social media, just as we are uncertain about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

So, should we, the online community, attempt to draw up some ‘rules’ and guidelines or should we let prevailing community standard sort it all out?

Surely, the answer has to be that we have figured out the rules of engagement for social interaction in all other areas in life, so why shouldn’t the same apply to social media?

Maybe?

But let me leave you with another question to ponder:

We’ve had hundreds of years to develop skills in the area of social interaction on a face to face level. We’ve had since the late 1800’s to learn telephone etiquette. But, we’ve only had a handful of years to learn how to deal with each other in the social media. Is that enough?