It’s episode 75 of the Future Tribe podcast and Germaine and Kelsey discuss brand refreshes, changes with Google and domain updates.
This season we’re going video first – bringing you the latest news in design, tech, branding, business and everything in between. Watch the video on the Future Tribe YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7d4S3w5eRTkEB0SDgk6WDg
Your hosts this season are Germaine Muller, Founder and Managing Director of Futuretheory, and Kelsey Allen, Marketing Coordinator at Futuretheory and the Manager of the Future Tribe Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/joinfuturetribe).
What we talk about
- .au domain name update
- Volvo logo refresh
- WooCommerce celebrates 10 years
- ABC America logo refresh
- CNN leaves Facebook in Australia
- Absolut Vodka refresh
- Google updates
- NAB and TAB's 'JAB' campaign
- LogoDesignTheory YouTube channel
Links from this episode
- https://facebook.com/groups/joinfuturetribe - Join the Facebook group
- https://www.instagram.com/futuretri.be/ - Follow us on Instagram
- https://futuretheory.co/podcast/ - Future Tribe Website
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/germainemuller/ - Germaine on LinkedIn
- https://www.instagram.com/germa_ne/ - Germaine on Instagram
- https://futuretheory.co/ - Futuretheory Website
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically and as such, may contain various spelling and syntax errors
Germaine: [00:00:00] Hello, feature tribe and welcome to this episode of the podcast or the video, if you’re watching us on YouTube. Links to the YouTube channel down below, and we’ve also got a future tribe clips, YouTube channel that you can check out in the links down below. That’s a bit of a breakdown, so you can watch short videos, nice and condensed of the different things that we talk about every episode. Speaking of episodes, this week’s episode we’ve got about 10 different things to talk about. Starting with an update on the .au domain name. Volvo refreshes their logo, Woo Commerce celebrating 10 years and the ABC America logo getting a refresh. And we’ve got Kelsey with the rest of the items.
Kelsey: Yes. So we’ll also be talking about CNN leaving Facebook in Australia absolute vodka has had a refresh of the bottles [00:01:00] and branding a couple of, well, one Google update, I should say. NAB and TAB’s JAB campaign, which has been circulating in Australia, and logo, design theories, YouTube channel.
Germaine: That’s a YouTube channel that I just put in there because I’ve been checking it out and it’s really quite good for anyone looking at designing their own logos.
Anyway, I’m Germaine and we’ve also got Kelsey let’s roll the intro.
Right. All right. So .au domain name update. I mentioned this to you yesterday, Kelsey. I attended a webinar that went for an hour on the domain name, which seems like a bit excessive considering that we’re still six months away from the release of that domain name. For those of you who didn’t watch the previous episode, I think it was two episodes ago that we spoke about .au which they’re calling .au direct
There were some interesting things that came out of it, but the main thing is that, one, it’s going to [00:02:00] be launched on the 24th of March next year, so we’re looking at just under six months if my math is correct. And interestingly, this is something that I didn’t realize, and I think it will be interesting to see how they actually monitor this, but anyone, I mean, technically I think it’s anyone who resides in Australia can register .au domain which is different to the .com.au. .org.au et cetera, because those domains actually have eligibility criteria that means that every time you register a .com.au for example, you need to give in an ABN and they need to check that and confirm that you, you have an ABN in Australia, and then they’ll give you your .com.au domain, where as .org.au requires you to actually be a ACNC registered not-for-profit or the there’s a few things around it, but you’ve essentially got to be a legitimate business. And I [00:03:00] didn’t realize that .au direct’s gonna be so much more open. Have you ever tried to record a domain name yourself and had
Kelsey: No, not myself. But I mean, I guess this will make it a lot easier. If somebody like me did want to go registered domain. Cause I don’t have to go through all the loopholes of .com.au, not loopholes, jump through hoops, that’s the one I’m looking for. To go through, to get, you know, .com.au so might open up a lot for smaller businesses. Individuals that kind of thing.
Germaine: Exactly. I think the goal there is that if you’re a startup if you’re there, they spoke a lot about people who sell on platforms like Facebook marketplace who want to register a domain or have their own website and take that jump over.
But haven’t been able to, because they don’t want to go through the expenses of say getting an ABN because. You don’t necessarily need an ABN to trade in Australia. So this opens up the potential for [00:04:00] them to create websites. And they’ve also spoken about companies who wanted to set up sort of temporary landing pages or do temporary marketing campaigns could use a .au initial signals suggests that dot AAU direct is going to cost about $9 a year. So quite affordable compared to. Yeah. Yeah, really it’s quite cheap. And I think that is potentially because they just need to verify probably a residential address. And that’s it versus needing to do like an ABN look up and, and confirm the details there. So opens up a few different possibilities moving forward and I think I, I’m still very excited for it. There’s still the stuff around, you know, priority periods. So if you’ve got a .com.au or a .net.au or a .org.au you can still you get that preferential treatment for the first six months. So. Yeah, there’s, there’s nothing changing [00:05:00] there. Another interesting thing I found actually was that the auDA who manages the .au domains in Australia mentioned that they saw, from memory, it was about a 5% increase in domain names being registered during the COVID sort of pandemic period.
Which, yeah, it’s being studied by economists because that, that’s obviously an expense that businesses have born in the middle of a pandemic in the middle of a period where some businesses have struggled. So they’ve sort of brought that up as an interesting point, because you would assume that, you know, a majority of these businesses, I would assume actually registered a domain and probably paid a third party to build a website for them. So yeah, I think I found that really interesting. But
Kelsey: yeah, it’s not super surprising though, because obviously with the pandemic, all of a sudden you’ve got all these lockdowns people can’t come into shops. And I imagine a lot of those businesses did rely on that foot traffic. And they had to do something that to put [00:06:00] cost into something, to keep their business going. And if that was a website and a domain, that makes a lot of sense. And in the big scheme of things, not that expensive, I think.
Germaine: Definitely. And it was probably one of the few places where they could actually spend money as an investment into the business, because with everything shut down. What else would you be spending your money on?
Another interesting thing that they pointed out was that there are about three and a half million. I think it was actually 3.3 or 3.4 million domain names registered in the .au sort of space. So that’s a pretty decent number. That’s above 10% of the population. If we were to attribute a domain name per paying individual and that’s forgetting, you know, the .com’s and the .co’s of this world where people have registered or trade under a D domain name, extension that isn’t in Australia. So I thought that was quite a good webinar, they’re going to keep releasing more information moving forward, and for our [00:07:00] customers at Futuretheory we’ll keep you in the loop as well as more news comes through on that, and we’ll be helping customers register their domain names as well. We’ve got six months, you know, from, from the 24th of March. So there’s no mad rush there. But we’ll be, we’ll be providing more information as, as more information comes afoot. The next one is the Volvo logo of refresh. Let me share this with everyone watching so that you can see what we’re talking about.
I, I think this is a misstep. I think this is, this is backwards. I actually didn’t realize how weird the Volvo logo was until I looked at it in isolation like this. I’m not the demographic for Volvo I think they’ve been trying to be, become more hip, more young, more sporty, but they’ve still [00:08:00] got that sort of, you know, older architect or sort of quote unquote soccer mum sort of vibe to them. But what’s your experience been with Volvo Kelsey?
Kelsey: I think I just have this idea that it’s kind of an old people brand. I’m not really sure what they’re trying to do with this refresh. It kinda just looks like clip art to me, which again is just like an old person thing. So I’m not sure if that’s really helping. Yeah, I know what to think about it, to be honest.
Germaine: Well, it’s, they’ve done something that we were seeing. I feel like every single mention, and later on this episode, we’re going to talk about ABC America’s refresh as well. Every single recent refresh has been taking a 3d logo and flattening it.
VW has done it. BMW has done it. So it’s not, it’s not a weird thing for them to do. I just think the end result comes out very weird that, that, that arrow on the top right. Is just weird. It’s the only way I can describe it. [00:09:00]
Kelsey: Yeah. And the the word mark, because they haven’t really changed the word mark in terms of the font and that and lining up with the thickness of the circle, it doesn’t sit right with me for some reason. Like, it just doesn’t look like they’re intended to be joined like that.
Germaine: It’s quite miss mismatched as well, because it’s a serif with a very minimal graphic around it. I also wonder what they would do on social media, because this would not scale that well, unless they just get rid of the Volvo wording in the middle.
Kelsey: Yeah, I’m not sure on that. I think, I mean, there’s a lot of brands. I think that struggle with the social media scaling, but maybe that’s not their priority in that sense. Probably not too concerned with this social media sort of stuff. I think they would be putting their marketing elsewhere.
Germaine: Elsewhere I think the only thing worse than the logo [00:10:00] refresh is the application on these cars.
This is a concept car application of the Volvo logo. And this is the, the mark on one of their more recent vehicles. I
Kelsey: It’s like they’ve got three different versions.
Germaine: And it looks like a pimple, like,
Kelsey: yeah, I mean that one, that looks more like the old logo. The one that we’ve got on screen at the moment, I feel like that arrow is in a different position to where it is in the main logo we were looking at.
Germaine: Yes, it is sort of further, closer down to the word mark,
Kelsey: and they’ve got that extra element of like the stripe that goes through and I can see they’re trying to do a 3D effect, I guess, on the edge of the stripe, but I just don’t know why. And I don’t know why they’re introducing all these other elements rather than sticking to that brand.
Germaine: I think. And I don’t, I don’t don’t know for sure whether Volvo’s necessarily struggling, but this might even [00:11:00] be the sign of a company trying to find sort of the next step. The next wave, they, I think have very nice, a very clear image of being safe. And that’s why that old person sort of brand comes to mind because they characterize what older, more responsible individuals would be looking for from their vehicles.
And, you know, if, if you want to prioritize safety as a number one Volvo I think has, has that brand image. But. Yeah. I don’t know what they’re trying to do. And then, then you’ve got the Volvo group logo, which is just the Volvo texts, but I think it’s actually spread out. Is it, it’s spaced wider?
Kelsey: I dunno. I’m just, I’m really confused by all, like this just three or four different styles. I feel like I’m looking at, it’s kind of like, they’ve got the concepts that they were working on and just going all right, let’s just make this the brand. Throw them all out there and hope [00:12:00] for the best.
Germaine: Yeah. Let’s just make all of them. The, the various representations of the brand. The only thing consistent through here, I think is the actual Volvo wording. Despite the spacing slightly changing. So maybe in amongst all this that’s actually there, the one thing that stays constant and the only other thing to that they want us to take out of it is that there’s an arrow pointing to the top.
Right.
Kelsey: Maybe, I dunno,
Germaine: this is, I guess, a message to everyone listening that you can really over-complicate things I think. And if you just come up with one, maybe two very variations stick with those, you would end up confusing people, way less than Volvo has managed to do in this, in this example. Jumping from Volvo to WooCommerce. You’ve heard of WooCommerce before?
Kelsey: Yeah. I think it’s through WordPress. A lot of people use it [00:13:00]
Germaine: a hundred percent. So WooCommerce is huge in the e-commerce WordPress sort of space. They’re celebrating 10 years since they first launched their first iteration of the plugin. So that’s quite a long time to be in market.
Especially with so much competition around. They’ve been down the, the, the plugin itself WooCommerce has been downloaded a half a million times. So that’s a long way of saying 500,000 times. So actually, no, hold on. I’m completely wrong. No I’m way off. It was, it’s been, it’s been downloaded 5 million times as of 2014.
Kelsey: That makes more sense.
Germaine: Half a million times after 16 months in the wild. So after 16 months of being launched, so
Kelsey: I was thinking like only half of. But I’d say half a million customers or downloads or whatever. Seems like not a lot because that’s really [00:14:00] quite small.
Germaine: I was thinking half a million as active installs. But even then that wouldn’t be much. It was acquired by automatic. They got guys behind wordpress.com. The guys who own wordpress.com.
Kelsey: I think we talked about them a couple episodes ago, we had a talk about automatic
Germaine: we would have they do come up, they have to come up. I mean, they are, to an extent they are WordPress. Automatics owned by the founder of WordPress itself. So it was, yes, it was acquired in 2015, and I don’t think they’ve released install-based numbers since then. But I think they generally say that they’re running on more than 5 million websites, which is quite a solid number. I think, in, in the, in the world out there WooCommerce still has a strong hold on the e-commerce space. But I just thought I’d mention the fact that they’re celebrating 10, 10 years of product just because they’re quite a significant plugin and we’re fans of WordPress, we use [00:15:00] WordPress, so a bit of a shout out there.
Jumping to the next one, another logo refresh. And this is what I mentioned earlier into when we were talking about the Volvo refresh. And that is the ABC America, not to be confused with ABC Australia, which are completely different entities, despite the same name.
They’ve done something very simple again, you know, gone from a 3d look to a completely flat look. I’ve seen people comment that, you know, the ABC logo is a masterpiece, but I don’t necessarily agree. But w w what do you think Kelsey?
Kelsey: I mean, it’s simple, there’s like four circles. That’s quite consistent.
Yeah. I mean, they have really simplified it and given the ABC word well, letters some more space slightly more consistency in the spacing of the C as well, between the [00:16:00] sort of edges of it. I like it. It’s not offensive. It’s nice and simple. They haven’t sort of gone away from their roots of that classic design of just clean and simple ABC.
Germaine: Yeah. I think my issue with people saying that it’s a masterpiece is that it was created at a time where there really weren’t many other logos out there. In this day and age, I think we talk about it as a cop-out. If you put anything within a circle or a square, like that’s just the easiest way to come up with a logo that works, that is balanced because you just put it within a shape and whatever you put within a shape, like a circle, it becomes fantastic and easy to use because it’s, it’s a circle you can put circles anywhere and they don’t feel misplaced or miss misfitted. But then looking through and what, what else they’ve done with the application of the logo, I think that’s where truly shines. They’ve really modernized a brand that has existed for so [00:17:00] long in a way that feels modern, feel, dynamic and potentially even refreshing, like circles are hard to do differently these days. And I feel like this animation was showing on the screen, for example is quite unique.
Kelsey: I really like it. I think it would be really effective obviously as well on TV, where ABC operates, and as you said, like, it can be a bit of a cop out with having the circle, but because they’re such an established company, they can continue to use the circle without it being a cop out. And they’ve managed to, as you said, refresh it in a.
Germaine: Well, they’ve got the history
Kelsey: really like all those animations
Germaine: yeah. Yeah, this is, this is wonderful. Like a very obvious filled in circle for when they’re sort of co-branding with one of the shows and one of the programs and then making, making it see-through with just the circle outline for, probably for when it’s on screen mid shows so that it’s not sort of getting in the way too much, but it’s still [00:18:00] quite nice.
And by the way, I apologize if my dog’s barking is coming through, she is going crazy. She’s been going crazy for the last few days. So we are still working from home. I can’t wait to go back to the office just, just because Kalu is getting a bit, bit crazy these days. So I do apologize for that.
And looking through again, you know, wonderful use of circles, I think I, I think it’s quite unique. And I’m surprised that they’ve been able to, you know, do circles in a different way.
Kelsey: Yeah. I like the way, for those that are looking at the screen at the moment, the way they’ve got that spotlight, it’s just, it’s very creative. It’s it just really, that can use the circle to put a highlight on what they need to, whether it is the logo or take away the spotlight by making it transparent. However it is, I think they’re just using it really effectively.
Germaine: This one’s an interesting application, I think though, where they’ve, it looks fine, but I wonder how you would define this as a [00:19:00] rule because they’ve sort of just plopped the ABC logo
Kelsey: Yeah a bit of an overlap on an e and not on the rest of it.
Germaine: Yeah. Like, I, I don’t know how you would define that, but then again, they th they’re not a small business. So they’re not, they’re not necessarily relying on the most efficient way to apply things that they’d have five sets of eyes to look through something before it goes out. If not more so they can probably afford to do things that are less traditional, less, less rigid, because they have the talent to then, you know, go through it all and make sure that it all works because even, even this application here which is supposedly a record sleeve which, yeah, I’m not, I’m not sure about some of these applications. Let’s put it that way.
Kelsey: I feel like there’s a quite niche applications though, on the whole where they’re using the logo sort of onscreen or on their [00:20:00] billboards, things like that, I think that it seems pretty good. It’s just those weird situations of merchandise that they seem to be trying to do something funky with.
Germaine: Yeah. I wonder if it’s even merchandise these days, like who’s selling records with their own logo on it, but it might just be one of those cases of trying to find examples that don’t give away, you know, upcoming products or don’t give away anything that still let you display and showcase your new logo in style. And, and in a unique application. I, you know, we’re going through mock-ups and going through examples of new logo, refreshes, a new logo launches. I think I’ve seen my fair share of really weird applications and ABC just couldn’t resist having, having their own variation of it.
Next one is CNN leaving Facebook and Australia. Have you heard about this?
Kelsey: No, not too much. If you want to walk me through it.
Germaine: So I’m going to try and find the actual court case that, that led to this. But it was, [00:21:00] here we go.
It was the Dylan Voller who took to, a case to court that essentially made the courts decide where the media organizations should be liable for comments left on their Facebook pages. This all happened back in 2016 after TV expose on the mistreatment of minors in the criminal detention system showed a photo of Dylan Voller hooded and strapped to a chair when he was only 17. That photo was used for their, for their articles of various media outlets posted on Facebook, et cetera. And then commenters falsely accused the victim in this photo or the subject of this photo of serious crimes, such as raping an elderly woman, which is huge. Obviously, you know, not, not the kind of thing that you just want to be throwing around. But what essentially happened out of that was that it was taken to court. He took it to court and saying that these media organizations that are responsible for defamation amongst a bunch of things [00:22:00] and courts, the courts agreed with him. that these platforms are responsible for the comments that are then play it. So the, the outlets are responsible for the comments placed on these platforms and the platforms aren’t responsible for the comments. It’s a, it’s a can of worms, I think, because it then comes down to, okay, who’s responsible for this thing who’s enabling.
What, where do you draw the line? So on and so forth? Because I think, you know, you get the there’s a bit of an old school reference, but you know, phone numbers written in toilets stalls, are we then making the, the people who constructed the toilet responsible for the phone number, being handed out, you know, it’s a very, like arguably very different example, but it’s, I guess what I’m trying to bring up is who’s the enabler in this instance who then becomes responsible because is it the company that manufactured the permanent marker in that example? [00:23:00] Is it Facebook in this example?
Kelsey: I think social media, it’s a very difficult thing to compare to other life situations because it’s a very unique environment. And I think when it comes to figuring out who’s responsible for some of these things. I personally really like, I agree with this court case and sort of outcome of it in that if you’re a media organization and you’re putting a story out, that could be, you know, the subject matter could sort of be a bit, what’s the word, polarizing or, you know, people are going to have opinions on whatever the subject matter is like a wide it’s going to be. Yeah. Right.
Exactly. And of course, you’ve got the comment system there where people are going to be saying their piece. And I think it really is on the media organizations to sort of monitor what’s going on in the story that they’ve put out there in the content that they’ve brought up as an issue, or is it subject to sort of say, you know, this comments not okay, this is racist or derogatory or [00:24:00] whatever it is, and be in control of that, because I think something like Facebook that’s, I just don’t know it’s their responsibility. They’re providing the platform. But when it comes to the media organizations, they’re the ones saying, hey, here’s a story to think about and discuss and whatever, but you know, we’re not going to have responsibility of what you say about it from that point. That just doesn’t quite line up with me.
Germaine: Two questions there though. One what happens when it’s not so black and white? Like when it, when the comment is more like defamation or calling someone say ugly, like who do you decide? Like who’s to decide, okay. You know where you cannot say this in the comments. And then at what point does a comment section then become just more or less pointless because no one can provide their opinion. So that that’s one, one sort of, I guess a retort to that, and then the other is shouldn’t Facebook, just to let you not allow comments like YouTube does that, YouTube let you upload a [00:25:00] video and disabled comments.
Kelsey: Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to like, not having an opinion, I don’t think that’s the case.
It’s more a case of don’t be racist or harmful essentially. So you can still have an opinion. You can still say your things, but if it is harming other people, that’s where the media organizations need to step in. And like all of the media organizations for ever have had codes of ethics that they need to operate by and they’ll understand that pretty well.
And I think it’s, you know, there is some times when there is like the gray area where it can be a bit difficult to distinguish between you know, real ethical issues or sort of, yeah, it can be, it can be a gray area sometimes, I get that, but I think on, in most cases, the media organizations should be able to identify that’s not just an opinion at this point. Like that’s a harmful comment. We need to sort this out.
Germaine: That’s it that’ll require a lot more staff though, because I would assume, per like big news article, [00:26:00] it would probably take five times the effort to monitor the comments on that news article than it took to push that news article out there. I think you could have one journalist and an editor look through it and then push it out to the public. Maybe a photographers is three people, but, reading then through say a thousand comments and deciding which one, what’s what I think it’s just easier to allow someone to disable comments, allow a media organization. YouTube does it, it, it annoys me because there are instances where I see relevant or current information being pushed out. And I just want to go see what the general feeling around that topic is, and its comments are disable for, for better or worse. I think ABC in Australia, we were just talking about ABC U S but ABC in Australia, which is a government media, organizational government, government funded media or public funded media organization. Disabled comments on, on a lot of their media and their news articles. [00:27:00] I just feel like that’s the easiest way because otherwise, you go down the road of media organizations that lean one way or the other, just deleting comments. And then, you know, okay, if you get comment gets deleted, do you then get the opportunity to go back and question why it was deleted and just creates this, you know, trap of conversations around stuff. And then I would argue for most people, it’s just easier not to have a comment section.
Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, I think in this kind of situation, when it comes to involving a law and things like that, it’s more an issue of if you’ve got an article and every comment, or like a large group of comments are problematic, I think it’s more about like the general sentiment. I think, you know, if you’ve got one comment from one person that comes through, I don’t believe you can be responsible for that as a media organization, but when it’s like a very widely.
Germaine: [00:28:00] It’s clearly going in one direction
Kelsey: Yeah. Yeah. It’s sort of, it makes me think of the Tayla Harris photo. So the AFL women’s footballer who had that photograph of her kicking, this incredible footy you know, like up in the air, it was amazing. I think it was seven news that posted the photo and comments that came through were just vile and sexist. And then they got to the point where they just deleted the photo and then had to put out another post where I think they sort of apologized for what those people were saying and really condemned that general sentiment that had come through.
You know, obviously if it was just one or two commenters that came through and said some bad stuff, wouldn’t have been as big of an issue, but because it was so significant, that’s when they had to step in. And I think it’s more situations like that where there’s, more, not so much overwhelming, but more significant of a group of people who are commenting these horrible things that they need to be held accountable versus just like one or two people. Cause you can’t control those one or two people. [00:29:00]
Germaine: Yeah. I, I do wonder like CNN is quite a big media organization, but I wonder if they even ran the numbers and sort of said, okay, so w we need to monitor our presence in Australia but does it actually make a business case for them? Does it make business sense? It probably doesn’t because I don’t think CNN’s big like don’t get me wrong CNN’s huge so they might be getting a significant amount of revenue from Australia, but I’d be very surprised if that is the case. And so they just looked at it and sort of said, because media organizations, these days have presence in every city, every country, because it’s, I mean, you can just run the same operation out of, out of your US Head quarters and have all these specific pages around and have a, have one person working within that country and yet have a great, I guess what we’re much, much bigger presence within that nation, despite not [00:30:00] having the actual physical presence in that nation.
And maybe this is maybe that’s, that’s a good thing that organizations that don’t actually have a presence in a UN nations market don’t then get to manipulate. Well, I think, you know, media. Media manipulates. At the very least, you know, it has a certain bias and pushes out information with that bias.
Maybe, you know, if CNN doesn’t have the presence here and therefore I think doesn’t have as much of an interest in maintaining a balanced opinion and in maintaining decorum within Australia, because no one’s going to be affected. I mean, they might have one staff member here. That then, well, it’s their call.
It doesn’t make sense. Get out of here. If you’re going to be here, staff it up and, you know, step it up. You can’t just make money out of a country or a people and not invest into that past just pushing the same news article, just branded to a different [00:31:00] nations URL or Facebook chat. Facebook page.
Kelsey: Yeah. Very true. I don’t blame them for leaving. I think it makes sense. I don’t know.
Germaine: Yeah. I would argue that there are too many news channels out here, out here. Well, out there in general for, you know, in Australia for 25 million people, I mean, how many, just how many Australian media channels are there? Let alone the Al Jazeera CNN BBC’s of this world that also focus in Australia. There’s, it’s fantastic to have differing opinions, but when those, when they all don’t have the same buy-in into, into a nation or into a demographic, I think that then leads to, to them doing questionable things because they don’t have to face the repercussions.
From that sobering conversation pun intended onto absolute vodka.[00:32:00]
They’ve refreshed their packaging. And there’s two reasons I wanted to bring, bring up and talk about vodka, Absolut, vodka, refreshing things. One is that I love that they’ve and I’ll share this for anyone watching on YouTube or the watching the video episode they’ve simplified things down, but not changed things too much at the same time.
But the biggest thing for me is that they’re Swedish, I didn’t not know this
Kelsey: Really? There you go
I mean, they have made a, more of a focus they’ve got in the new packaging Swedish vodka, and then down the bottom in the embossed part of the glass country of Sweden. Whereas I think previously it’s got Sweden mentioned in the, right at the bottom,
Germaine: but I’ve never noticed it before.
Kelsey: And in the, in all the cursive writing, which I’ve never bothered to read but is an image to me.
Germaine: I’ve never bothered, bothered [00:33:00] to read that either.
I think with making the Swedish side of things more obvious, I think Absolut has been able to differentiate themselves. The vodka market is absolutely like inundated. From a past life where I used to be around vodka a lot more. There’s a lot more vodka brands out there then most people would even realize, but this allows them to, the mention of Swedish for me wrongly or rightly sweet Swedish vodka sounds more premium than, just Vodka in general, and that’s been the biggest takeaway from it, for me from this refresh. What are your thoughts though?
Kelsey: I am a little bit in the middle of the moment. I think I, I don’t know. The previous bottle is so iconic and I feel like it’s just, you look at it and you know, it’s Absolut without even really need to need to read because of just the big bold text and that cursive, as we said, we don’t never bothered to read, [00:34:00] but it’s just, it’s absolut. That’s what you see. And they’ve also gotten rid of the, so I think on the back of the bottle, they tend to do like a bit of a graphic. And in that image above you could see the A with the big a dot. Looks like they’ve, it looks like they’ve taken that away. And they tend to use that space as well. Previously for like really special edition bottles, which have all these different graphics and colors and blah, blah, blah. So they’ve really pared that back quite a bit in the new one. I think they’ve got like a little house or something at the back. If you scroll down a little bit, I think I saw a little hint of it, whatever that graphic is , it’s much more simple, yeah, which maybe is the place where they manufacture it.
Germaine: Here we go. One source one. Okay. So this, this is what used to be in cursive.
Kelsey: Yes. Okay. So they’ve simplified that. And I like it. I just wonder how they’re going to do those special edition bottles and things in the same way, whether they’ll continue doing that or whether they’re [00:35:00] really simplifying and focusing on that one new brand that they’ve got. I do like it.
Germaine: Can I just mentione this photography as well, they’ve, I think they come across as very premium, even more premium than, I mean, I don’t even know how much a bottle of Absolut vodka would cost. I haven’t. So
Kelsey: it’s one of the cheaper ones
Germaine: I was going to say. I didn’t think it was, I mean, it’s, it’s they call themselves a premium vodka. It’s probably. More expensive, I’m going to do a search as we. It’s, it’s a liter cost $60. So it’s not.
Kelsey: It’s not the really premium stuff. That’s like 80 or 90 Australian it’s, but it’s also not the, you know, $40 bottle that you pick up, you don’t really know what the brand is, you’ll never see it again, but yeah.
Germaine: Okay. Yes. Something, [00:36:00] one, one vodka that I like is Belvedere. And so in comparison, Belvedere is $104 for a one liter bottle versus $60 for a one liter bottle of absolute. So it is it’s not a, you know, it’s a middle tier sort of product. But to me it comes across as quite a nice product and this photography certainly aids in that.
Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, I think this new branding that they’ve got is really simplified. And I think that it seems to be a bit of a trend where like the simpler it is the more premium it looks and the more info that’s on there and the more colors and blah, blah, blah, the cheaper it can look. So it seems like maybe they are trying to make their product a little bit more premium or at least appear more premium without actually increasing price or anything.
Germaine: Well, you never know maybe the price will increase. Exactly. Yeah.
Kelsey: Hopefully not. I feel like it’s just such a staple, like good choice. You just know that it’s not going to be super terrible, obviously not the best, but it’s just [00:37:00] right there in the middle.
Germaine: It’s it’s a decent mixer. Wow. 400 years of Swedish tradition behind it. So again, had to mention this one. I think it’s, they’ve done a good job, ultimately simplifying things at the very least and they haven’t messed with the Absolut vodka word, mark, and lock up. And really they’ve moved a few things around in the bottle, but they’ve, to me it’s a, it’s a tasteful refresh versus going, going a bit too far with things.
And they’re also like looking through all the collateral or the examples that they’ve shown us. It. It wasn’t as much of a jump as, was it Moet that we talked about and Chandon LA a few weeks ago? Where Chandon made a clear change in well, not, not a change, but a clear step in a certain direction that absolute has avoided going.
Yeah.
Kelsey: I saw a bottle of Chandon in the wild the [00:38:00] other day, and I thought it did look quite nice. It was pretty fresh.
Yeah. Yeah.
The new one with the map of the world thing that we talked about. Yeah, it looks really nice.
Germaine: I’ll have to take a look next time. I’m moving on Google updates. We talked about this while I pointed out to you yesterday.
They making of a few different changes. This one’s from this coverage is from tech crunch, looking at the company. Google is essentially providing, trying to provide more context around websites, descriptions essentially just trying to do what they’re always trying to do, which is be the best.
Provider of answers for your search terms. And this has manifested in a, in a number of different ways. So in this, in this image here you can, you can see, I mean, if you do a Google search yourself you can see the changes that essentially allow you to look into and look at the look at the.[00:39:00]
Source of information and more information around a website in particular. So if I was to search say feature theory
and we go further down and this is just the LinkedIn result it essentially creates a pop-up that shows you more information. The source, which is LinkedIn in this instance tries to link link to the Wikipedia feeds. So it’s sort of taking things that we’ve had in the past, like the, the knowledge graph that we get on the right hand side and putting it all in together so that you can see more information in one, go.
In, in this example where looking@featuresthroughyour.com today, you it was first indexed by Google, more than 10 years ago. Connection to the site is secure. So essentially providing a lot more information that if you knew where to look, this information did already exist and you could find it, [00:40:00] but they’re making it even easier than before.
Hmm. Do you have any thoughts about.
I was just kind of thinking, I wonder where that the average Joe we’ll look into that. I’m not sure how often I would myself go and click on those little dots and explore that information. Cause it’s sort of like, I’ll just click on the website. I don’t really know what information it gives me.
That’s helpful to me.
I think what it’s doing. Is trying to provide more information if you’re looking for that information and make it easy to get that information. Because like I said, all that information we’ve been able to find in the past. But it’s taken a bit of work particularly around when that site was indexed.
The quick way to get that doesn’t come to come to mind. So this has making it just a lot, lot easier. I think, and ultimately the, the only thing, you know, apart from not doing, you know, not doing bad things, they companies like this can do is [00:41:00] provide us with the information so that we can at least make decisions ourselves rather than Australia obscuring that information from us.
So. It’s just a, it’s a step in the right direction, I would say, or at least a step in a better direction. It feels like more
transparency,
I suppose. You’d never hurts, never hurts. Onto something close to home, NAB and tab launched the jab campaign. I wanted to say that I had to say that.
You said you’ve you’ve seen NAB, so essentially actually very quickly NAB and tab or NAB and tib, a bank and a betting company. Have replaced the first letters in their names to say job and to promote getting the COVID 19 vaccine in Australia. And we bank with NAB. So I’ve, I’ve been seeing jab a whole lot of times.
So, you [00:42:00] know, they’re clearly having the intended effect. And have you seen this out in the wild yourself,
Kelsey: Kelsey? Yeah, so I. I’m a big footy fan. Love my footy. And the other day
Germaine: yesterday I fell,
Kelsey: I fell Finn. And yeah, I saw a certain, the, I fell obviously more sports. They’ve got the big Venice that go around the ground as the barriers and yeah, they just had an eBay, but obviously it was JV in the next.
I think it’s right in serif font, just their logo, just circling through. And that was it with the little staffing as well. Not much more to it literally just jab in the, in the logo. I thought it was really cool. It really got me. I mean, I had a conversation with my partner about it at the time, and we were just chatting about the brand and getting vaccinated and all that sort of stuff.
And it was started the conversation. So I thought it was really fun.
Germaine: Th the, this question. I mean, I think through this every single time I see something [00:43:00] like this around brands getting on this almost bandwagon for their own marketing benefit, or is it out of the goodness of their heart? I don’t, I can’t say.
Conclusively, you know, it can point to one or the other especially when you’re talking about a bank and a betting company, I think.
Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes to this kind of topic, it’s just a classic CSR move. And I think brands these days really understand that they need to do things for social.
Good. Not only because it will impact. You know, their bottom line and everything, but just because it’s the right thing to do. And I think that, you know, the employees care about it for one and all of their customers care about it. It’s just doing the right thing by those people, which also does have an impact, obviously on their bottom line.
It’s sort of all win-win, you know, it’s, it might be coming from a selfish kind of place a little bit, but if it’s doing good, is that the way. [00:44:00]
Germaine: Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. They could be doing a lot more selfish or they do a lot more selfish things that are a lot worse. Then, you know beneficial. So this is not bad at all.
For those who don’t know the acronym, what does CSR stand for?
Kelsey: Sorry. Corporate social responsibility. It’s basically just all of the activities that our company will do. That’s sort of beyond their. Business operating. So whether it is those charitable acts or letting your employees take a day off to volunteer somewhere, all of those sorts of things that aren’t as direct directly impacting the company, but a good for the world, I guess
Germaine: that’s exactly how companies can be more responsible in the same way that I think all individuals should be as well.
So this is certainly a, a good CSR. Initiative and push. Yeah, even though especially tab could be argued as to what the ultimate goal is, but we can [00:45:00] leave it at that for now. And the last one to finish off is I came across. This you should kind of we’ll call it a logo design theory.
Have you heard of the book by the same name before Kelsey?
Kelsey: Oh, maybe that sounds a little bit familiar when you sort of put it in the context of books, but I’m going to just confidently say no though for now.
Germaine: Yes. It’s a, it’s a fairly established book by an established individual. And essentially it goes into how, how branding design really works is, is how they, how it’s positioned.
It’s been around for a number of years as well. And what, what the, I forget the name of the guy behind it, I believe, no, I still can’t find it, but, we’ll have the link to the YouTube channel below. I’ve watched a couple of the videos out of interest. And essentially what’s been done is that the book has been translated [00:46:00] into short, you know, 5, 10, 15 minute videos.
And at this stage looking through it’s not getting anywhere near the recognition that I think it, it potentially should, but then again, it’s getting, you know, anywhere from the, they’re getting anywhere from like 10 to 80 views per video. I think it’s fair to say that, you know, we have similar type of content and it’s not necessarily the kind of content that gets a lot of views. So it’s not surprising that even someone who’s a lot more established isn’t getting a lot of views, but really good information for anyone who’s either in the design world, the graphic design world, logo, design world, or if you’ve got a brand and if you, if you are a CEO or have a startup and you have to think about these things, but don’t necessarily have the budget to go to an agency.
This is free. I believe it’s actually ad-free as well. So you don’t even have to deal with YouTube ads, so it’s not monetized. [00:47:00] And yeah, I just wanted to mention it because there’s some really great, great tips here. A lot of content, but yeah, th this is accruing years, if not decades of, of knowledge from this individual.
And you’ll have to put up with, a bit of old school, I guess, old school -ness is the best way I can. I can term it. Let me see if I can share a very quick and I hope I really wish I would find, here we go. I’m just going to find this guy’s name. A Michael Shumate. Might be the worst pronunciation of that name.
I’m just, I’ve just found his paperback. But let me do a quick share of the video to finish off this episode, just to show you what I mean by slightly old school. Okay. [00:48:00] Is that audio coming through?
Kelsey: I didn’t hear anything then. No,
Germaine: no. No,
Kelsey: I don’t think so, but I already sort of see what you mean by old school.
Germaine: Yeah, no, no audio, but you can see what I mean. I’m just scrubbing through it’s, it’s a calm older gentlemen talking through, it’s in fact to the extent that it’s a bit confusing to me as to whether this video was done recently or not.
Kelsey: Because the yeah.
Germaine: Makes it things. Yeah, exactly. The background’s old school, but the type makes it look newer.
Kelsey: Well didn’t have any of these logos been redone recently?
Germaine: Oh, good question. None that come to mind. These all look like recent versions of the logos. Yeah. If I’m, to be honest, but yeah, this is, this is probably the best example of, so, but what I would say is that a lot of the principles being discussed are timeless a lot of the, [00:49:00] the principles still stand true and hold true today because at the end of the day, I think good design is timeless and good design is forever. So I wanted to bring this up and mentioned it to you all. As always have all these links in the description. But fantastic YouTube channel to check out fantastic resource.
And I’ll be sharing this channel shortly into the Future Tribe, Facebook group as well. Again, link for that down in the description. That’s it? Unless I’ve forgotten anything else, Kelsey,
Kelsey: I think that’s everything
Germaine: that is everything fantastic. Well, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. I think it’s time to roll the outro. Catch you later.
Kelsey: Catch ya.[00:50:00] .