Brandjack News

News and commentary around the concept of brandjacking

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  • Digi-book review: DARK ORIGINS

    By Quentin Langley

    This is the first book review on Brandjack News, and the book is not about PR, crisis management or social media. It is a thriller from the creator of CSI. What is intriguing about this is its interactive nature.

    I didn't read it on either my Kindle or my Sony e-reader, though I am sure it is available in both formats. I read a dead-tree version. What makes it interactive is the associated website, level26.com As you read through the book you are given codes to unlock films on the website. Most of what is shown in the films is described in the book, though sometimes only later. Using the website gives you an exclusive early site of something that is coming up.

    It is perfectly possible to enjoy tbe book without ever logging on the website. That is actually what I did. I only went to the website later, to see what it was all about. The films are good, and professionally put together. Hardly a surprise, as the author is best known for his TV scripts. 

    If you decide to consume this book in an interactive way – and the options for doing so with notebooks, smartphones and ipads are plainly increasing – it does create a significant new experience. It may be that books of this type will really take off on digital devices that allow for the film and audio clips to be integrated. Sony Readers and Kindles don't have that capacity, though I am sure that ipads do. 

    It is still experimental as an artform. It isn't there yet. I really don't think I lost anytihing by not looking at the films until I decided to write a book review. But this is a very interesting concept. Later generations – and the sequel - Dark Prophecy – is already out – will surely be better.

    I don't think this is going to change the way we consume books, but then, I thought Twitter would be a flop, so take no notice of me.

  • Democracy Wall lives again

    By Quentin Langley

    Democracy Wall was a remarkable experiment in China's political history. As the Maoists were pushed aside reformers around Deng Xiaoping allowed not just economic reform, but also political liberalisation. People began to post their views on a wall. That was in 1978. In 1979 there was a political crackdown. And so it has continued. Economic reform has been a constant, but political liberalisation comes and goes in China. Any serious challenge to the Communist Party's monopoly on power is not tolerated. Certain phrases – "Tibet independence", "Taiwan independence", "Tianenman Square" – are banned from public discourse. But some degree of political discussion is sometimes allowed. Political censorship is sometimes relaxed and sometimes tightened.

    It has long been assumed that, one day, China is going to have to choose. Either it abandons economic liberalisation or it abandons political control. There comes a time in terms of economic development when political control is no longer tenable. Countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Chile long ago moved to the point where repression was no longer possible without serious economic consequences. They all chose economic development and sacrificed central political control.

    The questions that have hung over China for more than 30 years now are these: if the Communist Party has to choose, which way will it go? And if it chooses to maintain political control at the expense of economic growth, will it be able to make that choice stick?

    I have long believed that the internet changes everything. The price of imformation has fallen. The price of publishing has fallen. The price of control is shooting up. The events of the past few months suggest that China is going through one of its liberalising phases. Maybe, just maybe, the Communist Party has decided that it is willing to relax, or even abandon, political control in order to maintain the country's spectacular growth rate.

    The Wenzhou train collision on 23 July this year was a significant turning point. At first, the government reacted in the traditional way. All media coverage of the even was banned. But, within weeks, it was obvious this wasn't working. People were getting to hear about the disaster anyway. So, instead, the country announced that three officials with the railway ministry have been dismissed. There is a two month review of rail safety underway.

    Could this be the moment when China decided that diversity of thought and opinion were essential to its future growth? Could this be the time that China realised the free exchange of ideas is necessary for the free exchange of goods and services.

    Just as you can't have political freedom without economic freedom, you can no longer have economic freedom without political freedom. Those days are gone. If China wants to be part of the twenty first century, it needs to engage in political reform. It needs to adopt the rule of law. It will need to have free elections. Wathcing the fall of Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi – as well as the coming fall of Assad, Saleh and Boutefika – the Communist Party may, right now, be planning its slow handover to democracy.

  • Was Nivea’s “recivilize” ad – racist?

    By Quentin Langley

     

    Nivea spent a fortune developing an ad contest only to see it condemned as racist almost immediately it was launched.

    Nivea ad


    I think we can rule out the possibility that they did this deliberately for the publicity. But who came up with the idea of an advert which seems to Black people that they should try to be more white? Who signed off on the concept? How many tiers of approval did this have to go through?


    This seems to me to be rather like the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes. There must have been many people who saw the ad and thought “am I the only one who thinks this is a little bit racist? Nobody else has said anything. I must be”.


    Way to go, Nivea. Brandjack yourself as racist.

  • Dr Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (1917-2008): Liberator of Millions

    By Quentin Langley

    Today, let us take time to remember Arthur C Clarke: author, educator, inventor of the communications satellite. Today, Muammar Gaddafi is running for his life and his sons are under arrest, because of Arthur C Clarke. Today, not one dictator anywhere in the world can be confident he will die in his bed, because of Arthur C Clarke. Today would be much darker if Arthur had never lived.

    Under the terms of the Clarke-Asimov Treaty we are supposed to refer to Clarke as the second greatest writer on science while accepting that he is the greatest author of science fiction. Clarke and Asimov were both wrong about this, and they both knew it. Asimov always had the more fertile imagination for fiction and Clarke's work on the communications satellite marks him out as one of the towering inventors of our age.

    It started as a dream. Clarke – a dedicated scuba diver in his later years – wanted to go to space. It was that simple. He wanted humanity to spread across the solar system and beyond. While working as a radar technician he puzzled on that most practical of questions: who would pay for space exploration? It occurred to him that satellites positioned in geostationary orbit – orbiting every 24 hours, and thus fixed over one point on the equator – would enable global communications. He calculated the height of a stable geostationary orbit – still sometimes called a 'Clarke orbit'. Instead of trying to design a working model, patent it, and make his fortuned, he rushed to publish his ideas in a peer-reviewed paper "Extra-terrestrial relays" published in 'Wireless World' in 1945. His aim was not his own fortune, but to convince telecommunications companies that they could make a fortune by investing in the dream of space travel.

    Because of those satellites, governments no longer control the flow of information. Governments can no longer keep people in isolation and ignorance. The days of the dictator are drawing to a close. 

    If Muammar Gaddafi is cursing his enemies, he should spare a moment to think about one of the greatest educators on the concepts of science who ever lived. As a boy, Clarke looked at the night sky, and dreamed. He never stopped dreaming. Because of him, millions have lived to see their dreams come true.

    I can't complete this article without mentioning that in 1998 Clarke was accused of child abuse. Obviously, I have no knowledge of whether there was any substance to these allegations. If true, this would be terrible. But even then, it would not undermine the euphoria of today. Libya is free today, because of Arthur C Clarke. And that makes today a beautiful day.

  • Criminals may have to stop using smartphones #ukriots

    By Quentin Langley

    With Twitter and facial recognition software being used to identify people who have been filmed engaging in looting and arson (the so-called #ukriots), the obvious follow up would be to use FourSquare, Facebook Places or Google+ to find where those people are. Does anyone know if this has happened yet?

    Far from modern technology supporting crime, it may create more and better ways to track down criminals. Perhaps they will simply have to stop using smartphones or, at the very least, lock themselves out of social media completely.

    The Onion realised this some time ago.

     

  • First thing we do, let’s kill this Facebook thing

    By Quentin Langley

    Dick the Butcher from Shakespeare's Henry VI had a plan: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". Superficially attractive as this sounds, there has never been a free country which was not governed by the rule of law.

    "The first thing we do, let's shut down social media" has a similar superficial appeal to a great many people. But there has never been a free country without freedom of speech, either.

    A lot of bad things, from looting to drug deals to terrorist mass murders, get planned online. But this is to wholly misunderstand the nature of cause and effect.

    When I was a child the problem was TV. TV was making children unfit and lazy. TV was causing violence among young people. TV was responsible for teenage pregnancies. But we now know that TV does not cause these things. Facebook does.

    You see, the times they are still a-changing, and it is still unwise to criticise what you can't understand. 

    In this case, the medium is not the message. It is almost certain that more crimes are plotted in bars than on social media, but not since America's failed experiment with prohibition has anyone thought that closing down bars would actually solve anything. 

    People use social media and other digital channels for all sorts of things. That is how I met my wife. But she is not an 'internet wife', and crimes planned online are not 'internet crimes'. Crimes plotted in coffee shops are not 'coffee shop crimes'. The notion that it is either justified or sensible to shut down social media channels during waves of looting – as some in the British Government have recently suggested – is inherently absurd. Just look at the way social media channels are now being used to identify perpetrators. 

    It is embarrassing that some in the British government have the same instincts regarding social media Mubarak and Assad.

    Nor does it make sense for pharmaceutical companies to shut down their Facebook pages now that their walls have been enabled by Facebook. The problem is that with an open wall, people can post material criticising the company or complaining about side-effects from their drugs. This is, obviously, a marketing problem. It is not helped by the fact that people will attribute effects to drugs which clinical trials suggest are unrelated. Companies are also concerned about the promotion of inappropriate uses for the drugs. Again, this is a serious concern. But do the companies imagine that by closing down their Facebook pages they can wish these conversations out of existence? A policy of hiding from the truth does not make the truth vanish.

    Pharmaceutical companies have the legitimate worry that open and transparent conversations about their drugs will interfere with the process of regulatory approval. Frankly, if it comes to a choice between secretive government regulation and transparent public discussion, I will take the discussion every time.

  • Facebook founder and the “kill what you eat” controversy

    By Quentin Langley

    Mark Zuckerberg – the founder of Facebook, and a multi-billionaire who is irritatingly twenty years younger than I am – is at the heart of a contoversy surrounding his policy of deciding to only eat animals he has personally killed.

    Some people are disconcerted by this, and interpret it as a statement that he is going to start killing a lot of animals. Others take exception to his claim that this will make him "virtually vegetarian". 

    Plainly, you can't be a vegetarian and eat meat. Yet it is also pretty obvious that, for the vast majority of people, adopting such a policy would mean eating a great deal less meat. While film footage of Zuckerberg personally killing animals would undoubtedly distress people, it is difficult for meat eaters to sneer at the work of slaughter houses and butchers. (Full disclosure: this author is not a meat eater.)

    This is a sensitve issue, because many people live such sanitised lives. We pay others to do most dirty, smelly, and distasteful jobs for us. This is not unreasonable, indeed most of us more comfortable lives as a result. But with meat, English speakers have another layer of protection. The meat on your table is not 'cow' or 'pig' it is 'beef' or 'pork'. Of course with lamb – much the cutest animal routinely eaten in Anglo-Saxon countries – there is no such protection. 

    Zuckerberg is setting an interesting example. If others followed it, a great deal less meat would be eaten, with all the consequent reduction in the carbon footprint of your food.

     

  • Greenpeace ramps up the Ken vs Barbie pressure on Mattel

    By Quentin Langley

    After five days of silence, Ken is tweeting his anger at Barbie again. Even the tweet from 04 August was a thank you to Leonardo DiCaprio for supporting the campaign. (Is Leo going to play Ken in the movie, I wonder). Suddenly, both the Ken and Barbie accounts are active again.

    I had thought that when Mattel suspended its contracts with APP this classic brandjack was approaching its finale. I rather assumed – and perhaps Greenpeace did too – that after its review, Mattel would drop APP as a supplier and announce a new sourcing strategy that would enable the toy manufacturer and the campaigners to kiss and make up and, more importantly, allow Ken and Barbie to kiss and make up. But it seems things are moving too slowly for the guys in green. They may even have had indications from within Mattel that the company is not going to settle after all.

    This is going to be a fascinating one to study. Why would Mattel not give on this one? Presumably, its packaging supplies are a fairly small part of its cost base. The advantages of being able to market the Dream House as being eco-friendly would seem considerable. 

    Has the Greenpeace campaign not been as effective as anticipated? The storylines have been excellent, and backed by the usual stunts. Are social media not proving the right channels to reach the target audience? Is it perhaps unclear whether children or parents are the correct targets?

  • Vlog – Gmail Man; IE users hoax; Pizza Hut ‘bloody bandage’; sexting and political names

    By Quentin Langley


  • The Pizza Hut “bloody bandage” debacle

    By Quentin Langley

    This is a complex one, and it is hard to establish the actual facts with any certainty. 

    Ken Wieczerza claims he fuond a bandage baked into his pizza. A word here on terminology: the 'bandage' was a small adhesive bandage of the type normally called a sticking plater in the UK. It was speckled with blood. This is, let's face it, not something you want to find in your food.

    The story was picked up in the msm and went viral in social media. Pizza Hut promised to investigate. The company hit the problem that is so common in any brandjacking situation – the story was developing fast in social media, yet any genuine and thorough investigation was sure to take time. That said, Wieczera says he only went to the media because Pizza Hut was being so slow in responding to his initial complaint.

    But this is where it gets weird. Pizza Hut is now saying that the dough type does not match their pizzas and the bandage is not the type they use. (It is one of the bright blue ones, typically used in the food preparation industry, specifically to avoid this problem, but Wieczera works in the fast food industry, so he would know that). The clear implication from Pizza Hut is that the claim is a hoax from someone seeking to cash in. Except that Wieczera says he never sent them the pizza slice, and still has it in his freezer. So what exactly did Pizza Hut test to come to the conclusion that the slice wasn't one of theirs?