LONDON – Mobile phone company O2 has cut the price of the iPhone by £100 amid speculation about a slowdown in sales as Apple prepares to launch a new and improved model in the next few months.
MANILA – The Advertising Standards Council (ASC), the tripartite group of the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster sa Pilipinas (KBP), the Philippine Association of National Advertisers (PANA) and the 4As, has shifted from the country’s Adboard umbrella group to take on regulatory duties for the media industry.
GLOBAL – A study of the world’s most effective corporate websites has been topped by German electronics giant Siemens, while Canon is the list’s highest-ranking Asian company – in 39th spot.
(TrendHunter.com) Today we kicked off a traffic showdown between our Top 13 posts about Hilary Clinton and our Top 13 posts about Barack Obama.
However, it would seem unfair not to showcase all the wonderful posts about George Bush…
So here’s a lovely collection that features everything from George Bush beatbox…
BEIJING – M-Zone, China Mobile’s youth consumer brand, has kicked off its first fully integrated campaign developed by AOR Ogilvy Beijing.
SHANGHAI – Tourism New Zealand is planning to capitalise on what it sees as a sizeable opportunity in the Chinese market, with a campaign to target the growing number of affluent overseas travelers set to roll out later this month.
ASIA-PACIFIC – Samsung has handed its entire consumer electronics account to Weber Shandwick following a competitive pitch.
KUALA LUMPUR – Maybank has launched a rebranding campaign for Maybank2U (M2U), Malaysia’s largest online banking service, to broaden its appeal among web-savvy consumers.
HO CHI MINH CITY – Ovaltine has used Y&R Vietnam’s recently launched digital unit to launch an interactive campaign targeting ‘smart kids’.
LONDON – There are times when Prime Minister Gordon Brown seems to be living in some sort of parallel universe, pronouncing grandly on world events while his own constituency – voters and MPs – rushes headlong for cover.
Balihoo fosters knowledge sharing by archiving your company’s activity history with specific media properties.
This is the fourth post in the Balihoo series, in which Shane Vaughan explains how the product suite helps counter brain drain in media organizations through information sharing.
“Our last post focused on how Balihoo can bring efficiencies to the RFI/RFP step in the media buying and planning process. Now let’s see how Balihoo benefits media organizations by countering the knowledge drain of employee turnover and the knowledge compartmentalization that occurs when information isn’t shared.
Let’s face it, media buyers don’t stay put for very long and when they leave for greener pastures or a higher rung on the ladder essential knowledge leaves with them. That knowledge includes details on past and current campaigns that are critical to the organization’s success… both present and future.
A less obvious intellectual capital issue is simply the lack of data sharing within and across offices. Ironically enough in this age of ubiquitous communication channels, it can still be difficult to disseminate critical information throughout a company in the form, and at the speed, it’s most needed.
Balihoo offers users centralized knowledge via two features: campaign dashboards and company activity histories. Campaign dashboards allow all users within your company to view details including that campaign’s consideration set, uploaded documents, RFIs/RFPs created or released, worksheets, and internal notes; all critical data for campaign management and analysis. Company activity histories allow users to save (and share) internal notes/tips about interactions or processes for any given property in our comprehensive media database. Additionally, these histories automatically list RFPs related to the property as well as any Quick Requests (a request of owners to update their listing in Balihoo’s database).
This functionality yields shared critical knowledge and institutional memory. Both of which are essential for developing a wiser, more agile organization. That translates into reduced costs by mitigating the training burden and impact of employee turnover; and more effective media plans resulting from easy access to historical data.”
Users throughout your organization can view all campaign details (including uploaded docs & any internal notes) via Balihoo’s Campaign Dashboards.
LONDON – Marks & Spencer is launching a TV campaign to promote the provenance of its food.
LONDON – The advertising watchdog has banned an EasyJet ad promoting its Easter offer, following complaints that the claim of up to 25% off was not all it appeared to be because prices went up as well as down during the promotional period.
LONDON – Marks & Spencer is launching a TV advertising campaign to promote the provenance of its food.
Have you heard that old myth about the McDonald’s burger makers? That there’s a team of specialist burger makers who fly around the world to make the perfect burger, shake and fries for every local ad shoot ever. We could make a movie about them, make it like Top Gun where a kid with extreme burger flipping talent gets to join the ten bestest burger flippers in the world and fly to exotic locations to make exotic burgers like the Japanese Teriyaki burger and of course, the Royal with cheese. I’m not sure what’s gonna kill Iceman yet, perhaps a freak fry accident.
Anyway, that myth isn’t true. There is no special team that creates those fab looking burgers for every ad shoot – sorry to kill the hopes of any aspiring McDonalds college kids. I just went there because in the world of global communication and global brands, perhaps there should be.
Take the latest spat that Coke got itself into. Somewhere in Germany, some “point” snack shop was carrying an old Coke poster from 2003 which shows Buddhist monks on a rollercoaster with the slogan: “Make it real” in the window still – and right now with the current newly inflamed China/Tibet wound it’s been misunderstood by a Chinese ex-pat living in Germany. A member of Tianya.com posted some photographs on the site and wrote:“Germany has started to really show adverts for Tibetan independence. Coca-Cola! Okay, I will remember. From now on I will not touch this shitty product! The three monks represent Tibetan lamas. They are riding a rollercoaster, which represents freedom. ‘Make it real’ means ‘make this [ie freedom] real'”. There are a couple of photographs of the offending old posters in situ here*. The Guardian reported “While one commenter suggested his interpretation was “far-fetched”, many more leapt to his support, pledging to stop drinking Coca-Cola.” Personally, I wish these people would stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
(TrendHunter.com) From Obama Girl to Obama finger puppets, the world is obsessed with all-things-Obama… But there’s also a ton of viral action related to Hilary Clinton…
So who is more popular in the world of viral news and trend hunting?
Perhaps the traffic to these two posts will help determine the best ca…
(TrendHunter.com) Hilary Clinton is perhaps the current queen of viral attention… From the “I’m f*cking Obama” video to Hilary Clinton nutcrackers, her name gets noticed.
But Obama’s name is also exceptionally popular…
Which candidate is more popular in the world of viral news and trend hunting? Perhaps the…
I’ve got too many Firefox tabs open, each waiting to be blogged about at just the right time. Well, I need to restart the browser, so here’s everything at once.
– I’ve been looking for self-help books published during the first dot-com era. Drop a comment if you have an interesting one in mind. Here’s one with a funny cover on e-Branding (love the “e-“) from 2000.
– Dropclock, a really cool screensaver (video below) with Helvetica numerals falling in water in slo-mo.
– Polaroid has come up with a portable instant photo printer to bring us back the beloved functionality of the classic camera.
– How about computer-generated books? Here’s a story about a professor who has his computers scrape and digest content from the Net and spit it out as books. Here’s one out of some 200,000 created to date.
Notes from the Re-Imagining Asia exhibition at The House of World Cultures in Berlin. The exhibition and other events, curated by Wu Hung and Shaheen Merali, examine how contemporary artists around the world re-invent the image we might have of Asia and the way in which the post-colonial production of knowledge is challenging Euro-centric concepts of art.
Chiho Aoshima, Japanese Apricot 3 – A pink dream, 2007. (bigger version Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin)
Asian art has reached a point where it is almost too hot to handle. New museums and art biennials are popping up all over the continent, the price paid to get a piece of Chinese art are going through the roof and Indian paintings and installations are exhibited all over Europe. Asian art is now so hype that one might think that another exhibition will just kill the enthusiasm. Well, this one won’t. The works on show have not been selected for the artists’ origins but for their focus on Asia as a space for the imagination. There are Chinese, Indian, Thai and Japanese artists but they are joined by Mexican, Germans and American artists.
As you enter the foyer of the House of World Cultures, you meet with Song Dong’s installation Waste Not. It is nothing else but his parents’ wooden house, which fell victim to urban planning in China. He reconstructed the house together with its entire inventory, a collection of utensils of all kinds accumulated by the artist’s mother over a period of 50 years and offering a picture of 50 years of material culture in China. It is hard to imagine how several tv sets, so many kitchen utensils, books, old shoes, toys, buckets, plastic bags, ballpoint pens, cupboards, etc could fit into the tiny dwelling.
Image HKW
Song Dong grew up in Beijing. His mother taught him how to make the most of few resources, recycling, re-allocating and saving utensils for future use. The socialist motto was: ‘Waste not’. The shabby borough he lived in has been cleared away for the Olympics a few years ago, but the government neglected to replace the old houses, so there is now an empty area.
On it Song Dong would like to build another wooden house in the traditional style as a call for the preservation of old Beijing.
Besides offering visitors a picture of Beijing life, the installation has relieved his mother of the dead weight of half a century and has done so without making her feel that her hoarding was futile. In fact she fulfilled the role of an artist herself by preparing the show. And each of her mundane and utilitarian objects has been elevated to the status of artwork.
View of the installation at HKW
Chairman Mao at Xiyuan Airport, Beijing, March 1949*, 45″ x 25″, Ed. 19, digital c-print, 2006
Zhang Dali‘s “A Second History” was probably the work i found most fascinating. It’s a collection of copies of Mao-era doctored “official” photographs paired with the unaltered originals.
The First Sports Meeting of the National Army, 1952*, 45″ x 25″, Ed. 19,
digital c-print, 2006
The work presents an “archive of the Chinese Revolution” in 3 parts: Mao and the Revolution, Heroes and the Masses, People’s Pictorial Archive. By presenting side by side unaltered photographies from original negatives and the images as they appeared in the media at the time, the installation shows how deliberate distortion of images became an essential mechanism of photo production, a way to satisfy a yearning for an idealized image and a propaganda tool. Long before the arrival of computer and photoshop. The methods used in the editing of these images involve mainly painting: a wrinkle between Mao’s eyebrows vanishes, superfluous figures in the background are erased. (more images of Zhang Dali.)
And in no particular order:
Michael Joo, Bodhi Obfuscatus (Space-Baby), 2005. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
The Bohdi Obfuscatus (Space Baby) by Michael Joo embodies perfectly the tensions and harmonies between novelty and tradition. In an homage to Nam June Paik, Joo borrowed a Korean Buddha from a local shrine and encased it in a halo of surveillance cameras, Fiber-optic lights cast projections onto flat TV screens while mirrors, mounted on poles that surround the sculpture, reflect images from the video displays, the Buddha sculpture and visitors as they walk around the installation.
Ozone – So Provided by Mizuma Art Gallery. Courtesy of Munteru
Ujino Muneteru was in the house two. I only got to see the Ozone – So installation, a wooden temple turned into a tank and adorned with waste material, such as electric appliances, plush toys, bits of carpet, building materials and books collected around Tokyo by volunteers.
There was also the video of a musical performance Muneteru gave in Berlin. He played with blenders, hair dryers, parts of bicycles, used vinyl discs, turntables, not only was it fascinating to see him handle all this junk but it also sounded surprisingly good.
Shi Jinsong, Na Zha Cradle, 2005
Shi Jinsong‘s razor-sharp line of baby products include a militarized Carriage, a sadistic Cradle and a predatory Walker. Na Zha Baby Boutique (Na Zha is a child warrior deity in Chinese mythology) tries to lure “shoppers” using stainless steel “products” which evoke both luxury and danger.
Bharti Kher, The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006. Photo credit:Pablo Bartholomew/Netphotograph.com
Bharti Kher’s bindi-on-fiberglass elephant. The bindi in India is traditionally a mark of pigment applied to the forehead of men and women and is associated with the Hindu symbol of the ‘third eye’. When worn by women in red, the bindi symbolises marriage. In recent times it has become a decorative item, worn by unmarried girls and women of other religions.
Bharti Kher covered her sculpture of a dying elephant in white bindi. The elephant is often regarded in Asia as a symbol of dignity, intelligence and strength. Kher marries the elephant and the bindi to contemplate the effects of popular culture, mass media and consumerism on the culture of India.
Andreas Gursk, Kuwait Stock Exchange. © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, 2007
Miao Xiaochun, Orbit, digital c-print, ed. of 3, 2005, 85.5″ x 189″ (bigger version of the image)
I took a few pictures. Universe in Universe has more images of the show.
Related: Chiho Aoshima, Mr. and Aya Takano in Lyon.
HONG KONG – The International Herald Tribune has promoted Helena Phua (pictured) from circulation and development director to deputy MD of its Asia Pacific operations.
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