Month: March 2020

From ‘hipster allergy’ charges to real estate agents jumping off cliffs – thinking outside the box when marketing a small business can be make or break.

As top ad-execs know there is a fine line between an ad or campaign grabbing attention, falling flat or in some cases causing offense.

If you are the creative type a job in advertising could be the perfect fit with the right approach launching a career and creating a last impression.

And it’s not just advertising jobs that succeed with creativity. Hospitality and property roles that rely on self-promotion to stand out benefit too.

This month a stroke of comic-creativity had two Waiheke real estate agents flat out with new listings.

Brad and Tobias Roebuck-Ward of Bayleys took out a full page advertisment with themselves as comic-book style stars to kick off the spring season.

And it got them plenty of feedback.

“There are 48 agents on the island so we wanted to do something to show our point of difference,” Brad Roebuck-Ward said.

“We were looking through other advertisments and just wanted something that stood out and made people smile.”

The comic includes attempts to order coffee in terribly mispronounced French, pokes harmless fun at other agent’s advertisments and talks about their own “immaculate hair.”

The response to the advertisement had been huge for the couple with “visits to the website up ten-fold” and people recognising them in the street.

“It has been amazing, people have shouted out that they love the ad and we are flat out with listings and auctions.”

Neither have a background in advertising or marketing but are both creative.

They opened the popular Ponsonby Road eatery Adam Arnold in 2017 before moving to Waiheke to concentrate on real estate.

The couple aren’t the first to take risks to grab attention for their business.

Just this week popular Indian restaurant Satya Chai Lounge made the news for the introduction of a $5 surcharge for “hipster allergies” to its menu.

The charge was to modify the meals to fit with gluten-free or vegan diets.

Most saw humour in the post but the joke fell flat with some customers who said it poked fun at people with dietary restrictions.

Earlier this year real estate agent Jock Kooger showed how far he would go to sell a house by jumping into the ocean at the owner’s request – fully clothed in his signature blue suit and tie.

The Bayleys agent told the owners of a stunning cliff-top home in North Auckland he would do anything to sell their newly renovated house. The owner asked “Even jump off a cliff?”

So he did.The resulting video shows Kooger jumping off the rocks near the house into the water – dressed in a suit, tie, shirt and shoes.

Kooger had no regrets with the stunt and said it showed how serious he was about selling the house and the type of fun someone could have living next to the beach.

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It was called the “primordial dark age” – a mysterious period that lasted just a trillionth of a second, but saw the universe balloon by 100 trillion times.

Now University of Auckland researchers have taken a leap forward in understanding this epoch, which took place immediately after the Big Bang in which our universe was born, 13.8 billion years ago.

At this point in the cosmos, there was no light, nor were they any of the subatomic particles that we know today.

As the primordial dark age began, the Universe was filled with a mirror-smooth, cold, ultra-dense, exotic state of matter called quantum condensate.

This condensate could survive for much of this time, but eventually had to fragment into particles and radiation due to the force of gravity.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, University of Auckland researchers PhD student Nathan Musoke, Research Fellow Shaun Hotchkiss and Professor Richard Easther have shown that interactions between this condensate and its own gravitational field were captured by the so-called Schrodinger-Poisson equation.

This equation described the gravitational interactions of quantum matter.

Using this insight, the researchers performed the first numerical simulations of the gravitational collapse of the condensate, showing that the peak density would quickly grow to be hundreds of times larger than the average density once gravitationally-driven collapse begins.

It marked a key step forward in our understanding of the very early universe.

The work could ultimately allow cosmologists to better predict the properties of the “ripples” in the early universe that eventually grow into galaxies and improve our ability to test theories of the Big Bang.

In particular, it offered fresh insight into the hypothetical inflationary phase which would precede the primordial dark age and generate the quantum condensate – a key part of most theories of the evolving universe for close to 40 years.The research could also tell scientists more about the production of enigmatic dark matter – and the origin of the mismatch between matter and anti-matter in the early universe, which ensured that our present-day cosmos was built from regular matter alone.”This is an exciting result, and provides a pathway to understanding the predictions according to our theories about the first moments after the Big Bang, and to testing new ideas in ultra-high energy particle physics,” Easther said.

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Cartoonist Jim Davis is offering up more than 11,000 hand-drawn Garfield comic strips featuring the always-hungry orange cat with a sardonic sense of humour.

“There are just so many, and it was such a daunting task to figure what to do with them,” said Davis, creator of the comic strip that appears in newspapers around the world and has spawned TV shows, movies and books.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions began offering up the strips in August. The auction house is selling two daily strips each week, with longer Sunday strips being offered throughout the year.

The strips span from the launch of Garfield in 1978 to 2011, when Davis began drawing the strip digitally.

Comic art collector Nagib Baltagi has purchased about 20 of the strips and plans to bid on more. The 36-year-old said the Garfield auction particularly resonated because as a kid he loved watching the cartoons and reading the books.

Acclaimed Kiwi comic Tape Face is returning home to give audiences the silent treatment at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival.

The Las Vegas-based mime artist will make Comedy Gala appearances in Auckland on April 30 and Wellington on May 3, and perform his new solo show at the Comedy Festival from April 30 – May 24.

“I am beyond excited to be coming home to do some shows,” Tape Face, aka Sam Wills, tells TimeOut from his home in Sin City, Nevada.

“I was last there two years ago for the busking festival down in Christchurch but I haven’t performed at the New Zealand Comedy Festival for several years.”

Tape Face is among the major draws for the 28th annual Comedy Festival, alongside British comedian and star of The Chase Paul Sinha, compatriot Josie Long, American funny man Tracy Morgan, and Australian television regular Felicity Ward.

The 2005 Billy T award winner is eager to road-test his new gags and says Kiwi audiences will provide a good gauge as to whether his fresh material will hit the mark elsewhere.

“The new show has evolved, it’s a bit darker in places, it’s a bit more long-form comedy,” he explains.

“I’m definitely still sticking to the same format so it’s very audience interactive but I’m not about humiliating people or making fools of anyone.

“I rely on the audience for the show so I make sure that everyone who is on stage is treated like a star, so when they leave they get a huge round of applause.

“New Zealand audiences are a very good judge of comedy so if I can make them laugh it tends to work well elsewhere in the world. I can’t wait.”Wills’ career has boomed around the world since he starred as a finalist in the 2016 season of America’s Got Talent.

That exposure helped him win a six-nights-a-week residency at Harrah’s Casino where for the past two years he has occupied the House of Tape.

“Going on America’s Got Talent was one of the definite tipping points in my career.

“It’s very hard to crack the American circuit and comedy scene. So to go on the show and be seen by millions of people and have them like the show, it made it very easy for me to jump into the comedy scene over here.”

Passengers on an international flight were all aflutter after having a pair of feathered stowaways join them in Economy.

A GoAir plane service between Ahmedabad International and Jaipur Airport was preparing for takeoff when a pair of pigeons joined the flight.

Like a cartoon caper out of “Stop the Pigeon” cabin crew and passengers were filmed chasing the birds from one end of the cabin to the other

The scene was recorded by TV Journalist Nirnay Kapoor, who posted a video to Twitter showing the hapless flight crew in a flap.

Both birds were eventually ejected from the flight and the airline apologised to its customers.

“We understand this was not the travel experience you were hoping for and we’re sorry,” GoAir posted via its Twitter account.

The comic scene of bungling would be worthy of some Muttley-like snickering, if the danger wasn’t so serious.

Kapoor noted that the airline had experienced a similar incident with unruly birds at the beginning of the month, with bird strike causing an engine fire at the same airport.

On February 18, The Hindu reported that another GoAir flight from Ahmedabad suffered an engine fire and damaged fan blade after a bird was ingested into the right engine on takeoff.

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