Admonsters held their first event in Australia this week, with a members dinner at the Waterfront restaurant in Sydney. The 3 course meal was very generously provided by aiMatch on a perfect summer’s night right next to the harbour.
The event was attended by around 25 people, which made for an intimate yet comprehensive representation of the major Australian advertising operations teams. Ninemsn, Carsales, REA Group, APN, CBS Interactive, YouTube, Google and number of niche publishers were represented. It was amazing how small the industry is (I had worked with at least 5 others previously) and yet how diverse our backgrounds were. There was some reflection on this topic, in particular what qualifications you need to get into Ad Operations, and therefore what you look for in new hires.
Other issues that went around the table included the continuing friction between digital and traditional media (both internally and in the market), the National Broadband Network and how it will accelerate this structural change and the amount of hand-holding that clients are still requiring.
Overall it was a great night which really helped build relationships across what is a very fragmented online media landscape in Australia. The discussion ended with a hope that there will be a larger Admonsters conference event in the APAC region next year!
YouTube today silently launched a new trends dashboard which showcases the top trending videos on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard
It has some great features to help you identify rising “buzz” videos, and then breakdown that buzz to regional areas. You can also show the most shared or the most viewed videos (which is an interesting comparison in itself). Then just need to jump onto the Video Targeting Tool to make sure your advertisement takes advantage of these trends! It’s certainly a much cleaner interface than some of the more popular 3rd party sites that have filled this void over the years.
Give it a try and let me know what you think!
30 days worth of growth...
This is the second year that I have participated in Movember, a great initiative to raise money for men’s health. Google Australia put together a strong team to compete, so I had no excuse not to join the cause. If you don’t know what Movember is, here is the summary from their website:
Each year Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in Australia and around the world, with the sole aim of raising vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and depression in men.
The program started in Australia, but has now spread to 9 more countries around the world. It’s really great to see Australia coming up with programs like Movember and Earth Hour that make a difference to the world.
If you would like to donate to my (poor) efforts to help, then that would be greatly appreciated! You can do so here: http://au.movember.com/mospace/227691/
November 26th, 2010
By Scott
Categories: Internet
Facebook and Zuckerberg are worshipped in a book, movie and this article. I have nothing but respect for the guy and what he has achieved, but what is it doing to society? And if I was cynical (and/or a capitalist), how can we use that change to predict the next big thing?
The quote at the end of the article really struck a chord with me:
We may laugh at Socrates, in the Phaedrus, for denouncing literacy, which he said would create “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves…. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Is this the first recorded recognition of our increasing degree of specialisation? People’s general knowledge is reduced, and instead focused on a very niche area of experience (i.e. they can rewrite Facebook in Java in under a week, but can’t cook a meat pie).
This specialisation has now extended into the social space. We have less time to socialise, our relationships become more casual, and therefore we need a tool like Facebook to painlessly maintain our fragile web of relationships. Facebook doesn’t deliver a whole lot of intimacy in return, so the numbing cycle continues.
I am not going to make a comment on society becoming more emotionally stunted, because it will make me seem anti-change and old fashioned. Instead, perhaps we can use this as a predictor for future social trends? How can one socialise more efficiently? I only want to be invited to the parties that my best friends are all going to. Alert me when I haven’t replied to my friend’s message within 48 hours. Let me know when I haven’t been tagged in any photos for 7 days and clearly need to get out more. Automated social network maintenance!
November 6th, 2010
By Scott
Categories: Business, HR
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt was brought to my attention when my director came out to discuss our operations team and ask where the bottlenecks in our organisation lay. When he referred to Herbie, I had to know what he meant.
The first thing to note about this book is that it is a story, not your normal dry textbook style business book. I guess teaching through narratives worked for the Bible, so why not a business book? It is a tricky balance though, and I feel at some points the author gets a little distracted by the back story. To make up for this he then compresses a number of key points into one paragraph of wise dialogue. It all flows reasonably well overall, it just means you can’t start skimming what appears to be light reading or you might miss key insights.
So what are the morals? The story starts with plenty of despair and common frustrations, but I love that it also starts with a reasonable company making reasonable decisions – yet everyone is burned out and under resourced. In my experience this is an incredibly common situation and probably where the “work smarter, not harder” phrase comes from. Even though the book sets its story in a manufacturing plant I found it really easy to adapt to my experience, especially working with an Agile software development team.
The solutions expressed in the book are all about a back to basics approach to finding and optimising within your constraints. Every process has a bottleneck, the trick is identifying what it is and then applying techniques to make the best of what you have. For example, if your developers are constantly overworked then test the requirements documents before they start work and offload some of their tasks to other roles who are not bottlenecks. Sounds simple right? To justify these changes to your accountant you can note that if your developer works 50 hours a week and your total operating expenses for a week are $50,000 then the cost of them wasting an hour is $50,000 divided by 50 – $1,000. This is because it adds downtime and inventory jams across the rest of your process and is the limiting factor of overall output. Puts things in perspective right?
The book doesn’t stop there however – it talks about synchronising bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks, the importance of minimising inventory, how to focus on market demand across your organisation, why data is misleading and no substitute for getting out on the floor, problems with modern efficiency accounting practices and even how organising a regular “date night” with your partner is a good idea! Overall I really loved this book, it was very easy to read and relate to. Although it doesn’t mention this, I think it is a great read for fast growing companies that face resource constraints every day and can get easily distracted by their purpose as a company.
YouTube Symphony 2011 has launched, and the Sydney Opera House has been announced as the new final location! The program is revolving around an APAC advertiser and location, so it is an extremely exciting program for the region. Make sure you try the Augmented Reality application in the “Experiment” section.
This excitement is being driven internally by a surprisingly large and distributed number of Australians based all around the world. I was at the launch event at the Opera House on Wednesday morning, and every Google employee who spoke was Australian! It was quite an inspiring moment for an Australian in IT like myself looking to make an impact globally. Working on the project has already been an amazing experience, and things have only just begun.
I guess Symphony is already achieving its goal to be a globally inspiring program.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M Christensen is one of the best business books I have ever read. It focuses on the practical aspects of innovation, with two key points (for me at least):
- You are most vulnerable when you are most profitable
- You need to create the start-up that undermines your most profitable products before someone else does
- New markets need simple, cheap products which hit a critical new requirement
This book is great inspiration for those seeking to become entrepreneurs, it shows practical examples of where start-ups have seized on opportunities and completely blind-sided the highly profitable incumbent. That’s the dream right? It also serves as a great warning to those in big business who feel chasing the margins instead of innovation is the path to success. It certainly puts forward a compelling argument, one that even NASA seems to think has merit.
Perhaps margins should be the guide for businesses, but they should work on a goal of an average margin across all their products instead. That way they can maintain a balance of high profitability mature businesses with low profitability emerging businesses. Of course this would need to be combined with some “profit margins must never decrease on a product” rule. Doing this without cannibalising your own offerings (by differentiating based on high end vs low end customers) however is a very fine line to tread.
The other practical reflection I had reading this book was on the Engineering vs Sales argument. Which side is better equipped to run a successful business? I am still yet to work anywhere that balances these two sides perfectly, it always seems to fall one way or the other. My thoughts after reading this book were that an emerging organisation needs to be run by the engineers (focus on product success, not profits or impossible projections) and mature businesses by sales people (focus on profits, finding upmarket customers).
What did you get out of this book?
September 15th, 2010
By Scott
Categories: Personal
Pa in his later years
Pa does not need me or anyone else to tell you all how inspirational he was. Inspiring and challenging people was what he did best, and what he spent his whole life doing. He had an amazing mind that would happily recount how to set up an artillery rig, run a poultry farm, make a profit on trucking ash or a list of other materials, how to grow tomatoes, how to manage people or even how to repair the rising damp in my house. If I didn’t follow his advice, or rather instructions, then I knew he would check as soon as he saw me next. He was so passionate and engaged with everything that he did, and that passion rubbed off on everyone around him whether they liked it or not.
There are a lot of people here today, myself included, who list him as one of a handful of people who challenged them to be a better person. He loved challenging people too. He always did it with a twinkle in his eye that let you know he was one step ahead.
Even now he is still challenging me today and will continue to do so. His mind never gave up either, he was incredibly sharp right till the very end. He didn’t die wondering whether he should have said or done something, he did and said everything he wanted to.
His body simply could not cope with a 100th minute loss by the Tigers and Labor being sworn back into office that very day. We love you and will miss you Pa, but we promise to keep doing better.
Wondering why I have been so quiet lately? I volunteered my time to write a blog post for the Google Grants blog instead!
http://googlegrants.blogspot.com/2010/08/get-your-non-profit-started-with.html
I really hope that it helps more non-profits get onto YouTube. It really is a great platform that will deliver a level of transparency and engagement with your supporters, and in turn it offers you call to action overlays to convert those supporters into contributors.
Tomorrow from 1-2pm YouTube Australia will be running their first live streaming event for the 2010 ICT ministers debate on the youtube.com/AustraliaVotes channel.
ICT policy is shaping up as one of the big issues of this election, which is great because ICT tends to take a back seat in Australian politics. The main issues are around the $43b National Broadband Network (NBN) project and the proposed Internet Filter. Each party has a different perspective on each of these major issues, which hopefully will make for an interesting debate. Regardless, I am proud to be helping to bring this first to Australia!
Edit: The debate ran successfully on YouTube Live! You can now see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHbeONYdUc
Admonsters held their first event in Australia this week, with a members dinner at the Waterfront restaurant in Sydney. The 3 course meal was very generously provided by aiMatch on a perfect summer’s night right next to the harbour.
