Blogbook
Insta Novels is a new initiative by Mother New York and the New York Public Library, combining classic literature with Instagram Stories.
The Australian Womens Football (Soccer) team, the Matildas, may have crashed out of the World Cup. Their push for pay parity remains. This hasn’t been new — Ada Hegerberg, the world’s best womens football player, sat out the World Cup in pay protest. Via the Sydney Morning Herald:
Hegerberg is a wonderful talent who scored 38 goals in 16 appearances for her country before quitting two years ago.
She has taken the opposite view to Kerr where the fight for better pay, conditions, and recognition for the national team is concerned by boycotting the whole business and concentrating on her day job, playing for European champions Lyon, where she, too, is well looked after financially.
Norwegians now shrug about her non-participation. They have got used to it but the rest of the world, given the focus on the Women’s World Cup, is only now waking up to her non-appearance.
Way to the Woods is a beautiful game whose railer premiered at E3 2019. It’s the brainchild of a 20-year-old game developer from Melbourne. Via Sydney Morning Herald:
Anthony Tan, a 20-year-old game developer from Melbourne, watched Microsoft’s pre-E3 Xbox briefing earlier this week with bated breath.
Like more than a million people around the world, he saw the company highlight 60 games over more than and hour and a half. And there, between 12 minutes and Microsoft’s own Gears 5, there was a minute-long trailer for a game about a pair of deer collecting light and avoiding wolves in a mysterious world. The game Anthony Tan has been working on for years.
“Dude it was insane for me,” he says of seeing his work on the massive screen at Microsoft Theatre in LA.
“To see, like, Keanu Reeves, Halo, Gears of War, and then just see my little deer game. It was surreal. Felt like a dream.”
When They See Us is a powerful Netflix show by Ava Duvernay about the Central Park Five, the boys who were wrongfully imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit. It is now the most-watched/daily Netflix show in the USA, and has created some real world fallout: the prosecutors have had to resign from their current positions. Via the Atlantic:
Thirty years ago, five New York City teenagers were arrested for—and later falsely convicted of—the rape and attempted murder of a 28-year-old woman named Trisha Meili, who became known as the Central Park Jogger. That landmark case is examined anew in the Ava DuVernay miniseries When They See Us.
The project spends much of its run time explicating the racist logic and manipulative tactics by which New York City law enforcement, aided by uncritical media coverage, criminalized the five black and Latino boys, whose case-defining confessions were coerced and whose guilt was presumed before they entered any courtroom. But crucially, When They See Us also introduces viewers to—and thereby emphasizes the innocence of—Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, Kevin Richard, and Antron McCray as it indicts the systems that led to their incarceration.
How much plastic do you eat per week? WWF Singapore (via Grey Malaysia) has come up with a helpful and depressing video explainer.
I’m in a movie theatre, waiting for a film to start. My friends and I tend to watch blockbusters because we’re easily entertained. With the world slowly burning down around us, it’s nice to spend a couple of hours every weekend pretending that tech billionaires would invest their money into armoured flight suits and personally attempt to save the world. The first few ads are familiar, and again make me extremely curious about Desi Dhaba’s advertising strategy. How does a smallish restaurant on Flinders Street always seem to pop up on the cinema ads at Hoyts Melbourne Central? Are they just buying ad space in one cinema? Distressed space? How much is their budget? While secretly praying that whoever wrote the copy for the ad would never find matching socks forever more, a slick new ad pops on. It’s about “clean” coal.
Wow.
There is, in case you haven’t realized, no such thing as “clean” coal. I could go on an hours-long rant about this, but to sum it up in a way that involves less invective:
The best of the new breed of plants can reduce emissions by up to 40 per cent compared to some older-style coal-fired power stations, according to the International Energy Agency. But to call this “clean coal” is misleading. The new generation plants are less damaging to the environment, but they are not clean.
Even the best of the high-efficiency, low-emission plants emit far more carbon into the atmosphere than gas-fired power stations. Coal, by nature, is not clean. Aside from releasing CO2, which contributes to global warming, burning coal releases sooty particulates that can cause cancer and respiratory problems, sulphur and nitrogen, which contribute to acid rain, and other toxic chemicals.
Advertising, I like to think, gets a bad rap. There’s good work that gets done. Ads that can help drive change in ways both large or incremental. Often, though, there’s also stuff like this.
Nothing Is Real Anyway
Everything you see in an ad is fake. Cats unerringly choosing a certain brand of catfood? The other bowls probably had a layer of petroleum on it or something. That happy family you see on screen? Probably not remotely related. That delicious shot of fried chicken falling through the air? Possibly CG. That huge, stacked, fluffy McDonalds burger? Stuffed with tissues and pins and glazed. Not convinced? There’s tons of vids out there about the tricks of the trade, like so:
Everything’s more glamorous after post-production. Advertising is the art of pushing a better, more idealised world to a customer in the hope that they’d part with some money for whatever our client’s selling. With this in mind, does it matter whether the ad is presenting a set of alternative facts? The whole ad itself is technically an alternative fact, isn’t it? We like to think so. We think there’s a difference between a little lie — like a raw chicken painted to look like a roast chicken — and a big lie, aka that coal is a fuel source that doesn’t damage the environment.
Define the Thing
What is ethical advertising, you might ask. Just ads that don’t lie? If all ads lie in some way, what is an acceptable non-truth? I would say that ethical advertising:
- Is effective: aka it meets its key objectives and has decent ROI
- Doesn’t involve much moral compromise in concept
- Doesn’t have a fundamental message that is untrue
- Doesn’t create, perpetuate, or encourage harmful situations or outcomes
- Doesn’t break the law
Basically, to sum it up, ethical advertising does the thing that Google used to have as their brand message: it does no evil.
Ethical Advertising for Profit
It’s easy to make ethical advertising when you work for something like a nonprofit, you’d say. What if you’re shilling a fast food burger? You can’t exactly write the truth into the ad. Everyone knows that McDonald’s burgers don’t look as good in real life as they do in an ad. To what extent can you stretch reality without it being unethical?
Clients do increasingly care about messaging in advertising and branding. Putting political advertising aside, which is a whole ‘nother kettle of terrible fish, you’ve probably already seen the occasional backlash against brands coming from both sides of the political spectrum whenever there’s a particularly egregious lie or message. There was the pushback against the body-shaming “Bikini Ready” ads by Protein World in 2015, for example. Or the recent, laughable pushback against positive masculinity ads by Gillette. Overall, however, clients are more willing to support brands that push social conscience or environmental responsibility. Via the Guardian:
The numbers add up. Neilsen’s global retail analysis shows increased sales for brands with sustainability claims on packaging or active marketing of CSR efforts. What’s more, 55% of global online consumers across 60 countries say they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. On top of this, The 2015 Brand Footprint report published by Kantar Worldpanel shows that brands with a social conscience grew in popularity, Dove among them.
It’s not a stretch of the imagination to see where the wind is blowing: towards more socially conscious, “authentic” advertising. The messaging is far more likely to stick in the right way if it’s true. It’ll also attract positive attention to the brand, which would enforce existing customer loyalty and maybe even reach new customers.
Sex, Money, Puppies
Several years ago I attended a talk where a brand guru said that there are three things that easily sell: sex, money, puppies. Maybe not all at once. There are indications that this isn’t necessarily entirely true:
A classic study conducted by Baker and Churchill in 1977 found that advertising models’ physical attractiveness increased viewers’ attention as well as their positive evaluations of the ads. But at the same time, it found that sexual content in ads did not affect respondents’ deeper cognitions, thus rendering physical attraction ineffective in gaining the target market’s acceptance of the advertising message.
Similarly, Parker and Furnham in 2007 realized that sexual ad content had no effect on viewers’ abilities to recall details of television commercials. The study also found that women recalled ads without sexual content better than they did sexualized ads.
A more recent study conducted in July at Ohio State University discovered an even more conflicting effect. Violent and sexual content in ads again succeeded in grabbing attention, but it also overshadowed other important aspects of the marketing effort, including the product being promoted. As a result, the researchers concluded that sex and violence in ads actually impeded product memory and lessened purchase intentions.
Sexualised advertising that objectifies people doesn’t work, so why is it still ubiquitous? Because of mistaken assumptions that it sells. We should all take a closer look at what we think we know, even as we figure out what we think we understand about the campaigns we create and their consequences. Curious and need a chat? Get in touch. In the meantime, bring on the puppy ads.
Natailie Dyer from Stranger Things is the star of a short film called “After Her”, which subverts the Lost Girl trope into something more interesting. According to writer-director Migliori via Gizmodo:
I was interested in making a short that confronts the perversion of the “missing girl story”, in both film and in reality. I wanted to create something meditative and personal with a small group of collaborators; I shot most of the film myself, including the VFX, which were hand-done in my parents’ basement.
I’m from Rhode Island and grew up reading Lovecraft, and was incredibly inspired by his worlds, his characters, and their maddening search for the bigger picture, the great answers. As Callum searches for Hailey, the alluring missing girl of his past, his expectations get challenged. His journey spans fertile woods, deep caves and fallopian tunnels. He grows to realise that he is a passenger, not a pioneer, while she is the leader, not the victim.
Eugene Lee Yang of the Try Guys, a YouTube star, comes out as gay in this stunningly choreographed music video with original music. Via Newsweek:
YouTube content group the Try Guys regularly upload hilariously entertaining videos on the social platform. However, on Saturday their feed took a more personal approach to their latest creation.
One member of the four-man group, Eugene Lee Yang, wrote and directed a new music video to address his sexual orientation. While Yang has previously stated that he doesn’t identify as fully straight, this is the first time the content creator has gone completely candid with who he is in front of the channel’s nearly 6 million subscribers.
As Yang navigates through the set of the video, changing into various vibrant outfits, the actor addresses numerous roadblocks that could hinder someone from fully coming out. From a conservative upbringing to judgmental religious encounters, Yang explains why he withheld his truth from the world.
“I created this music video as my personal way of coming out as a proud gay man who has many unheard, specific stories to tell,” Yang tweeted Saturday in conjunction with his video.
Elden Ring is a collaboration between George RR Martin, Hidetaka Miyazaki and the developer From Software, who made games such as Dark Souls. Perhaps predictably, fans of GRRM haven’t been happy at this news–they want him to finish Winds of Winter. GRRM has always been involved with lots of projects all at once though. Many celebrities are. We’ll get the book when we get the book. In the meantime, this game looks like it’s going to be awesome.