The award is granted in recognition of contribution and advances in technology and strategies to reduce or repair our impact on our oceans.

The GhostNets Australia program is a fantastic example of innovation in action. Solving our environmental problems needs a healthy dose of lateral thinking in order to first see a solution and then brainstorm a way to make it happen. What particularly impressed us was how they have initiated a program that turns ugly ghost nets into beautiful artwork that is sought after by esteemed collectors of Indigenous art around the world. Not only this, GhostNets Australia is working to determine the source of the nets and resolve a complex social issue by capacity building and partnerships.

- David Lennon, director of Sustainable Oceans International.

We are very honoured to have received this award. This recognition of all our efforts will be a huge boost to our team’s morale as we launch into the next phase of the program – tackling the source of the issue and working directly with fishermen in south east Asia. Thank you.

- Riki Gunn, Coordinator of GhostNets Australia.

Visual Obsession have worked alongside GhostNets Australia for the past three years, including filming, editing, project management and graphic design.
At the 2011 Queensland Multi Media Awards, Visual Obsession and GhostNets Australia won Best Logo Design (Not For Profit) and Best Environmental Story for the documentary titled “The Young Man and the Ghost Net”. This documentary was also selected from numerous video submissions, as one of only nine international documentaries to be highlighted at the 5th International Marine Debris Conference (5IMDC) Movie Night in Hawaii March 2011. In 2012, GhostNets Australia won the Creative Arts Category in the World Wildlife Fund Earth Hour Awards in New South Wales… a very popular choice.

A big congratulations to the hard-working and dedicated team at GhostNets Australia!

 - The crew from Visual Obsession

CLICK HERE to read more about GhostNets Australia and the fantastic work they do.

With a clear win for the mayoral position in Cairns, Mr Manning and six of his Unity team are set to join council ranks. Visual Obsession is proud to have assisted with this successful campaign by delivering their message throughout the campaign with the use of online and print media.
The message of Bob Manning and his Unity Team was clear, and how to extend this to the community was the task set for Visual Obsession. By using progressive technology and accomplished staff, Visual Obsession produced a TV Ad, various print media and advertising, the Vote Unity Website and set-up the Social Media marketing.

The outcome of the election held by Cairns Regional Council was a victory and the final count revealed Mr Manning held 55 per cent of the mayoral vote which was 34 points clear of his closest rival, Ms Schier. This success demonstrates the community’s support of a back to basics spending. The Far North’s economy is struggling to recover from the global financial crisis and Bob Manning has vowed to restore confidence and opportunities, synonymous with the wave of success in the 80’s & 90’s.

It’s easy to talk about what’s wrong with the economy in Cairns but it’s going to take a huge effort to make it right.

- Bob Manning

Bob Manning and the Unity Team’s key objectives are:

Cairns Economic Revitalisation:

• Tourism – restore Cairns as one of the top Australian destinations
• Retention of ‘trading port’ status
• Marine industries – ship repairs, white boats, grey boats, protection and preservation of strategic land holdings and port access corridors
• HMAS Cairns – increased Naval

Economic Diversification:

• Education – attracting international students to Cairns
• Tropical expertise – develop potential/specialisation
• JCU – on campus college / growth

Cairns Regional Council performance:

• Continuous improvement in service
• Capital expenditure – not to exceed Council’s forecast capacity

Aviation and Commercial Potential of Cairns International Airport

Visual Obsession are working with Bob Manning and the Unity 2012 candidates to get the word out about future opportunities for economic growth in Cairns city & the Cairns region, and the need for strong leadership to take hold of them. A major hallmark of this campaign has been to avoid “putting down” rivals and instead focus on positive messages about Unity 2012 and what they stand for.

The Unity 2012 candidates are a group of community-minded people who have made a decision to step into local government where they can contribute to the development of sound economic management and planning strategies for our region.

The 2012 Cairns elections will be held on 28 April at a polling booth/voting booth in your division. Learn how to vote, and which candidate is running in your division now.

Visual Obsession has been working on producing:

• Website
• Facebook marketing
• Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter marketing
• Business cards for all candidates
• Door Hangers for all candidates
• Corflutes for all candidates and other outdoor signage
• Magazine advertising
• Promoting Media Releases including the Cairns Entertainment Precinct and Connecting Cairns WiFi Plan
• And more to come…

What a fantastic concept! Travel Experience is a locally owned travel agent, based in Mareeba and Atherton, specialising in group tours and holiday packages all over the world. Travel is their passion, and they are keen to share their experiences with you to help you find your way around the world.

Travel Experience required a new user-friendly website that would be eye-catching, inspire a feeling of trust and enable users to view the many unique and exciting holidays that the the team have on offer. Initially most people only want to see what you have on offer that is going to meet their needs. If the product interests them, then they will look at your branding, logo and who you are. With this in mind, we designed the the Home page, or “shop front”, with a clean and un-cluttered look and feel, easy navigation, a great hero-shot and a good clear message. This creates a positive emotion and connection, which is essential for successful business today.

We also designed and developed an online banner advertising campaign for analytics. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn – Visual Obsession integrated social media with the website to further engage the community and drive traffic to it. Travel Experience is all about great customer service, so good two-way communications using Social Media, which is measurable, is a fantastic way to build confidence and trust in potential clients.

What are you waiting for? Check out the new Travel Experience website to see the fantastic travel specials they have on offer!
http://www.travelexperience.com.au/

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The use of the mobile web has exploded over the last couple of years, with 2011 being the first year that Smartphones have outsold PC’s and Smart phone Internet use tipped to surpass that of PC’s in the immediate future. With the iPhone being the dominant Smart phone platform since its release in 2007: the release of platforms such as Google’s Android has launched the mobile web into unprecedented levels of use.

Australia has the highest use of Smart phones per capita, with 40% (and rising rapidly) of the population connected to the Internet via their mobile phone.The use of mobile Internet services has also been accelerated by social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. For example: Facebook has around 800 Million monthly active users and about 350 Million of those are accessing the site through their Smart phones.

So after extended legal battles, Facebook’s Timeline is now here. So what do we need to know?

Business Branding 
First of all, what does this mean for business branding? So far Facebook has neither confirmed nor denied whether brand pages will get a layout similar to Timeline. We can observe however that Facebook is trying hard to tap into the “personal branding” scene, using subscriptions. Time will tell whether this takes off as Facebook has long been seen as a very personal network. So is it time to start personal-branding on Facebook the way we do with LinkedIn? One very important point to consider in that discussion is privacy.

Privacy 
Because Timeline makes past events very visible, it may display things you wish certain people didn’t see. In my opinion however, this is a major plus. All of this information was already out there, available to snooping people and indexable by search engines. People are now being forced to confront what they had preferred to ignore. If you choose to market your own personal profile as representative of your business or brand, you will probably wish to hide most of your past from the public and your subscribers. Luckily Facebook has provided an option to do just that. If you want to restrict everything you have ever shared to be viewable only to your friends, go to the Privacy Settings page (http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy) and click “Manage Past Post Visibility”. You can then go back through all of your posts and choose individually which of them you want to share with the public. For each item you can also hide it from your timeline or share it with only a certain person or list of people. To check what it is looking like, use the “View As…” tool. You can find in-depth information about these privacy options here: http://www.facebook.com/about/control

Cover Photo 
One of the most noticeable differences in the new layout is the massive cover photo that you can now add above your profile picture. We are predicting a mini-industry will spring up around this, similar to the myriad of “MySpace Layouts” providers that were around several years ago. So far, people have begun using their cover photos in some very creative ways. Here are a few of our favourites.

• A Filmstrip
• Some Fake 3D
• Some Real 3D! (Apparently it works if you have the glasses)
• Recursion
• The Simpsons
• The Brady Bunch
• Mobile Apps
• Personal Branding

If you have been inspired, download our Photoshop Template and get to work! Post a link to your creative cover photo in the comments below.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

On Thursday YouTube released the biggest design overhaul in its entire 6 year history, in a bid to change the whole way in which people interact and use the website.

Google’s vision for YouTube is that it’ll become a complete media destination, one which will rival Cable Television. The newly designed homepage has become a hub for the viewer’s content, with a feed running down the centre of the page featuring channels and videos based on site viewing trends and even what their friends on Facebook and Google+ are watching.

This comes after YouTube has announced various changes to the site including a new Analytics system, and announcing that it will be bringing 100 new channels of original premium content to its site. And with its recent announcement of Disney coming on board with putting original content on the site, YouTube is looking to become an ideal spot for advertisers.

With YouTube’s emphasis on promoting itself as an Online Television Platform, this could potentially change how we currently do online video marketing, changing the way we think about promoting content and businesses on YouTube.

In the meantime, we’ve updated our YouTube page to the new design and we’re excited to see what new strategies we can form to take advantage of this new design. Check out our new channel here: Visual Obsession YouTube Page

Great News! Our client EcoSplash has done it again! Still pumped about our awards at the annual Queensland Multimedia Awards, one of which was for the EcoSplash logo design, we are happy to announce that an EcoSplash Pool Design has just been awarded it’s first international Gold Award of Excellence at the recent APSP Presentation at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas/ USA!

We are thrilled for our design and concept to achieve international recognition. Placid Pools as the builder has been awarded a staggering total of 5 Bronze, Silver and Gold Awards in the international arena. We are delighted to share the good news with you.  ~ Amanda Spelta, Co-Creator of EcoSplash

And this award was just the tip of the iceberg… earlier this year, EcoSplash not only won the “Innovation of the year” award at the Tropical Innovation awards, but Treasurer and Minister for State Development and Trade, the Honourable Andrew Fraser, announced that EcoSplash had won funding from the “What’s Your Big Idea Queensland?” grants scheme on behalf of the Anna Bligh government!

Well done to the the fantastic team at EcoSplash, what a fantastic year it has been for you!

Click Here to view other work we have done for EcoSplash.

• Queensland Media Awards 2011

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• Queensland Media Awards 2011

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• Bob Hale Award – Best Advertising Campaign Across All Media for Ergon Energy – Power Savvy
  
• Best Multi Media Presentation – Training/Educational DVD for Condoman
• Best Environmental Story for GhostNets Australia
• Best Logo – Not For Profit for GhostNets Australia
• Best Logo – Corporate for Placid Pools – Eco Splash

Our other nominations were:

• Best Logo – Retail for Quaint Wondecla Quilting
• Best Logo – Service for Speedweld
• Best Environmental Story for Ergon Energy – Power Savvy
• Best Corporate Identity / Stationery Package for Placid Pools – Eco Splash

This fantastic outcome was made possible by our many amazing clients. We are so lucky to have really great clients that give us the opportunity to create and design award-winning products that they are happy with.

Saturday night was a win for each and every member of our professional team and really demonstrated that collectively we can produce work at a very high level. Together we can achieve more than any one of us could achieve on our own. This level of achievement is only possible when everyone works together to an end goal. Our aim is to see each one of our clients getting a good return on investment from their marketing strategies.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Here is a video of some of our behind the scenes work:

Visual Obsession was contracted by Mango Productions to carry out a still and video shoot for Tourism Australia for the New7Wonders of Nature campaign.  The New7Wonders of Nature is a global search to recognise the 7 most wondrous natural sights in the world, as voted by the world community. Visual Obsession contracted WIN News to join them and capture news footage to be aired that night nationally across Channel 7, Channel 9, Channel 10, and ABC.

The Scene:  Deep in the heart of the coral sea, patriotic Australians and enthusiastic travellers snorkled and splashed their way to the world’s most scenic and remote polling booth which was placed on a Great Barrier Reef sand cay 30 Kilometres North-East of Cairns.

Because we needed to capture the scene from the air and on the ground we broke the production team up into two main groups

- Visual Obsession production manager, Corey Austin.

The ground crew: Corey Austin: Cameraman/Production Manager, and Ewan Cutler: Production Assistant.

The sand cay was located two and a half hours by charter vessel from the coast of Cairns. This meant a bright and early start (2.30 am) for Corey and Ewan.  All equipment was methodically checked off, including all audio and camera gear. The crew and talent were then ready to depart the wharf by 4 am.  Once the boat came to shore the props team set up a temporary voting booth equipped with an iPad. The team then commenced their section of the shoot of the polling scene and interview.

The air crew: Kevin Austin: Cameraman, and CJ McNamee: Still Photographer.

The air crew started their day at 6 am. After loading their HD video and still cameras they set off to Great Barrier Reef Helicopters at Cairns Airport. Kevin and CJ set up the HD video camera onto a Gyro Stabilizer. Both doors were removed from the Turbo Jetranger with a clear line of sight to shoot the talent voting. The ground crew had finished their shoot and were safely back on board the boat. Once they received the “Okay” call, the helicopter commenced the flight to the sand cay. Both the Aerial and ground crew captured some stunning footage and photography.

Andy Ridley, Executive Director from Earthhour Global and Ben Southall the winner of the Best Job in the World were there to promote the reef.

It was a pleasure to work with the great people from Mango Productions & Tourism Australia

Editing the photos and video for Social Media uploads onto Tourism Australia Facebook took us through to 6pm. A very long day for some of us but we don’t mind when we are able to get great shots of one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Within the hour there were 3,000 Facebook “likes”, and then within 48 hours there were over 10,800 likes! Just goes to show how many people are interested in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.