Humour

Consider the human side of robots

Neville Hobson 8 Comments Advertising, Business, Communication, Entertainment, Humour, IBM, Innovation, Marketing, Public Relations, Technology, Trends

With all the talk about how robots will take everyone’s jobs and basically bring on the Apocalypse, it’s not hard to get worried. The robots haven’t just landed in the workplace – they’re expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts. One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn’t just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp—it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust. And just this week, Google won a patent to start building worker robots with personalities. […]

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Humour debunks marketing myths for Adobe

Neville Hobson 4 Comments Business, Communication, Humour, Marketing, Social Media

Intelligent humour that doesn’t patronize and isn’t condescending – it just makes you laugh – surely must be a Holy Grail for marketers when designing their campaigns. If something makes you laugh, particularly because you can identify in some way with the situation portrayed, you’re more likely to remember what made you laugh; and, from a brand marketing perspective, you’re more likely to talk about it, share your comments online and tell your friends. If it’s a video, you have a good chance of establishing some of the essential conditions in and from which that intangible known as ‘viral’ develops. Thoughts I pondered as I viewed two new videos from software maker Adobe in its on-going ‘Metrics not Myths’ digital […]

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Humour in Adobe’s Cloud

Neville Hobson 5 Comments Business, Communication, Humour, Marketing, Social Media

Buzzwords, precision in analytics and measuring ROI are topics featuring in a trio of humorous online videos that software maker Adobe has been using to raise awareness of key aspects of its Marketing Cloud product and drive traffic to its website. Launched in October 2012, the Adobe Marketing Cloud is an integrated set of analytics, social, advertising, targeting, and web experience management solutions with a real-time dashboard that brings together everything you need from your campaigns that lets you get the essential and actionable insights from all that data. With the overall theme of ‘Metrics not Myths,’ each video addresses an area of digital marketing that I expect will resonate with you if you get a little tired of the […]

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Don’t be like the pointy-haired boss

Neville Hobson 2 Comments Business, Communication, Employee Communication, Humour, Leadership, Workplace

Big data. The cloud. Actionable analytics. Three phrases that have crept into the business lexicon and that are bandied about freely in many workplaces, sometimes by people who do broadly understand their meanings but more frequently by some (especially managers) who want to impress their co-workers, seem cool by using the latest lingo, or employ a little control freakery because it’s in their nature to do so. There is some reality behind the humour displayed in today’s Dilbert comic strip you see here. It’s in the nature of human beings to use jargon that only a select few understand: we like to impress others with our cool-ness. Yet with lack of understanding by others comes lack of commitment and effectiveness […]

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The secrets of making viral videos

Neville Hobson 3 Comments Advertising, Communication, Humour, Marketing

Outsource the clickers, create outreach programmes for the elderly, stimulate your kids’ clicking smarts with school clicking programmes. Making a viral video used to take a lot of work, says Buyral. “How can people go viraler and viraler?” they ask. And give you the answers. And check out the CL-app (say it quickly) for your iPhone. Now anyone can do it. And who knows, soon you’ll have the viralest video – and no need for viewers any more to get that virality! Go! (Via +Keith Childs with tongue welded to cheek. Clever communication from ad agency John St in Toronto, Canada. It’ll make you click.) Google+: View post on Google+ Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

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