Breaking News

Easily the biggest news of the year for Social Media in China is the just announced 430 million dollar investment by Oak Pacific Interactive for Xiaonei the Chinese Facebook. I posted just recently about China 2.0 over here, with inexpensive ways for brands to get involved with social media, but these guys have just thrown an incredible amount of money into this small start up despite a) the Social Media model is unproven in China b) a revenue model is yet to be harvested from that. This is the equivalent of Google's purchase of Youtube in 2006

Whether this proves a sound investment or not (and its hard to see why a way to make it work wont be found) this is another example of the shift from interruptive messaging of the traditional monologue model of advertising to the dialog model we are seeing all round the world. Advertising may not be broken in developing economies as Russell points out quite correctly, but as long as the shift of eyeballs to computer screens continues it's possible that the massive passive is diminishing a lot quicker than us Asian planners may have first anticipated.

For a comprehensive and authoritive analysis check out Kaiser Kuo's blog post on Ogilvy's Digital Watch.

My powerpoint is unstoppable

The Staufenbergers have started a new game with their latest fab post and I've risen to their challenge. I wonder what my prize will be!

Paquita

Earlier this evening, the Ballet de l'Opera national de Paris danced a 'Paquita' for a predominantly Chinese crowd at the Beijing National Theatre for Performing Arts (The Egg). Quite astonishingly (to me) they played with the narrative on two notable occasions.

They were spectacular, fluid, and yet tight when it counted. Gutsy in a word.

At the end of the first act through a triangle shaped formation, the dancers hopped violently backwards and receeding back into the stage, with peaked caps, bathed in the deepest hues of revolutionary red, and saluting violently to the audience whose spontaneous applause they won through sheer bravery given the context of the protests by China against the French in the last few days that is bordering on rage and insanity.

For a brief few seconds, it was as if the French were saying to the overwhelmingly Beijing intellectual-elite audience plus a few oiks myself, "is this what you want?", "is this how you want France to be?", "jumping up and down every time China starts to wave a stick?" ...."haven't you, you of all people, had enough abuse of power?"

It was the most creative thing I have ever seen and I will never forget it.

Bravo!