Rupert Murdoch Lies To His Mother

In an interview in The Australian Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the centenarian and mother of newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch, revealed her misgivings about some of the family's more salacious publications like the UK based News of the World or New of the Screws as Private Eye calls it. It has been described as having small words, big headlines and even bigger tits. No wonder Dame Elisabeth, a woman of undoubted grace and civility is loath to be associated with it. But to spare his mother's blushes Rupert explained to her that it was practically a social service as it's readers had nothing else in their lives to do. Presumably except for watching illegal satellite football while smoking toxic weed on sink estates. The Lowest Common Denominator and Rupert is happy to drag even more people into it by lowering their expectations. Of course Rupert himself came from a humble background and dragged himself out of poverty to become a self-made billionaire. Except he didn't. He could hardly lie to his mother about that.

Obama - the Speech He Should Have Made

...and when our childrens' children look back on us in their own times of trouble, for as surely as this one must pass each generation faces anew its own struggles, let us be sure that we are an inspiration to them and not a lesson, a beacon of light and not a bonfire of the vanities, the shoulders on which they stand and not the feet beneath which they were crushed.

And let us no longer ask "Can we do it?".....because of course we know we can. But let us decide "Will we do it?" And I say to you here and now "Yes we will!".

Godblessyallnmerca

A PR Disaster? No such thing.

The number of viral marketing campaigns seems to be increasing exponentially. A couple in Sydney in the last two weeks involve planting fake stories in the media Here. This is more like PR than advertising. PR agencies aim to get their client's as many mentions in the media as they can. Having seen this as a client I can say they appear equally as proud if that mention is in "Grain Financier Monthly" as "The Wall Street Journal". They even get excited about unattributed quotes. Strangely enough the NY based PR firm I used spent a lot of time bitching about each other. Maybe they subscribed to Oscar Wilde's aphorism "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" and were just doing each other a favour.

Spoon 4 U

"Are you between 40 and 45?
A white male weighing approximately 110kgs?
Do you live in Australia?
Are you a Spoonlover?
Then we have the perfect gift just for Valentine's Day.
A limited edition spoon for lovers."

This type of advertising is increasingly common on the web, particularly in Facebook where they steal your personal details to make it look like personally targeted advertising when the personal details about age and background are irrelevant. I mean who doesnt love Spoons?

The Real Thing on Reality TV

Product placement as a form of advertising remains controversial. Ad advertisement is seen as a very specific thing designed to coerce the viewer to buy a product. A not so discretely placed can of coke in a movie seems to be break faith with the movie-goer who has already paid for their ticket. In some countries such as the UK where the amount of advertising per hour is strictly limited product placement in tv shows is banned. But the law of unintended consequences will out. What about imported shows from the US? The hugely successful US version of the global franchise "American Idol" is shown in freeview channel ITV2 in the UK. I am a huge fan by the way and watched in the UK for the last three series. It has produced such stars as Jennifer Hudson and the improbably named Fantasia Barrino. It is probably not a coincidence that a program which trawls through the fame aspirations of 300m Americans and Canadians will throw up a much higher standard than the same franchise in the UK and Australia where the singing is of such a poor quality that they don’t bother making comments like “that was a little pitchy for me”.

In America the three judges, Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell (why doesn’t this man get more exposure?) have in front of them what appears to be tumblers of some refreshing liquid, occasionally sipped, probably water (maybe not Paula, the well known lush). In the UK transmitted version the obviously branded receptacles have been digitally blurred. Even when they pick them up to their lips or the cameras move they remain obscured. No doubt this is simplicity itself with modern digital technology. Yet I found myself absolutely fascinated by them. Who was the brand they were advertising in the US but were required by law to remove in the UK to protect us from accidental advertising overload? Well here’s a clue. The logo appears to be red and white. In a large tapered glass. Could it be Coka-Cola? So a large part of my viewing time in series 6 and 7 was taken up with trying to see if I could just, just work out the lettering (in a similar way I am always, but not quite able to work out the wording on the Simpsons supermarket lettering in the opening credit. No don’t tell me I’ll get it one day). Given the enormity of this program it was unlikely to be anything other than Coke and this was confirmed when I lived in the US in 2008 and was able to watch it live.

I am sure I have drunk more coke since becoming obsessed with this attempt to obscure the product placement. It was actually a bit of an anti-climax to see finally the judges sipping from clearly branded Coke tumblers. So much so that I almost instantly stopped noticing them and went back to drinking Pepsi.

Going Down in the Lucky Country

Forget the rubbish tourism campaigns based on "Where the Bloody Hell Are Ya?", and "Australia" the movie. How about "The Get Lucky in the Lucky Country" campaign. It would involve some young foreign backpackers seen having the time of their lives while partying hard in a club with celebs Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman and Lara Bingle. Eating tapas too of course.

The next morning they wake up a bit worse for wear in a tent and look out on the dawn rising over Ayer's Rock, a Barrier Reef Island or Cable Beach. While they gaze over this beautiful scene an attractive younger lookalike of the Aussie celeb they thought they had scored with the night before also sticks their head out and say "gidday". "Hugh" , "Nicole" or , well actually, it really is Lara Bingle, and then the tag "Australia - it's not called the Lucky Country for nothing".

They could even use Richard Clapton's song "The Lucky Country" which contains the subject line for this post.