Oscar and Friends » Bond

Semih Sayginer

Oscar — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:24:40 +0000

“The Turk” first showed me this while studying in Australia, can’t really remember if I’ve posted it before, but it’s well enough sick to post again. How’s this guy doing this? Impressive!

Rebtel – Powerful competitor to … Skype?

Oscar — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:29:57 +0000

One of my Swedish friends from Bond University got a job at Rebtel a couple of months ago. I have to say that I didn’t think about it more than that, even though I checked his blog a couple of times just to keep up with the general idea of New Media Marketing and the different sources he recommended.

However, I have to say that after trying Rebtel a couple of times the past 2-3 days I’ve become quite fond of the concept and idea that Rebtel has. This is the basic idea of Rebtel:

But there’s more to it, you can also make a Smart Call which is when the real savings really kicks in I suppose. Here are an example of rates (without using the Smart Call which basically makes it all free) from Ireland to Sweden: To Landline: EUR 0.012, to Mobile EUR 0.089. Of course you’ll pay the mobile operator’s cost as usual on top of these international fees. If you on the other hand make a Smart Call, you’ll only pay the mobile operator’s cost as you would if you called someone within your own country as normal.

Quite nifty.

1 to go

Oscar — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:30:53 +0000

Boom! The final assignment for Entrepreneurship was just handed in. It was a Feasibility Study for a company that we’d like to call BTravel, that’s about all I can say at the moment as we’re currently talking to an Investor in Dubai (!) to come up with the money to finance the different stages. It’s hardly the case that they’d cover all the risk (that is, all the money) that is needed as it stretches a bit over US$1M but a kick-off to start discussions is always nice. 50 pages down in a Feasibility Study might seem much, but that also means we have a solid ground if we decide to go with a Business Plan to be presented to Venture Capitalists or other Investors.

Anyway. Only one exam to go, ever. Oh, what a feeling, keep believing … schalala.

Näst sista

Oscar — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:04:21 +0000

Det är som vanligt på Bond, vecka 13 har precis påbörjat och det innebär förstås att det var presentation idag (bara 2 timmar inför VDn för företaget vi jobbade för), presentation imorgon och givetvis lite upp spice’at med ett final exam imorgon också. Skit.

Viral Marketing 101

Oscar — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:44:22 +0000

Simpsonizeme.com

“Infectious disease with a reproduction rate (R) greater than 1″

Sold

Oscar — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:48:28 +0000

Presented the website layout for one of the sub-brands of Ozone1 today. It’s a concept for one of their products called OzoneSwim which basically is a product that uses Ozone instead of (at least much less) chlorine as is used today. Everything went good, the marketing director, or whatever he would like to call himself gave the goahead, tomorrow the price will be discussed, but as it looks right now I’ll turn to Joel for the HTML (got no time) and take a bit of the cake myself for providing the concept and the customer. Sounds good to me! We’ll see tomorrow if our proposed price went through, but it should since it’s god damn cheap, they’ll be stupid to turn it down, especially since they need the new site up and running within 1Ã‚Â½ weeks, they’ll never find someone so cheap and fast as Joel, that’s for sure :)

After that meeting it was time to finish up our MarCom Foster’s Lager campaign, we have around 50 pages as it is right now and will incorporate appendices that will make it even longer. Only one problem, namely the fact that it’s maximum 20 pages on the outline, however we’ll probably get around that when we talk to the professor, if you want to do it right, you cant do it with 20 pages.

Now it’s about time for the new Entourage! Medellin trailer (out Entourage) has been leaked on YouTube for those who missed, looks like a BRILLIANT movie to me! To bad it’s only fiction within a TV-series, ha!

The Retreat

Oscar — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 12:51:54 +0000

Was actually a pretty sweet little place to live. I was there yesterday with Philipp, Nadia, Romain, Emine and Mark, one of the german’s called Niko lives there, I kind of liked the apartment, his balcony was HUGE, could easily fit a fussball table, a pool table and a table tennis table, which is actually what his neighbour had done, well, at least the table tennis. So there was really no harm, our pool table still kicks ass among the “student homes” … very important.

Otherwise much the last couple of days has been about the library and the labs. Got a pretty important meeting tomorrow with a representative from Ozone1 and my professor where I will lay down the law with a new “website concept” (pretty much a screen) for one of their sub-brands called OzoneSwim. I’m pretty content about the stuff I did, did some research about some hosting plans as well – so I’m pretty confident they’ll go for the idea, the only thing is that this means that I’ll have maximum a week to do the actual HTML that is needed until next week when all the company’s representatives are going to watch our presentation, oups. Hopefully Greg has found some grants that we can get for the company and Goupta provided a promotional strategy for their PuraAir product, I didn’t run into to them today at uni, so I’m a bit worried. Often when it comes to group things with people you don’t really know or trust it’s always better to do it yourself :)

We’ll probably be going to Byron thursdag-saturday to get away from the library but still work on our Entrepreneurship idea, it’ll be good for the other boys Philipp and Mehmet to get away from all of their finance assignments (which is pretty sick how many they have). Tomorrow we’ll hopefully finish up the MarCom campaign for Foster’s Lager as well, it’s looking good for final weeks, the workload is successfully going down even though I know I will complaining within a couple of days again.

The new Simpsons movie premiers this Thursday which also happens to be my birthday, I knew they’d find a good day to open … I think that movie could make the in-the-money for most money played in, if it plays its’ cards right, it sure will be interesting to see!

Finally, solid 5-1 home victory in the season debut for my DMT!

Movie shoot and the Movies

Oscar — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:08:50 +0000

Today we filmed the second spot for our Foster’s Lager TV-ads. It really didn’t go as I would have hoped for, everything was totally out of control and I’m sure it will turn out pretty shitty. But at least it’s done now, now we can go back and focus on the other stuff, since this wasn’t really something we “needed” to do for the assignment. Next week we’re photographing Nadia on the beach for the billboards, this is REALLY something we needed and wanted to do however!

Later, Me and Joel saw Knocked Up at the movies, 8.1 on IMDB is really good! It’s not really overrated either, really funny stuff!

Foster’s Lager

Oscar — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:07:45 +0000

Today we filmed a couple of scenes for one of the two Foster’s Lager commercial we’re doing which is a part of the new communications plan for marketing communications. It went alright even though I had to “act” in it. Nadia, the sister of Sabrina (french connection) was the girl in the ad, hopefully it will be good enough to show one day, as it probably will be shown as part of the presentation for the marketing director at Foster’s (shit). We started shooting at 7 in the morning, not only was it early, it was freakin’ freezing at that time, luckily it didn’t take too long for the sun to warm the place up – but by that time I was going home to have a early siesta. Now I have a headache like never before, and it’s just 23 minutes until the last Prison Break of this season, they’re doing a 2 hours special down here to end the second season … I hope I get some answers!

Buh-bye Holland!

Oscar — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 08:29:40 +0000

What a game! Today I played in the Quarter Final of the Bond World Cup for Sweden (of course). We faced a “dreamteam” Holland which consisted of hand-picked players by our previous captain Christian. That is, our co-captain of my first and second semester was this guy Christian who this time put together his own team, picking players out of other teams that existed last semester (judas), stealing our keeper among others. Anyway, we got them by putting in 1-0 pretty early in the first half, totally unexpected and really from nothing after a corner the ball was in the back of the net. The really amazing thing about the game was that our keeper was sent off in the first half, getting them not only a converted penalty but a 11 vs 10 strength as well. However, one of our wingers, Brandon jumped into the goal and was without chance on the penalty, but after this Holland simply couldn’t score, he was really everywhere – MoM for sure! Eventually the game went into a 2x 10 minutes overtime (golden goal) and even though we had a couple of half-chances it really looked as if Holland would eventually get us, but we stood up like the Vikings we are, and with six minutes remaining of the second overtime period – their keeper (our previous one that is) totally messed things up by playing an easy backpass right into the feet of one of our strikers. Then it was buh-bye Holland!

It’s SOOO GOOOD, since this guy actually went out of our team (appearently we weren’t good enough, HA!) to hand-pick his own, right back at you. Right back at you …

Focus group

Oscar — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:41:13 +0000

Tonight we’re doing the focus group for Foster’s Lager, I’m hoping that people within the group (as it looks like right now; two aussies, two germans, one swede and one indian) will have something to say to the open discussion (questions) that we have. I think we’ll be two seminar leaders, or dual moderators (as the proper term might be) leading the discussion towards the topics we want to cover. The reason for the groups composition can’t really be answered right now, we probably wont have enough reliability for it if asked, but it’s simply the people that were available within our target audience (18-25 yr olds).

But I think we’ll do fine, we can always say that we had the germans because they’re a superior beer producing country, the swede because we’re simply heavy consumers in general, the aussies because we’re in Australia and finally the indian because India is one of the biggest and fastest growing markets, in general :) Since we’re going to do some beer testing and maybe some blind testing, we’re thinking we might take the entire group down to Don’s for a few more jugs after we’re done …

“If you’ve got ambition – go after it.”

Oscar — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:34:48 +0000

I was at the screening of Bond’s new TV and Cinema commercial today, it’s a modern and good ad (compared to the other ones they show down here) which is supposed to strengthen Bond’s position as a “Chase your dreams, bring your ambitions to life” University. The Creative Director as well as the head of the Marketing was there for a quick FAQ and briefing of the mission and what the objectives are with the commercial. The Creative Director (which is an Australian multi-award winner for marketing excellence/campaign strategy etc) stated that the goal was not only to further enhance Bond’s positioning strategy as a “market leader” within the university sector, but also to make a new point of contact with the customers, being future students. The TV ad is going to be aired between some of the most favourite shows down here, including; Home & Away, Boston Legal and Grey’s Anatomy.

It’s a good campaign overall with well-stated objectives and missions. The campaign also saw the launch of BondSpace, which is supposed to attract to the new-comers by mixing a sort of MySpace/Facebook approach, it’s a pretty desperate try if you ask me, the only thing that little website has in common with the giants mentioned is the ‘space’ within the name.

Branding-101

Oscar — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:11:03 +0000

Well, I don’t know for how long it has been official, but here is the official logo for the London 2012 olympics. Comments from the creators of the logo and general branding idea states that “Officially a brand set to “take(s) our values to the world beyond our shores”. Ken Livingston, praising the angular and disjointed design, says it “draws on what London has become”. It’s good to see that mr. Livingston thinks that London has become a place for Nazi Storm Troopers insignia which is another of the comments the logo has been getting.

Branding-101 includes “Do NOT create a logotype or other symbols of artifactual nature or value that could create negative associations to previous occuring events, OR worse – through these negative association(s) create negative association(s) with the brand.” Of course, I just made that up, but it goes something like that :)

Maybe England should think about outsourcing their next attempt …

Finally

Oscar — Mon, 28 May 2007 04:28:24 +0000

Just ran into Ray Gordan, my Behavior in Organizations teacher from last semester. He gladly reported that I’ll be recieving the Academic Achievement Award for class nr. 1 of last semester’s class. Pretty sweet, now I’m just waiting for Peter Clarke to tell me I got it for Customer Analysis/Consumer Behavior as well, I think I’ll share it with Nils in that subject. But, Boooyaa anyway!

Key

Oscar — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:39:51 +0000

After the Champions League final, no matter what the outcome is, it stands clear that Captain Fantastic and Carradona are going to sign new contracts with Liverpool. It’s being said that Steven Gerrard is going to be paid around 6 million pounds per season for 4 years which sounds like a pretty smooth deal to me! One remarkable thing is that it is the same agent that has negotiated both of the new deals for the players which probably makes him a very rich man as well. Wouldn’t that be something? Maybe I should switch to Sports Management which is one of the undergrad educations that they’re offering at Bond, might be worth something someday!

Today I have my first presentation at uni, the chockstart that last week seemed like a one time event seem to be happening next week as well. Got one major assignment and presentation due on Monday to be followed up by another Case Study and assignment due on Tuesday. Shieeet.

Oh, did you see that guy catching glasses?