RADAR says 'Pictionary is genius!' The exhilaration and pressure, the simplicity and the strategy…
Your drawing skills could well be lackluster, but it is the visual communication that is key. I wonder how the 'creative' studio would fair against our 'clever' accounts team?

Oh, can you guess what Lee, our Senior Creative has sketched up here? I believe he's gone all Mr. Squiggle on us so you might want to view upside-down-upside-down.

Ever sat at your desk and looked out the window and dreamt of turquoise blue seas, spans of white sand and lapping up a few cheeky cocktails on an idyllic island paradise? I know we have! With Club Med’s new iPhone app soon to be available in Australia, you can daydream away about your next holiday and plot out where the best 18 holes are in Bali or where to score the best sunbed in Cancun.

RADAR will be onboard to help with the launch of the app down under and entice all you eager holiday goers to jet off to one of their world wide resorts. Keep your eyes peeled for this on this one the app store over the next few weeks. 

At RADAR we love EOFY. Not only for the pleasant surprise of a tax return (yay to unplanned savings) but also because it’s one of our biggest events on the RADAR social calendar.

Like the X Factor, each year we try and make it bigger and better and with more surprises and twists than the year before. Last year we went to Byron Bay for a lazy seaside overnight break, which can be summarised in three words: dreadlocks, lighthouses and late night kebabs.

This year, we wanted to do something totally different. So we went to Tasmania. Before you snicker sheepishly and ask if we visited the inbred bakery, let me tell you that Tasmania boasts something that none of our other states have: The Mona.

If you haven’t heard about the MONA (museum of old and new art) – let me put it in a nutshell. Guy makes a mint from Casinos, has more money than he can spend so develops a thing for art, finds himself a pretty cool cliff-face in Tasmania, builds a forward-thinking gallery and makes it free for the public. No biggie.

Fast forward taxi’s, magazine swaps on the planes, cheese and crackers, and another taxi headed deeper and deeper into dark clouds and we’re there. On first impression, the museum looks like an odd piece of architecture on a putt putt course on a cliff by the sea – not your traditional art gallery in a busy city centre. This set the theme for the whole experience: expect the unexpected.

On arrival we’re handed touch-ipods to enable a sensory experience of all of the artworks inside: the ipod contained artist statements, auditory soundtracks, additional pictures and artists biographies. It even allowed you to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the artwork and then showed each artwork’s popularity based on these ratings.

The interior of the museum is like a labyrinth. It’s dark, underground and seems to defy order – there’s no set direction or even defined levels. It could be the setting for Alice in Wonderland. We spent over 3 hours in there and still didn’t see everything.

The artwork, photography, sculptures, installations, assemblages and video/audio expressions were curated with the underline theme of death and sex. A visual depiction of what we avoid and what we pursue. Although this sounds slightly dismissive, it was quite powerful and thought provoking. Most importantly, it made us think. You can see from the pictures what was inside but keywords describing what we saw include raining words, videos of self-mutilation, vaginas, mummies and found objects. It was cold, smelly, loud, quiet, busy, empty and felt like a black whole: time didn’t exist.

After wondering around the gallery and casually bumping into our Director while he was admiring the mechanical faeces demonstration, we finished off the day in the very classy bar. Most of us kept our minds and mouths busy by guzzling a few too-many vino’s and some expensive cheese – perhaps to ease the awkwardness we all felt from what we just saw. Overall, it was an amazing experience and somewhere we definitely recommend you visit – even if it’s just for the vagina soap sculptures. 

In case you're wondering, its a skull, covered in lady beetles, with a bird in its mouth. 

There is a certain obsession with anonymity in recent years that has led to a new trend online – the anonymous blogger.

There is an obvious plus side to this – saying whatever, however, to whoever - without the concerns of a future employee, old school friend or even parents reading it. But is that a good thing?

Unfortunately there’s been a recent backlash to anonymous blogging, due to an ongoing battle between industry leaders and smaller minority groups. These smaller groups, most likely on the inside of the advertising/marketing industry, write insulting, ruthless and at times heavily emotional comments usually at the expense of their competition. 

The irony is that anonymous bloggers are now turning off their “hide my identity” button to participate in the debate. The Communications Council got the ball rolling by starting the conversation on anonymous blogging and trying to ban trade press from publishing such comments.

The argument is that perhaps rather than banning, we should moderate what is considered appropriate or even enforce a type of registration.

From a personal point of view, I think I sit on the fence on this issue. The argument of free speech is an obvious but boring one. More importantly I see it like this – if I asked for someone’s opinion (face to face) on a recent ad campaign that I worked on and they didn’t like it, it’s unlikely they would curse and shout profanities. So why do it online?

From a professional point of view I think the more people who do it anonymously, the less credible each unconstructive comment becomes. So there aren’t any winners because the commentators are left anonymous and useless and those who the comments are directed to are left aggravated and annoyed.

So what’s the outcome? I think there is a lot of work to do to find a happy medium between healthy constructive opinions and low blows to the competition. However the recent trend in the media appears to be pro-anonymous blogging.

Let’s look at it this way – Julian Assange has a lot of supporters, especially within our industry, but where would he be if it wasn’t for his “anonymous” helpers?