I missed this the first time around, I guess, since it was posted over at 23/6 towards the end of October. But this video of all three debates synchronized really makes you wonder whether the Presidential debates are worth watching at all. I enjoyed the occasional cleverness in them, but I explicitly remember not gaining any new information.
To continue the trend of writing about election week media here at Banapana, i’d thought I’d make a note about the “Obamamercial,” the 30 minute informercial that candidate Barrack Obama aired tonight at 8pm Eastern. So far, around the web I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how they felt that the production values were good. Perhaps that may seem like an odd point to use to enforce the idea that Senator Obama would make a great President, but I really think it speaks volumes about a man who knows how to delegate power and knows who to trust to get the job done well. As I pointed out in a post about campaign branding the kind of design work you see coming out of a campaign does a lot more than tell you if the person in charge has taste. It tells you whether they are smart enough to not interfere with the work of the professionals that they hire to get the job done. Whether it’s the creatives he’s chosen to work with or just how totally, unbelievably thorough the campaign was in designing graphics for every necessary instance, the Obama campaign’s media strategy can tell you a lot about what Obama’s team knows about strategy and just how good they are at it. I think the production values of this “Obamamercial” just give greater weight to the point that Obama knows how to tap good, talented, smart people and he knows how to manage them cohesively. For all the rhetoric about policy decisions and political stances, I don’t think anything can tell you more about the potential for an executive team then how they’ve run the campaign. Obama’s team is good. Vote for them. Vote for Obama.
A blog appears on the internet, written by a man named Håkan Nordkvist who claims to have traveled to the future and that he has proof. Later, a video surfaces. Apparently, this man crawled under his sink and into the future where he met himself and took a mobile phone video of the event. The video is viewed thousands of times and debated by many. The problem? The entire matter was conceived by AMF Pensions to market to a “younger” generation. This video is part of a portfolio of “guerrilla” marketing campaigns propagated by Forsman & Bodenfors. The apparent logic of the marketing campaign is that you should give your money to people who are willing to deceive and lie to you for a good laugh. The problem with this sort of campaign is that not everyone finds out that the matter is a hoax; more disinformation is created in an already incredibly noisy environment. This kind of marketing is simply unethical and is the worst kind of propaganda because it is in no way concerned with the truth or even willing to make a case, based on evidence, for the value of the product. It’s bullshit is what it is.
There are lots of products out there that might accomplish some silly task like “stress relief” but whose real and primary purpose is humor. The Tiddy Bear more than applies here, it’s actually best in show. But I don’t want to ruin the joke for you, so watch the video and then I’ll say my piece.
Okay, I didn’t contribute actual Jell-O to the infosphere[^1], but weirdly enough, after reading Chris Anderson’s “The Big Lie About Free” I got to thinking that what’s really silly about all these complaints about the seeming decline in value of media is that the idea of the promotional giveaway is so old! How old, you say? Read more…
