Settling in

Before I get into how the whole work thing is going I need to share this little element of gold with you - you will probably need to pick it up at home as it is a link to youtube, but all I can say is I love the ninja cat. For the record I found this while logged on at home - no slacking in the office for me.

Well back to work. A couple of interesting snippets to start with:

1. AAA NCNU (and most of the US clubs) rely heavily on direct response advertising. Supporting this they have thousands of campaign numbers so they can track every promotion individually. As a result they can relatively easily identify the response rate of any promotion. I am going to investigate this one further as I would question how much wastage might occur due to the potential customer not having recognition of a common number - but then again would a prospect simple look up the phone directory anyway?

2. The team I am working with, Enterprise Strategic Consulting, does almost all list extraction for direct marketing - including all of the copy magazines (their primary magazine is called VIA), and all email contacts. Thats a lot of lists! Having said that one of the things we are going to be working on together is a more complete contact strategy. Like RAC there is much to be done to ensure the right customers are contacted for the right things at the right time. 

3. The club is right in the middle of planning a move to a new head office - which is expected to occur in about 18 months time. I will certainly be providing contacts to some of the people at RAC that made our big move three years ago so successful.

So that is the "work" things. Now onto practical matters, I have sourced great coffee just around the corner. This proved to be much harder to do than I first expected - they all drink "drip coffee" here, and for the most part like it sizzling hot. This place understand how to do a perfect rosetta, and as a bonus roast their over beans - check them out here Blue Bottle.

Also we made another important discovery - an Australian/NZ restaurant just around the corner (South Food and Wine Bar). The importance of this discovery is that they do a mean pavlova (and they also agree that the pavlova is categorically first made in Australia - so that argument is settled). My daughter Grace was in heaven, as she has truly been asking for pavlova since about day two.

On other matters I have been sent an invite to the American Australian Chamber of Commerce AFL Grand Final party. The time difference means that the final is on Friday night - but the game won't start until about 11pm, could be a problem....

More to come next week.