In the segment, I feed prompts to a chatbot, which responds with ad campaign suggestions. As you’d expect, the ideas are incredibly bland—not awful, but nothing of real value. You’d need to keep feeding it prompts to get anything worthwhile. But that’s not the point. I’m deliberately taking the worst ideas and pushing them until the chatbot starts giving hilariously bad suggestions. It’s surprisingly easy and quite funny. The hardest part? Getting the robot voice right. The other day, I spent two hours editing an AI voice for a two-minute clip! I’m not sure how long it’ll take to shoot the full segment, but I know it’ll be time-intensive, even if straightforward. I might automate the voice alteration, but generating the clips still requires manual input, so that’ll eat up time. I have a feeling the segment will need to be pre-recorded, but John, our mentor, seems keen to keep most of the show live.

The other segment I’m working on is the audience participation piece, Market Research. It’s pretty simple—send out some questions ahead of time, have a panel discuss the responses, and read out the correspondence. Easy enough. The big challenge right now is finalising the guests and getting quick briefs sorted ASAP. I’m feeling a bit nervous at this stage but optimistic about what I can bring to the table.

7/8/24 - Episode 1 - How to Sell Road Safety

Episode 1 is live! It felt so short compared to the amount of work that went into bringing it to life, but everyone on the team is really excited about the show’s potential. It feels great to be part of such a dedicated group. We’ve got a ton of ideas on how to improve things over the next few episodes, but I do worry that some viewers might not stick around to see the progress. Not that I’m unhappy with Episode 1—I was genuinely impressed by everyone’s hard work. But what if we get way better later on and people miss out because the early episodes were only pretty good? Guess that’s the perfectionist in me talking.

Our guests were fantastic. The entire team was blown away by the level of insight they provided, both on and off camera. Personally, I found the discussion on how red tape hinders effective road safety advertising particularly striking. There’s so much room for creativity, but so much resistance to change. I also enjoyed diving into lesser-known topics like the use of memes in road safety ads. I’m hoping to keep bringing these kinds of controversial takes to the show—next week’s Kamala Harris AI ad campaign is shaping up to be a good seg!

A big thank you to our guests, the backstage crew, and everyone at Hungry Talks. I’m grateful to be working on this project with such an amazing team.

14/8/24 - Episode 2 - The Future and Ethical Communication Online

Episode 2 is out! There were definitely some ‘technical difficulties,’ and this one ended up being quite a challenge. That said, I think we’re all learning fast and getting better in our roles, and the show itself is evolving too. One of the best things about this project is the creative freedom—we can switch things up as we go. In fact, we’re completely changing the structure next week, and I expect we’ll keep experimenting as we move forward.

I was really excited to dive into the controversial Kamala Harris parody in this episode, and my guests brought some fascinating perspectives to the table. It’s becoming clearer than ever just how rapidly the reliability of information online is deteriorating.

Next week, I’m taking a break from market research, but I’ll be hosting a fun little segment we’re calling Microwave Pitch. It originally started as Adversus Machinum, which is Latin for ‘against the machine,’ but while explaining that to the team for the fifth time in 2 weeks I realised that it’s not very catchy. Microwave Pitch it is!

21/8/24 - Episode 3 - Unleashing Creativity

Episode 3 is out, and Roberto has officially arrived! This segment was actually the first idea I pitched to the team when we were brainstorming the show’s direction. Since I have some experience with animation, I figured giving the microwave a face would be a breeze... Turns out, I was both right and wrong.

While I’m used to working with Premiere, Photoshop, and occasionally Audition for tricky audio, adding Adobe Animate and After Effects to the mix really slowed things down. Animate was intuitive enough—I’ve dabbled in it before—but After Effects was a whole different beast. Luckily, Adobe’s software tends to be pretty similar, and there are loads of great tutorials out there. The two things I couldn’t quite fix? The audio (thanks to my incredibly squeaky shoes) and my rusty acting chops. Who knew that after six years without practice, I’d be a bit out of shape?
The good news is, I’ve learned my lesson: next week, I’ll definitely be practising my lines at home before we shoot.

If you’ve seen the episode, you might’ve noticed some technical glitches. With such a small team, everyone’s juggling multiple tasks, so things happen. Tbh, I have no idea what caused the audio to glitch but fuck it, we ball.

Next week, if all goes to plan, we’ll be diving into the Raygun controversy on Off to the Market.

28/8/24 - Episode 4 - Crafting the perfect message

I feel really good about that episode. I love being able to dive into topics that genuinely interest me. Honestly, I expected our guests to be more supportive of Raygun. While we all agree that bullying and harassment—especially threats—are unacceptable, I was surprised to hear our guests argue that she shouldn’t have competed in the Olympic. Through my research, I discovered that this perspective has some strong points.

I mentioned that some breakers may have boycotted the Olympics, a possibility raised by a journalist who conducted extensive research into the controversy. However, I want to clarify that I haven’t found any solid evidence to support that claim. The idea of a boycott stems from the complex history of breaking as an outlet for marginalised communities, leading some to question its inclusion in the Olympics. There was also speculation about boycotts due to underfunding—the breaking competition received very little funding compared to what would reasonably be required to establish an emerging competitive sport in the Olympics. There is also the problem that the competition was organised by a ballroom dancing organisation which may have led to a boycott. That said, I have not seen evidence that any significant competitors boycotted Olympic tryouts. If you want to dig deeper, I encourage you to do your own research.

Regarding the misinformation and accusations against her, I’ve done extensive research for this segment, and I’d like to dispel some of the rumours. The selection committee had no known affiliation with Gunn, nor did any of the organising bodies, as far as I can tell. Gunn has a strong track record in competitive breaking and was likely one of the best choices for an Oceanic B-girl at the time. Additionally, breaking was not removed from the 2028 Olympics because of her performance—it wasn’t selected as an event in2022, long before the 2024 Games.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m working on the next Microwave Pitch, so get excited and make sure to tune in for the next episode!

11/9/24 - Episode 5 - Cross-Cultural Creativity

Episode 5 is up, and it was a blast to make! We’ve been getting more quick brief submissions because most of us just finished Assessment 2. That said, we’re hoping to get a lot more submissions, which is why we introduced the mail segment. The goal was to set expectations for submission quality and encourage everyone to send their ideas in.

At first, I had big plans for the mail segment—lots of fun animations and visuals. But, like everyone else in the course, I had my own assignment to submit. So, we ended up going with a simpler, live-action approach. Sometimes less is more, right?

One of the highlights of the night came from a bit of unexpected fun. In the original script, I had planned to do the Blue’s Clues mail segment song, but when we decided to film live, I cut that section. However, Zi and Loula insisted that I should still go for it—and that they’d join in! So, on the spot, we went ahead and did it together, and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the episode.

18/9/24 - Episode 6 - Narratives with Purpose

This week on "Off to the Market," I sat down with journalism lecturer Janak Rogers to discuss the cultural phenomenon that was Kony 2012. For those who don’t remember, Kony 2012 was a massive social marketing campaign led by the charity organisation Invisible Children. The campaign aimed to leverage the power of American citizens to push for military intervention in capturing Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who was responsible for terrorising several African nations. Despite the campaign’s success in making Kony infamous, it ultimately failed to bring about his capture, either within the 2012 timeframe or in the twelve years since.

In the episode, we talk about what went wrong with this campaign and why the lacking clarity and truth in their messaging were key to the failure of the campaign.

In essence, we found that the lack of clarity was probably necessary to the wide reach of the campaign but also resulted in the massive backlash and consequences that resulted. It seemed that had the campaign been more truthful and transparent from the beginning, it likely wouldn't have gone viral. The plan itself was deeply flawed, and a clearer message might have revealed just how impractical it was.

That being said, we also highlighted the importance of preserving truth in storytelling, using Kony 2012 as a case study of what can happen when transparency is sacrificed for virality. The campaign serves as a stark reminder of the consequences that arise when clarity is sacrificed for reach.

On a personal note, I felt that my interviewing style was stronger than ever in this episode. It was incredibly rewarding to dive into such a complex topic with Janak, and I had a lot of fun throughout the conversation. Overall, it was a successful and insightful segment!

25/9/24 - Episode 7 - Generative AI

Microwave pitch is back! I had an idea at the start of the series to shoot a microwave pitch for every episode before we even started filming. That fell through because I decided to do them on the quick brief of the week which meant that I had to know which quick brief we were doing before shooting and we usually only decided that within a week of the episode. Thank god for that!

The writing I could easily have managed and the shooting wouldn’t have taken too long but the editing would have been nightmarish. I very much doubt that I would have been able to do as many interviews as I did if I had stuck to this plan. Still I think I’d have been happy doing it.

This week’s microwave pitch was a lot of fun and I was really happy with the response from the team though some of the crew did accuse me of harassing Roberto. It was a bit of a nightmare to edit because the white balance was totally off. I learned a lot of painful and valuable lessons on that one.

2/10/24 - Episode 8 - Narratives with Purpose

Something occurred to me during my segment this week. On Off to the Market I always open with the line, “where we take a break from providing the insight.” It might not be obvious to everyone why I open with that but my intention was always to make the segment about collecting opinions from people outside the show. Some pedantic readers may disagree with the term insight to describe data points but the point is that we’re getting a look into the opinions of our audience and also our industry contacts. This proved to be beyond the scope of the project so the polling got scaled back and the segment became about forcing whatever expert we had on to examine something obscure and controversial. That said, I always tried to include some data points that I had collected, in no small part because I wanted to justify using that line every episode.

This episode we did something unusual and I got to interview a good friend of mine. Tim is a researcher at the uni and a major influence on my youth so when I heard that we were looking for industry experts to bring on the show, I immediately thought of him. It took me all season and we had to squeeze in an extra guest spot to do it but I finally got him in.

In truth, I didn’t know nearly enough about his research before this segment. I was surprised to find this wealth of knowledge right under my nose. Luckily I have plenty of time to catch up with Tim and exploit his expertise.