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The Rise of Anti-Advertising

By Anya Ow / March 16, 2019 / Comments Off on The Rise of Anti-Advertising

We get it. It’s hard for ads to stand out from the crowd. There’s a lot of noise out there and it can feel like the big, expensive, TV campaign you’re funding is just going to sink into the void, making only a tiny splash for your efforts. Stuff like ad jingles don’t just cost […]

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Zara Rebrands, And Other Scary Stories

By Anya Ow / February 23, 2019 / Comments Off on Zara Rebrands, And Other Scary Stories

If you’re mired in the particularly tiny, shiny bubble of the internet populated by designers, you might have noticed that Zara has rebranded. Rebrands aren’t unusual nowadays, particularly for fashion brands. Instead of taking the usual step of rebranding into a featureless sans-serif, Zara chose instead to move to a more beautiful, taller serif that […]

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Remix Culture and Advertising

By Anya Ow / February 16, 2019 / Comments Off on Remix Culture and Advertising

Near the Christmas break, I participated in a black market exchange. It did not involve drugs. I’d become a fan of a Chinese web novel with a multi-part animated series that had amassed a considerable following of fans. This meant fanwork being produced at fan conventions, where rows of booths sell fanart, pins, and other […]

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Google Chrome, HTTPS, and the HTTP Purge

By Anya Ow / February 5, 2019 / Comments Off on Google Chrome, HTTPS, and the HTTP Purge

Are you browsing a website on Chrome? Head to your website and check out the address bar. If you’re a business, ideally your IT people have already switched over your site from HTTP to HTTPS, given you the nice green lock icon and a ‘Secure’ statement. If they haven’t, or if you have no IT […]

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New Year, New Year's

By Anya Ow / January 10, 2019 / Comments Off on New Year, New Year's

It’s the New Year. We’ve woken up hung over from parties or jetlagged from travel. It’s the first week of work. There’s a whole new year to look forward to, at least once the hangover goes away and we’ve cleared off all this leftover champagne. Something’s always surreal about the first week. Here are our […]

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TV vs Digital Advertising

By Anya Ow / September 8, 2018 / Comments Off on TV vs Digital Advertising

Here in Starship, we listen to a lot of podcasts. The creative director likes a mix of American politics and true crime, our social media manager’s trying out Serial, and I’m more of a law/politics person. Unless it’s Game of Thrones season, then it’s Game of Thrones all the way. Pity we’ll have to wait […]

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The Dark Side of Stock Imagery

By Anya Ow / September 1, 2018 / Comments Off on The Dark Side of Stock Imagery

If you’ve been hanging around the ad agency echelons of Twitter, you’d have seen this thread: So today I’m going to tell you the story of How I Ended Up with my Face On a McDonald’s Advert in China – A Cautionary Tale. Six or so years ago, a friend in Canada posted a pic […]

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Political Advertising

By Anya Ow / July 28, 2018 / Comments Off on Political Advertising

It’s politics season for Australia. I think. I’m not really what you’d call plugged into the Australian political scene — US politics sucks up so much air sometimes that it’s hard to remember that we actually live on the other side of the world. Australian politics has been trying its best to compete with the […]

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World Cup Finals and Marketing

By Anya Ow / July 14, 2018 / Comments Off on World Cup Finals and Marketing

The World Cup Finals are coming, and you probably know the date — unless you live in one of the few countries in the world where football isn’t a religion. The World Cup (yes, the one involving ‘soccer’, which by the way really should be just called football) is unofficially the world’s most popular sporting […]

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Big Data and Creativity

By Anya Ow / July 7, 2018 / Comments Off on Big Data and Creativity

My cat is a purebred Birman, a fluffy fur-shedding machine created to have the temperament and self-preservation instincts of a soft toy. A year ago he ate an unknown substance that gave him acute pancreatitis. After several vet visits, a large bill, and an absolute refusal to switch to a fresh meat diet to save […]

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