Our beloved Marcus is hitting the road. He's walking from Munich to Hamburg to meet Peter Figge of Jung Von Matt who I have it on good authority is an absolute top geezer. Put the internet's best story teller on the start of a long journey and who knows what's going to happen? I don't but I'll be hurling twitter abuse at him along the way. It should be interesting.
I'm into Food Sovereignty and La Via Campesina and Raj Patel at the moment so while I really like the design thinking that goes into IDEO's the future of the book, particularly the fluidity of the non-linear narrative as opposed to a thousand tabs opened up in Chrome or whatever it is we do to suck in a gigabyte a day, I'm struck by the yawning gap between the technology fetish of the geek advertising crowd, and the more engaging grounded topics of the real challenges of the 21st century.
I keep asking myself is advertising trivial?
Here's Raj, he can talk for 30 minutes or longer in a very engaging manner over issues that will, whether we ignore them or not be of consequence to us all. There were consequences to Wall Street excesses, though that didn't get in the way our trivial pursuits. Here's a taster because I know you are time starved?
Not that it's a competition or anything, as I'm a HUGE fan of Naomi Klein but in this New York interview attended by the Brooklyn Food Coalition Raj's compelling explanations are even more riveting than Klein who probably writes better if was being even handed or just nice. Anyway, here's an hour and half of two people who are a credit to the 21st century. I hope you get time to listen to this and through your own non linear narrative more of both.
A few years back my good friend Joe Sidek from Penang in Malaysia, introduced me to an elderly gentleman who apparently was the instigator of Woodstock back in 1969.
The excitement around Elliot was that the director Ang Lee was going to make a film about him which I thought was exciting though my full knowledge of the event was limited to cultural references and dare I say, a good friend of mine talking about a guy on stage at Woodstock alerting the attendees to avoid the 'brown acid'. Chris chose a bad trip to invoke this piece of history and while it seemed of little comfort at the time, in retrospect it was a kind thing to support the notion that maybe our distress wasn't entirely due to repressed psychological emotions that are the challenging hall mark of the psychedelic experience. Put it this way if you're curious about that last statement. It's near impossible to take that particular voyage without being fully confronted with the infinite beauty and/or ugliness of who we are but don't let that scare you off. You've your career to think of.
I like Ang Lee. I'm more into Asian interpretation of this trip than Hollywood. There's a good reason for this....It's called bias. But if you can park my bias next to the Lexus for just a few minutes, I'm obliged to point out that I struggle to fall in love with anyone who isn't moved by the compartmental spotlight of social roles in Chungking Express, the operatic opressive futility of And the Spring Comes or say the longest uncut fight scene in the Korean Palm d'Or winner Old Boy
The give-away is I didn't get up off the floor. I also didn't have a knife in my back but hey, I was just grateful I hadn't been thrown off the balcony; spinal injuries scare me a lot more than a good kicking.
Old Boy is borderline genius. It's so full of life and joyous, gutsy film making that there are a few trying errors which are either confusing or hard to ignore. Which one you suffer, is largely dependant on how much you trust yourself. A topic, believe it or not which loops back into that trip I mentioned earlier.
I can see I'm shirking my duty in this post. I'd love to fill it up with cheeky Asian film references but that's not going to do is it? OK, one more before I spill the beans.
I wanted to use the example of John Woo's Hardboiled because of his clear influence on Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs but as I can't find the exact clip, I'll leave you with 'In the Mood For Love' by Wong Kar Wai.
The definition of a good movie for me is when I ache to be part of that time and like Taking Woodstock this movie throttles my aorta to the point where I don't believe I know how beautiful life is unless I've witnessed white collar Asian girls in 1950's (ish) Hong Kong for real. Which I haven't but I do know it exists from film like this. It's almost intolerable how stylish Wong Kar Wai splashes his Pollock like proclivity to portray the female form in ....In the Mood for Love.
Getting back on track I should reveal my hand. I don't think the digitally duplicated form of anything is fair game for IP or intellectual property. Anybody with half a brain would challenge me on that but as I've spent a few years thinking, there's no more room for me to wiggle so.
If it's on the net. It's free.
I'll come back and polish off that statement and the usual spelling/grammar later. But my friends who champion the rights of artists to earn the same as CEO's (or more). They're wrong. The artist is uniquely privileged to understand why. Look at what fame and wealth does to the artist.
Apologies for the rough nature of this post. I'll edit when time permits.
I said back here that I see an impending political discourse coming in socialised media. The costs of extracting wealth just above, just below or at ground level and then distributed around the planet are either too damaging environmentally or physiologically for us to ignore. I'm surprised to see this ad airing in the States even though it hits that sweet spot between Big Pharma and big Agra called Medical Practitioners. Even so, in my experience nobody takes on big lobbying pockets like the fast food industry. This is war isn't it?
Paradoxically I'm a reluctant fan of McDonalds for reasons I've written about at some length here , here and here. Like I mentioned earlier I believe we're going through brand puberty because the mono-dimensional brand personalities and values of the 20th century aren't going to cut it with the challenges we face in the 21st. I've said it before but it's worth repeating. If you're brand isn't social in the broadest and most inclusive sense, it probably hasn't got anything to say. If McDonald's ignores this, or responds with a corporate swagger, it's increasingly looking like a brand consigned to history.
I've been using mIRC (proto Twitter) since 1995 and I believe it was me who first coined the phrase "right wing nuts" as I noticed everyone on #politics picked up on it immediately and then it entered the general discourse. Not a lot of people know that.
We're long past the point of anthropomorphizing brands. The idea that Old Spice might have a proper personality when it started would have seemed risible. To this day extraordinary individuals still impose themselves on great branded communications through their entrepreneurial cojones, product obsession and unsurpassed love of customer service.
Now of course back here on planet earth where the average tenure of a Marketing Director is under two years the onus on those individuals is to deliver in the short term and NOT DROP the ball. This is largely why we have the wind tunnel effect and something more insidious than product parity.
Personality Parity.
But let's not point the finger too much because if we take a good look in the mirror, we advertising agencies have traded off the right to challenge our clients for an unseemly all out internecine warfare to pursue the last possible buck left in the bottom of the bucket.
It's not hard to see the reasons for this, but the point is that we live in remarkable times so why are we engulfed by the unremarkable when it comes to communications? We have an increasing number of brands talking back to us in real time. The implications for this are unrecorded in history. So how do we bring this potential to life?
Ah yes. Give it a minute because the effect is worth considering.
The thing is we're human, we're always anthropomorphising stuff; projecting ourselves, applying our value system to 'the other'. Cars have long been female in the UK and the older the better. It seems the more curious the peccadilloes they had, the more we were attached to them. That doesn't apply so much in the age of what I might call the neo-neoterics the obsession with the new.
Of course it's not as if we need to apply the Geneva Convention to objects but there is always a sliding scale where say humans are top of the personality food chain, then animals, then products, then services, then hedge fund traders.
Getting back on track we're confronted by the uncharted waters of deeper and more meaningful communication. Now personality goes a long way, but the reality is the construct of the corporation and its paralytic fear of diminished quarterly results means it's unlikely that most brands are going to get a life in the near future. If you get close enough to some of the most hard working clients the sheer pressure of work restricts their ability to know precisely what a life is (they pay people to find out) and which is why there are often so many dumb perambulations between and after idea and execution.
They are going to achieve this through the simple yet infinite scope of dialogue as opposed to the top down, controlled and linear monologue broadcast models of yesteryear.
How that personality manifests itself is a highly contextual subject dependant on a lot of factors that requires a post in itself, and which would still not provide a definitive answer. However the reason for me revisiting this less than revolutionary subject is because I see the scope for brands articulating their personality through their politics.
It's been done before
This anti sweatshop brand was getting close recently but economic timing was bad and franchise extension was, well, over extended.
I don't want to harp on about this because if there's one weakness I have as a planner it is that I see the potential too early too discern the reality. Time and again I've been excited about what's round the corner and tried to implement before gestation had completed. I noticed that the presentation I gave to low income Asian marketeers from multinationals a couple of years ago is only now starting to realise itself in India.
While it might not be prudent for a brand to immediately take a political stance, the age of the corporation as it emerges blinking with moral fatigue from the 20th century is fast becoming an anachronism. We need to be having a discussion about what exactly brands stand for if a non conformative position or a set of values becomes strategically imminent. The reason for that is entirely business-like. It's a profitable and identifiable stance to take and if you think that online group purchases known as Tuangou in China, are an interesting phenomenon, just you wait till INACTION becomes political. The potential for global boycotts of brands that don't play ball has yet to emerge, even though precedents exist with some of the most crippling action taking place in times before our hyper networked world.
This isn't a post that negates the value of brand utility (an important post to factor in if you weren't so busy and have kindly got this far anyway) but it is one that says if your brand isn't social, it probably has nothing to say. That's an impoverished strategic weakness in an age of product parity and one that will cost a lot more (and a lot quicker than we're used to).
Words are what distinguish us from any other life form on the planet and possibly the universe. Words could arguably be the reason our neo cortex accelerated into action at some point in our evolutionary story, and I put it to you that if your words are increasingly circumscribed by a language that is unremarkable, then the quickest way to get out of that is to take a stand, pick a cause and stick to your guns.
I'm really pleased to have come across this today as it stimulates some of my own thinking and saves me boring you with too many words ( OK Andrew?). A little background for my motivation on this subject is that each time I walk past local schools, as the children are piling out, I'm noticing that the number of fat kids is rocketing and in some instances constitutes the majority of the students.
Obesity is a problem now, and it only took one generation to make the jump.
The leap between skinny and irreversibly fat kids took only a few short years in Asia. I've noticed it from Beijing to Manila but here in Thailand it feels particularly poignant as I remember a time when 7-Eleven had hardly any dairy products and people didn't know what cheese really was. These days if I want to re-conjure up the elegance of a thin and beatiful race from the early nineties I need to head out into rural Thailand closer to the villages and the paddy fields, where I'm magically sent back to that bygone era. One where rice is the staple diet and a few morsels of meat with lots of vegetables keeps them looking so fabulous.
As an adman I find this troubling and yet another hurdle (on top of sustainable wealth creation) to reconcile doing good work with good intentions.
Paul French who I've long admired as a thoughtful China commentator is interviewed here by another China afficianado Jeremy Goldkorn about his new book Fat China. They both dissect the issue in a manor which is contextually interesting even if you're not in Asia but interested in adding dimensionality to what's going on with expanding waistlines of the Occidental races: Europe, U.S and Australia.
The most compelling point for me if you can't spare 10 minutes to watch is that, we advertisers idealise children as chubby when selling to Mom children's food and drinks, and yet when they turn to 'Pepsi' teens we suddenly try to sell them the Heroin-teen-chic matchstick-thin lifestyles when biologically the toothpaste is out of the tube if one is serious about reversing the obesity process.
This is morally wrong and a point I hadn't thought of before; one I'll never let slip by again.
I really like Oliver Stone's work. I think he's consistently dealt with the most excruciating themes of the American 20th century in a candid way that most Americans aren't ready to deal with. I also like that he did two tours of duty in Vietnam despite being part of that privileged elite who could have avoided the draft, as did the Neocon chicken-hawks; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol et al.
I just rewatched Stone's Nixon earlier because yesterday I finally got round to seeing Frost/Nixon, a clip of which I've used above. It's extraordinarily good and made me want to revisit Nixon the man because in the thick of all the Bush bashing (when it's evident he never really had the intellectual gravitas to manipulate the world but was instead a subject of manipulation) I took great delight in telling people Nixon was one of my favourite presidents. I can't say it now because I've dug a bit deeper after watching this, though I will say that despite the carnage that Nixon authorised, particularly the unconscionable bombing of Laos and Cambodia he still presided over the most geopolitically volatile period apart from all out world war. It's easier with hindsight but the question remains did he exploit that geopolitical volatility? Was it really necessary?
The answer's probably no because proxy ideological wars in far away places are at a primary assessment level abysmal failures though arguably have much more complex secondary geopolitcal angles like the suggestion I read today that Afghanistan and Iraq is about having an experienced army at hand if middle Asia becomes the arena for conflict over resources (not just oil). Believe me the only peaceful ideological solution we have for that is a sharing one. Marx came close and I suggest we need to try again, because the profit motive is hitting a dead end and hey, even the Wright brothers didn't quit when their first plane nose dived. However my ideological chin sticking out affirms a simple principle. Don't bomb and maim small Buddhist countries to achieve larger geopolitical ends. Take some pain on the chin, and I most definitely am looking at the United Kingdom as well as the United States too.
It's time to open up an Easter Egg on this blog because when I wrote that last Nixon piece it had another story behind it. It was allegorical too, because my apartment was being broken into at the time. The protagonist(s) were also reading my blog (note the personal Wifi router the case is sitting on) so I thought I'd land a punch when it suited me and today it does. So I guess I got to write about it, share what I think about Richard Nixon and pluralistic thinking, as well as nail a date and a time to that period when things like my Porsche briefcase had it's combination lock popped while I wasn't at home. I did walk away with my full deposit from that affair. That's unheard of in Asia when two warring sides choose to go their separate ways with a tenancy contract between them.
I don't mind confessing there were days when I thought I'd lose a lot more than the deposit as I'm stubborn. It's irrespective of what influence or power I'm up against though a shiny motorcycle police escort one early morning while nipping down to 7 Eleven prompted me to settle for the cash. A foreigner never actually win's in Asia so I did OK given who I was up against, and that post I wrote time stamps accusations without ambiguity. Not that I didn't appreciate it being nominated for post of the month too because the dual narratives were completely coherent and utterly sincere. You'll forgive me if I killed two birds with one stone. It's the mark of a really lazy person not an industrious one ironically.
Anyway that was all wild and I learned that snakes really do writhe when you have them by the tail but the reason for this post is very simply to outline that Oliver Stone is for me, more of a patriot than any of the abysmal Tea Party crowd and (I contest) a brave creative American icon. Which is kind of my way of saying sorry, because I met him in a nightclub once, here in Bangkok. He'd been filming Alexander the Great and unfortunately I'm less amusing after a cocktail than I think I am so I confirmed if his name was Oliver and leaned into his ear sharing something along the lines of 'I hope you didn't omit from your film, that while Alexander was pinning down Asia, he was also pinning down his Generals'.
Oliver immediately backed away as if purgatory was imminent and his entourage protectively engulfed me from saying another word, sweeping me away back into a less interesting world. The moral of the story I guess is just be nice, say hi and 'how are you' when you meet someone you respect instead of being a smart ass, and also just make sure they haven't directed a turkey of a movie.
Both Nixon and Frost Nixon are brilliant films. The first historically and the second, well the second did something that a small screen has never done for me before. I've been moved by actors on the big screen theatre but the Nixon character in this second movie. I was spellbound by the end. I never believed that a small netbook screen could ever command or impose such pathos and yet it was all there. You should watch it because even if you don't care about politics you should care about how the mightiest can fall and once again how little in life is black and white all set to a Greek tragedy of biblical proportion. I just discovered that Frank Langella was nominated for an Oscar in this movie and that's the most deserving nomination I can think of for some time. I also think it's great to see actors doing very fine jobs of David Frost and John Birt. Both of whom now I think have knighthoods. Watch Langella in this. Sometimes it's like a bear leaning over you baring perfectly ominous but preternaturally perfect teeth. Or is that Frost as well?
Love this. I've been fast forwarding through the boring parts of Dexter earlier. I love the character but all that contrived futile love angle? It's maddening. Though I realise that sounds like ironic psychopathy.
www.russelldavies.com for more wisdom (Go on type it. You'll remember it that way)
I like documentaries. The older I get the harder it is to immerse myself in fiction and suspend disbelief. Yet despite enjoying the documentary genre, I've never really gone out of my way to watch them, except for maybe Michael Moore's work, and that was only after watching Bowling for Columbine. Before today, I'd never seen Moore's first work 'Roger & Me'. I was aware of it and yet somehow I always assumed that because it was his earliest piece it would be less polished. Well that's wrong. It's right up there with the rest of them.
I've been working my way through recommended documentaries. If it wasn't for that cease & desist I recently received (complete with Microsoft identified malware attached to the word document) I'd probably be inclined to do a (hard) drive-by 'cloud' stick-up-job to secure them, but that's not sensible now so instead I've seen what's available for free online or else headed over to my 'Pirate' DVD dealer on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 5 open from 1am to 5am to purchase the 'Pirate brand' of merchandise. I assume that's an ironic wordplay joke by the entrepreneur in question, but you can check him out along with the other hundred or so late night media specialists that are quintessential Bangkok if the 'right to copy' has been infringed. Hell I can't tell. Who can?
Where was I? Oh yeah, Roger & Me. It's essential viewing. I think his talent lies in a sublime ability to make the most incendiary contrasts of video (house eviction over Christmas for a young family while GM CEO, Roger B. Smith quotes Dickens on festivities after laying off 30000 workers). Moore is consistently mild mannered in his requests to interview the well paid heads of corporations who were all gearing up in the late 80's to shift manufacturing abroad while essentially filleting the American way of life.
And it's the diminishing American way of life which is so resonant in this documentary. I know it's fashionable now for the art photography boho-set to relocate to ghost town Detroit and shoot long decayed hanging chandelier anterooms from ghostly and vacated semi decadent lower upper class mansions but it's all so vibrant now that Moore was shooting this pivotal change in the way that America structurally operated over 20 years ago. It's all there. Moore focuses on Flint but the Corporations' absence of sentiment is evident right from the git go.
The burning question for me as an Americanophile: one who grew up under the benevolent arm of Marshall-planned Wirtschaftwunder Deutschland is simply this: Does America (The U.S.) step on the back foot clumsily?
The answer if Detroit or Flint Michigan is an indicator, must be yes. The sheer range of excessive and baseless optimism staring in the face of nation state downsizing was, in this documentary, the most disconcerting example of disconnect I've ever come across. I often wonder how the obese will manage if the food chain breaks down in the US when peak oil arbitrage suddenly excludes the citizens of a country that calls Iraq 'way out East Texas'. The answer to that one 'aint purdy' but who knows when that call gets made or who is pointing what tactical nuclear warheads at whom to squeeze one more fix out of the system.
I digress.
It's clear from this documentary that when hope becomes nothing but linguistic vapours (you can't eat hope after all) that the reality check for mindless consumption in the States will be an ugly affair. I don't mean that in a triumphal sense one bit, because for those of us looking closely at the Oriental Leviathan over here (China) it's clear they've bought into a discredited money model before it's had to time to conclude it's economic momentum. It's a bit of a shit sandwich all in all but I urge you to avoid taking a carbon footprint rich flight to Bangkok to buy this documentary at the kick ass price I did, and just download the mother off a disruptive peer to peer sharing network at a hard drive near you before the Feds get wind of it. We get very few chances in life to redistribute wealth from the the wealthy to the less wealthy and I have it on good authority that Michael Moore is cool with cutting out the middle man.
Lastly I couldn't help but noticing that the TV evangelist that Flint hired for 20 000 bucks in 1989 to cheer up the 'po' people, a Mr Robert H. Schuler, had an interesting programme title that I took a screen grab above. Someone once said that you can never go broke betting on the stupidity of the American people and I see now that it's irrelevantly true but equally when it comes to a venal and psychopathic corporate class, there is no smarter and more cunning beast than the American CEO.
Bits of this are great. It's also the second time today I've watched Neville Brody (I was catching up on Helvetica earlier) and it's the third or fourth time in the last few days that a name emerges more than once from completely separate and distinct internet travels.
I've talked about synchronicity-frequency related to increases in data consumption and it's almost worth a statistical probability paper if anyone other than me was interested in it, but more importantly this catch comes from Dhiren Shingadia who strikes a nice balance on his blog between taste, tasty and digital or all three at the same time if you wish ;)
My favourite meal of the day is breakfast. I started taking the definitive cooked breakfast a bit more seriously when I lived in Camden from 97-99 (around the time I worked at HHCL).
My girlfriend and I, at the time would go exploring Greasy Spoons and try out Hi-So Fry Ups at swish hotels and bourgeoisie cafes. I can still remember the first time the mushrooms arrived in a full cream sauce and I realised that an upper crust cooked breakfast wasn't such a bad thing or indeed a class transgression worthy of pejoratively labelling an injustice.
Last year I lived in Hong Kong twice on the Island of Lamma which is a lovely island only a half hour ferry ride away from Central where kids and dogs intermingle freely at all hours like they did in the old days when the car was less dominant and main stream media scaremongering was restricted to those bad old communists. Now it's a never ending stream of paedophiles served up with Roe vs Wade (poltical in-joke for observers of right wing psychology).
While living on Lamma I got into the habit of breakfast experimentation and discovered that straw mushrooms are an extraordinarily good replacement for meat in a cooked breakfast for both taste and texture dimensions, and so because it's been a couple of years now since I blogged my morning victuals, I thought I'd share some low res mobile snaps of my creations.
I love cooking (particularly for others) and for some reason or other I find breakfast a truly beautiful sight. It's a never ending quest nailing the perfect British Beauty though. If I'm lucky I'll be able to weave this post into another about cultural drift because I see what's happening here in Asia and it's very interesting some of the unifying aspects of global culture as good ideas catch on everywhere.
God I really lucked out on this sucker. Not sure where I heard about it but any biographical political film whose reach exceeds its grasp (up to an academy award nomination) had to be worth downloading (stealing) and my god it was fucking ace.
However long it lasted (it felt like an hour).... from the opening scene of a baby face George Stephanopoulos though to it's climactic end, I was back on my political junky fix of 2000-2005. It's remarkable even in this day and age of diminished privacy just how far Clinton was up for disrobing from behind-the-scenes come-back-kid (warts and all) as well as sharing with considerable political aplomb and generosity, the people who took him to victory in 1992.
I still maintain that those 8 years of Clinton were the best years of my life outside of living inside the Wirtschaftswunder of Germany in the 70's. I'm not saying Bill "Jim'll fixed it" for me. It's just that we all loved him, we forgave him the skirt semen - spunk if you will. Definitive spunky right?
Good thinks (things) happened around then. Or maybe I'm deluded and I was just young. It was rock and roll whatever you slice the Polish salami because the single most knockout blow watching this documentary was finally meeting James Carville. He's so impressive, he's even better than the person I've lasciviously read bundles about over quite a few books for half a decade or so, and wanted so badly to stare at.
I admit I think there was quote about him wearing a Nylon suit that made me sit-up reading some other hack journalist's interpretation of the Comeback Kid. I've always had a thing for the blindly indiscriminate & unfashionable Nylon suit for reasons it would be too indulgent to get into here, but in truth his clothes/style is worth deconstructing but only in that trainspotter way I'd get lost on with a person who rolls like Mr Carville. He'd look the bollocks in Commes de Garcons but lets just say because he's from Louisianna he also would know how how to drop it like its hot in Yohji Yamamoto even though a man his age cuts a sashaying swish draped in Kenzo. I'm slightly kidding of course on that last number, but it's true his clothes are unconventional for a policy wonk. The guy knows how to 'do' when a T Shirt works.
Just in case there's some cloud computin' dysphoria shit hanging over you. I fucking love this bro. He's a politico prophet, a one man focus group - part bleeding heart liberal...part sneering hammerhead shark snorting his way to the kill. I've never seen anything like this dude and I've read up on him. He exceeded my expectations.
But you know. If there's one bit I connect with the man it's when George (Hi My Name's Bill Clinton and I think this Greek kid is smart as fuck) Stephanopoulis takes a bow towards the end as victory was looking assured; and attempts to articulate how deeply rewarding it was to work with James Carville.
Apart from Mr Carville breaking into tears of redemptive reconciliation with his dreams of the past manifesting themselves in the future (as dreams do), there's just something utterly Liberal - pinko fascist communist if you lean towards those incoherent bastards who throw dirt better than they implement policy. There's something noble, something that reveals the dignity of the left when the Director of Communications (George) hands over to James, and is received with a mutual respect that reflects the honour of why all change starts at the bottom and fist fucks its way up.
Not Maserati down.
Watch the first clip (part one) if you want to understand why.
I've been talking about this for so long that the only thing that really interests me is why anybody in marketing and advertising who would want me do for some work with them, might not have googled my name and Unilever + Skin whitening. In any case it's still worth making a quick summary because money doesn't come first in my universe. Skin whitening creams in Asia are broadly speaking about hierarchy. The whiter the skin the less likely you are to be fresh from the rice paddies. The less likely you come from the rice paddy, the more likely you are to be hired, promoted, secure a Blu Ray DVD player, iTablet, BMW 3 series and/or shiny white teeth.
Though it strikes me that for someone who argues a woman is entitled to make her own decisions about abortion that the final decision on what colour one wishes to be is down to that person. So I'm not anti skin whitening.
They say that holding opposite and conflicting thoughts in our heads at the same time is a mark of evolution and so the only position I can take when thinking about this category is that it behooves the multinationals; that is the onus is upon them. That they bear the responsibility that there is a clear responsibility to fulfil and articulate, that melatonin expectation transactions should come with an unambiguous message that Unilever, P&G, Johnson & Johnson et al respect all people of all colours. The reverse isn't true for tanning lotions because that hierarchical imposition isn't present within that context. I maintain it's a great communication opportunity of the win win variety - if it's with sincerity.
Anyway, above are a series of ads by Ogilvy & Mather Hong Kong regional office. They look innocuous and in some markets they may well lean more towards the beauty end of the spectrum than concealment but as I've mentioned over here in the comments; the focus groups are revealing because with skilful moderation, the kind where dirty secrets surface...well they tell the story of skin whitening.
I think what's most interesting is how clearly the child is mimicking the father and seeking approval (enjoying it all nonetheless). Though the nose scrunching is uncanny.
Did we do anything wrong? Did we handle anything too harshly? Did we listen to only one side of the story? Did we perform our duties? Did we really think of people? Were we corrupt? Did we take too much? Did the media make people better informed? Did our society deteriorate? Did we love money more than the rightness? And did we only wait for help? If there was anyone to blame, it would be all of us. Apologise Thailand. And if there was anyone who can fix the problems, it would be all Thais. Keep the loss in mind and turn it into our force."
Sometimes we get a bit bogged down with which pipes the content is delivered on or what screen it's going to be viewed with. It's true that you can tell a lot from the contextual variables for enjoyment based on that but in principle the single largest differentiator in terms of value for video content is scheduled versus unscheduled. The reason for that was brought home again listening to you lot on Twitter talking about how rubbish the last episode of LOST was.
I should thank you for that. I don't watch many TV shows and even films are a struggle outside of a movie theatre but I make an effort to download something I keep hearing about so I can keep an eye on TV culture.
Even though LOST was obviously a bit contrived at points (how many fit babes can you fit on a beach?) I was into the second series and doubting if that was a wise investment of time but you nailed it for me by saving me having to endure all of the series only to be disappointed at the end.
Though it was interesting to make a note of you scheduled types because apart from it being more expensive to watch it's also a lot more sociable in that format. Which is what I mean by scheduled versus unscheduled. TV was often a lot more social than we gave it credit for. Do you remember the next day when Del Trotter famously leaned on a non existent bar in Only Fools and Horses? Everybody was miming it weren't they. It was so funny and so memorable.
The wire is different though YO! I love the characters and script writing in it (You feel me?).
So if you have any other must see tips I'd love to know what is culturally important and maybe why you think that too would be great.
