British Columbia is well known for its mountain bike trails and excruciatingly beautiful scenery. Our plan is to meet in Vancouver, then drive, fly and ferry to remote places, set up camp and go riding.

Inspired by Lone Wolf – Matt Hunter

JOB TITLE: SENIOR PRODUCER
REPORTS TO: CEO
LOCATION: Redfern
POSITION TYPE: Full Time
START DATE: Feb 2012

WHO WE ARE

TCO is a Strategic & Creative Communications company focusing on consumer engagement. We assist our clients and partners in navigating their communications in the Earned Media and Owned Media environments. Our core competences are Content and Social Media.

TCO works with some of Australia’s leading companies including: Coca-Cola, Westfield, Nestle, Fosters and more.

THE ROLE
Producers are responsible for facilitating a project from beginning to end. They are involved in every stage of the television program, film, video and TVC etc; overseeing the project from start to finish, both in a studio and on location.

Essentially team leaders, they are supported by production assistants, coordinators and managers, depending on the size of the project.

Producers work closely with directors and the other production staff on the shoot. Increasingly, they need to have directing skills themselves. They are responsible for keeping production within the allocated budget.

Creative input varies, but producers may have the ultimate say on the final product.

In theory, the producer deals with all the practical and political aspects of keeping a project running smoothly, so that the director and the rest of the team can concentrate on the creative angles.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Setting and monitoring appropriate standards for the delivery of quality service in terms of accuracy, timelines, reliability and consistency.
• Monitoring and reacting appropriately to issues relating to Customer Satisfaction & Customer Relations
• Closing deals with clients to approve proposals & budgets
• Reading, researching and assessing ideas
• Writing project scope documents and pitch presentations
• Building and developing a network of contacts
• Writing budgets in excel and Traffic
• Maintaining the integrity of TCO templates
• Use “Traffic” to perform the majority of tasks, organize resource and workflow to meet deadlines
• Effective time management
• Hiring key staff, including a director and a crew to shoot films or videos
• Controlling the budget and allocating resources
• Organizing shooting schedules
• Troubleshooting
• Supervising the progress of the project from production to post production
• Holding regular meetings with the team to discuss plans and briefs etc
• Acting as a sounding board for the director and or editor
• Bringing the finished production in on budget
• Writing or overseeing contact reports for client meetings
• Actively participating in team meetings
• Communicating the completion of tasks
• Follow TCO policy and procedures

ATTRIBUTES AND ABILITIES

• Have the ability to identify and develop talent
• Adept in building, maintaining and developing strong relationships with internal teams, external partners, clients and agencies
• Have run a production division of an agency or a production business
• Have a very high understanding of sales and marketing of a production business
• Are very clued up on digital content creation and delivery
• Possess entrepreneurial flair
• Be an empowering leader
• Operates at a high level of integrity and delivers high quality work.
• You are precise and accurate with an eye for detail.
• You are passionate, open, and creative and have an incredible memory.
• You are curious, inspired and responsible for yourself and others.
• Superior communication skills with the ability to communicate a vision, persuasiveness and a skilled negotiator
• Be confident and outgoing, you will be working with exciting and fun brands, there fore you need to match the level of enthusiasm and passion
• Bring skills to share and develop within our small, but passionate team

TCO COMPETENCIES

• Initiative and drive for results
• Teamwork
• Communication
• Customer Service
• Strategic Thinking
• Leadership
• Creative Problem Solving
• Learning and Development

EXPERIENCE

You will have 5-6 years industry experience and will have worked your way up through the ranks as Production Assistant, Production Coordinator and as a Junior Producer.

EDUCATION

Tertiary qualifications are preferred in any of the following areas: Film and Production, Advertising and Media.

TO APPLY

Please send your CV and Cover Letter to hr@theconscience.org

First up, the backwards bend diamond shaped handstand. “what?, there’s no way in hell…” Could be heard from the back row (I like to keep my lack of co-ordination to myself). After failed several attempts, accompanied feelings of irritation, frustration and self consciousness pulsating through me, i managed to control my flailing limbs and haul myself in an almost vertical upside down position. Poise and athletic grace aside… hey I had kind of done it.

Now I am not going to recount each and every one of the 26 other (impossibly agile) positions, but what I do want to share is the overarching message that the teacher kept reminding us of when we were going through the practice:

Stay connected, present and focused.

If you’re  anything like 99% of non yogis out there, frankly this is a challenge in its self. It’s often easy to get bogged down with the sheer size of the task at hand, the daunting to-do list, that nagging feeling of terror that has been keeping you awake at night.

The trick (and I say this at the the beginning of my quest for enlightenment) is to break down the sum of the parts and stay focused and connected to one task at a time. It is only then can you become aligned to accomplish the overall goal.

Graceful?

Is it the range of frames or the quality lenses or is it just the fact the brand has been built up over the years by premium celebrity tie-ups?  Steve McQueen popularised the 714 folding model in the original Thomas Crown Affair, and subsequently Pierce Brosnan & Daniel Craig have both sported many pairs in their roles as James Bond.

But I think the richest experience I have had with the brand is this video.  Persol prides itself as being “hand made in italy” and you often loose sight of the origin of words particularly in a world of marketing jargon and clever copy that massages the truth around brands. But this video really helped bring it back to basics.  Yes you need the high profile celebs to build the credibility, yes you need the film endorsements to propel the brands luxury values, yet “hand-made” suggests a craft and that care & attention have been inject into the construction of the product – so its nice to see a brand getting back to basics and providing that look into the “reason to believe” they’re worth the price tag.

For me its this authentic view into the construction of product which has made them that ever-so slightly more justifiable…after all I won’t be telling my friends that “Daniel Craig wore them” I’ll be saying “they’re hand-made, don’t you know!!”

Persol – The Magnificent Obsession of Hand Making Persol

The video is below (a warning, unless you’re a complete sociopath the video below is likely to bring a tear to your eye).

To put into perspective just how powerful this video has been here are some stats:

Shares on Facebook: 789,804

Shares on Twitter: 84,911

Total views: 3,267,497

Total YouTube ‘likes’: 243,167

Obviously, Jonah’s message is a very serious one. To inspire those that are bullied and broken down day after day to stand up and say ‘no more, I am stronger than this.’

What the rapid spread of this piece shows us is that it’s not just LOLs & sex that get shared online, but it’s those pieces of content that connect on a level that inspires a visceral reaction, whether that be laughter, sadness, happiness or arousal, as well as pieces that allow us to connect ourselves with a cause greater than the sum of it’s parts.

At some stage in our lives, most of us would have had an experience with balls or loons, or maybe just balloons. Whether it is a tactile or visual experience – decorations at a birthday party, water bombs in the schoolyard, puffing it up and letting it fly around the room, whoopie cushion effects or playing balloon tennis – balloons bring colour and excitement to our lives, not to mention deep relaxing breaths trying to fill them up.

An invention from the 1820’s (thanks Wikipedia), balloons have been providing endless uses from entertainment, decoration, medicine & flight. What Wikipedia won’t tell you is that they were used recently at our client xmas party to create an experience, where we filmed people losing their minds & inhibitions (reconnecting with their inner child) in a pit of balloons.

From a marketing & engagement point of view seeing the behaviour that a simple idea generated was really interesting, an “oooh that’s cool” moment. On a personal level, the experience evoked nostalgic memories of childhood. It reminded me that no matter how serious, shy or just plain boring people can sometimes be, when put in a room filled with coloured balloons & a video camera they loose their minds, and the layers of inhibition quickly peel away to reveal a playful juvenile side. Sort of like going back in time and seeing grownups as children acting out their natural uninhibited behaviour.

It’s an interesting thing, that the older we get (& the more serious we become) the less we laugh at life the way we did when we were kids. The truth is, we don’t always have to get caught up in the seriousness of life and over-think ideas that are wrapped up in layer upon layer of strategy. Sometimes all it takes to create a ‘balloon moment’ is a simple idea that embraces our inner child & reminds us to enjoy life a little more.

The battle of the Cafes.

For the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on 2 cafes that share a close proximity. Lets call them Cafes ‘a’ & ‘b’

12 Months ago, there was only cafe ‘a’ & ‘d’. Cafe ‘a’ was the place to go, it was constantly full of hipsters, had a barrista who brewed consistently decent coffees, and was run by friendly, personable staff who would remember your name and coffee order. Then something happened. The cafe was sold by its existing owners and a new owner took hold. From here there was a sudden decline across the board, the staff started turning over and the service went from friendly, chatty banter to order your coffee, wait silently and get out. The quality of coffee made started varying as different barristas of varying skill level worked behind the machine and there was a lack of energy about the people who worked there.

Then something happened. A new cafe, cafe ‘b’ opened across the road, this cafe was a small, no fuss event. It has a rotating roster of about 3 barristas who all brew a decent cup and 4 service people all of whom were friendly, happy to be where they were and energised. They were selling a great coffee blend, were always keen to have a chat about life and really tapped into the hipster vibe of the area with a mishmash of furniture and milk crates out front.

Suddenly cafe ‘a’ was near empty and lines snaked their way up Redfern street as people waited on their morning pick-me-up from cafe ‘b’, all the while smiling and chatting patiently in the knowledge that they would be getting great service and a terrific product.

So what’s the lesson for businesses in this?

The lesson is to never get stagnent, never take your eye off the prize. We must seek excellence in all that we do, because if your service or your product decline in quality all it takes is for someone else to step up, be relevant and do it well, and everything can fall apart.

As a bit of a synopses, the paper took a sample of people from five countries (United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China) and queried them about the personality traits they would assign to the various screens in their lives. The outcome is the personification of devices resulting in Archetypes that help to identify the personal role these devices play in peoples lives, with TV fitting both the Everyman & Joker archetypes, PC’s falling into The Sage, & Mobile Phones; The Lover – their most personal and intimate relationship.

All of this provides a terrific insight into the psychological relationships people have with their devices and thus how we, as marketers can utilise different devices to leverage these pre-disposed mindsets. Want to connect on a deep, personal level? Mobile might just be the right channel. Want to provide rich, deep information for high-consideration purchases? An online/digital solution may serve you best.

Whether you buy into this methodology or not, the paper is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in human behaviour and technology.

You can grab a copy of the white paper over here

It’s pretty simple, one person raps over a beat to the camera and tags the next rapper by saying their name. The next rapper will do the same and so on… To date the Rapper tag series has been running for just over a year and has accumulated a total number of views well over the magic 1,000,000 number.

The success of rapper tag as a phenomenon lies in that it has empowered artists to create content for their fans, whilst they are simultaneously able to compare and align themselves with their peers; in the same way that they could back in the days of Myspace top friends. The model myspace helped pioneer in which artists could use owned channels to pubicly align themselves with other artists to expand their fan bases has always worked. However, rapper tag has taken this model to the next level by turning it into an independent artist driven form of content creation for fans. The artists involved have diversified the touch points they use to talk to their audience, taking control over their owned channels to engage each other and their audiences. In doing so they are (albeit on a small scale) subverting the power of music directors, labels, and media; who in this case are being exposed to the content after the fact; rather than controlling who sees what, and when they see it.

Since it’s inception rapper tag has spawned an underground (copycat style) rapper tag here in Australia, an arabic rapper tag and recently a U.K version kicked off by one of the U.Ks most talented and successful MCs, Mystro.

In hindsight, I properly would not have cut all my hair off, bought that fluro pink jumpsuit (that looked great on the model), or stressed so much over that presentation.

But the thing with hindsight, if I did know then, what I do now, would it change things or would I still be battling albeit with a different set of unknown variables?

Hindsight will always be there to fill the gaps in knowledge, but for the time being lets live in the present. Let’s concentrate more on the things we can change and use hindsight to give us the learnings required to give us the upper hand in our next challenge. Let’s turn hindsight into foresight!

Clearly it was all about Boy and Bear on the night. Humble guys who I suspect are going to get better at perfecting their acceptance speeches. Boy’s take notes from Guy Sebastian or the lovely Kylie.

Goose bumps from Gurrumul and also Delta. AMAZING performances that stopped the show.

We officially love GOTYE, best performance of the night in my book but Boy & Bear came in a close second. Thank god we squeezed in a photo before he won his ‘Best Male Artist’ gong. What a sweetie.

Oh Kylie what a legend. Down to earth, honest & open she really is the poster girl for Australian music. What a speech and she was clearly very honoured. The only disappointment was that she didn’t perform. Next year please Kylie.

Of course the night wouldn’t be half as fun if we weren’t sharing it with some of our lovely clients and partners. You know who you are but we also captured a few of you on film, check out our Facebook Page.

And finally, big thanks to the guys at EMI who know how to throw a party. Who knew the door blag of ‘we are from TCO we just produced the ARIA’s', would be the golden ticket to entry. There were some mean shapes thrown, several sightings of Benji & Joel Madden and perhaps a few drinks too many. Pretty successful end to the evening we say.

So here we are, the day after the night before, and what did we learn on one of TCOs biggest nights of the year? The ARIA’s went digital and the people have spoken…The viewership in traditional terms was solid but the ‘social-shere’ went nuts with the #ARIAs dominating the Twitter trending charts. We also saw some great positive sentiment around the performances and the quality of the broadcast across both Twitter & Facebook. Just the live streaming views to come in but dare we say it, this is one for the TCOs history books.

Bring on next year’s ARIAs, we are already excited!

I came across this clip and although it may not be amazing to some, its more about the sheer dedication portrayed in having such a talented skill, this elegant form of ‘break dancing’ if i dare call it that.

In any choreographed routine, you’re expressing who you are. In a creative industry such as ours we’re surrounded by talented skills and as with a choreographed dance, so too do we, as a brand, as TCO  express who we are in the work that we do for our clients. Brands have a past, present and future and need to express who they are to stay in the minds of the consumer. We will continue to ‘choreograph’ stories for the brands identity, doing what we love and loving what we do!