Issues management: Louis Vuitton and Nadia Plesner

Nadia Plesner, a Danish artist, started a campaign in October last year to “raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in Darfur”. Her now-famous illustration of an impoverished Darfur child holding a chihuahua and a Louis Vuitton (LV) bag lookalike was meant to highlight the disparate treatment by the media towards a certain hotel heiress and the situation in Darfur.

The luxury goods giant asked Plesner to cease sales of her designs immediately. She resisted and LV, obviously none too happy about it, brought a lawsuit against Plesner, claiming an incredulously amount of over $20,000 for each day of her Simple Living campaign.

I thought this was a classic David and Goliath story. And indeed, it is. Google for the story and you are likely to find media and blog articles on the issue. Even Jeremiah Owyang (one of my favourite bloggers on the social media scene) devoted an entry on the ongoing suit.

Without going much into the nitty stuff (you can read that yourself), I am wondering what in the world does LV intend to achieve by suing the socks off of a struggling artist, who in her best of intentions, simply took the monogrammed LV bag as an inspiration. LV would have been better off fighting intellectual piracy of its famous bags from the likes of the notorious Ladies Market in HongKong, choc-a-bloc full of LV imitations.

I have no doubt that Plesner will garner much support (she probably already has an army of supporters). There is even a FaceBook group in support of Plesner and her campaign. If LV treads wrongly and insists on going down the libel road, it may find itself in more of a fix than it bargained for.

Will this fiasco hurt LV in the long run? Maybe not. With annual sales of billions, and growing, LV’s main target audience are the mostly the well-heeled with cash to burn. It’s not a mass-market brand. Still, would this hurt LV’s brand reputation and how it is perceived? We can only wait and see how will LV react to the current situation. Their PR agency has their work cut out for them, and in this age of social media, they better have a good online strategy in their pockets too.

The eight things meme

I first saw this meme on Jeremiah’s blog, and then on Connie’s blog. It’s amazing how fast information spreads in social media. Well to keep the meme going, here are eight things you didn’t know about me:

1. I’m a natural right-hander but I text/sms with my left. If I try to text with my right hand, I end up as slow as a retard.

2. I started out playing the percussion in the school band. It was so boring until I insisted and got started playing the trumpet. Then I got seduced by the french horn and ended up as a section leader. It has been 8 years since I last touched any of those instruments.

3. In secondary school, the teacher who marked my composition script for the GCE ‘O’ levels preliminaries came and told me in front of the entire class ”I read your composition and I nearly fell off my chair. Keep up the good work and you will go far.”

4. I have seven hamsters (!) at home. It was just two originally and one day we noticed the male one humping the female one, and a few months later, out popped five babies.

5. For my first job, I worked in the Government service in a statutory board doing web communications stuff and loved it. I still have fond memories of the place and my ex-colleagues.

6. My favourite country at the moment has gotta be Japan. I was there a few months ago and how can one not be amazed at the culture, the politeness, the scenic beauty and… the food! Oeshii ne.

7. I have fairly high myopia (over 800 degrees each eye). I’m afraid to go for LASIK because I’m convinced that when the laser is zapping my eyes, my eyeballs will move and I’ll go blind.

8. I’m a tech freak and have an insatiable urge to change my mobilephone every six months. Next up, the iPhone.

IBM report: The Advertising Armageddon?

I read with interest the recent report “The End of Advertising as We Know It” issued by IBM which forecasts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.”. The report can be view here.

Whoa. Very doomsday-like with IBM predicting drastic upheavals in the advertising industry. I wouldn’t exactly call it the end of advertising. This is the beginning of a critical shift that will cause traditional advertising to evolve, NOT go kaput. We are beginning to glimpse the changes that are to come: Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook’s SocialAds, which delivers personalised advertising content based on users’ interests.

Remember the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report? There were scenes that showed him running through a metro train and a shopping mall in the midst of his escapade from the baddies. Very tiny machines scanned his retina and flashed personalised ad contents based on his purchasing history, interests etc.

When I saw that, it was all very wow and futuristic. In probably 10-15 years time, we may not be too far off from that future.

Blog action day: iPhone an environment killer?

Ok ok, so I forgot I was suppose to blog about environment related issues on the 15th October… but it’s still 15th over at the US… so technically it still counts.

I just read an article at TechCrunch where “According to Greenpeace, the iPhone contains toxic brominated compounds (indicating the prescence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs)) and hazardous PVCs.”

Does this spell the death of the iPhone? I doubt so. Most electronic products are made up of non-biodegradable materials so they just sit in landfills when chucked away. But at least it’s creating awareness about electronic waste that most people aren’t aware about.

Another environment-related entry I posted earlier can be found here.

I’ll also be waiting to see how Apple will respond to this. Will Jobs be ready with another PR spiel?

Goodness… Twitter spam?!

I received an email notification that someone is now following me on Twitter. I thought that was rather strange. You see, I’m a rather low-profile user and and only have a handful of people on my list because I hardly use Twitter.

I clicked on the link and discovered my new follower called “mycoupons”. Mycoupons has online discount coupons for everything from adult toys to cosmetics to iPods. OMG. Spam has even worked its way into Twitter.

Needless to say, I blocked mycoupons.

Paid blogging (and how it may affect the PR pitch)

Recently I got to know of a friend who worked at a company that had just launched a new service. The company engaged the service of the controversial pay-to-blog company PayPerPost (PPP). How it works: You pay a pre-determined amount of money for XX number of blog posts. Bloggers in the PPP network blog about your product or service and received a percentage cut of the fee.

Because bloggers were not required to disclose the real nature of the sponsored post, it raised a storm of controversy and ethical concerns because article integrity were being compromised. For all you know, the next door teen queen/soccer mom/tech geek who raved about a certain product on their blog did so because they were paid to do so. PPP subsequently relented and later required bloggers to state upfront that they are paid to blog about a particular product or service. Still, it doesn’t take away the fact that it IS a paid review. You don’t have to be a marketing guru to know that most of the time, the review is skewed in favour of the product/service.

My friend had reservations about associating with such a controversial company but the boss adamantly pressed on with it. That aside, another problem is Google. One of the factors that affect a website’s Google page rank is the number of links to it. If there are alot of websites/blogs linking to your website/blog, you can be sure your website’s page rank will improve. The paid blog posts usually link to the website of the product/service reviewed. Google has a major issue with that, because it screws up the “real” ranking or organic search result of websites. Google is constantly fine-tuning their search algorithms to sniff out paid links; and sites that utilises paid links may end up getting *horrors* blacklisted on Google.

You are now probably asking “How does this affect pitching to bloggers?”. For one, if bloggers can be motivated by monetary incentive to blog about something (or anything), why in the world would they want to listen to your pitch? And companies, without the proper understanding of public relations and media impact, would have no problems bypassing the PR folks and going straight to PPP or the bloggers themselves.

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea. It just beats me why any self-respecting company or blogger would want to associate themselves with a controversial outfit like PPP.

PR and Web 2.0

Here is an excellent article on PR and social media.

Digital storytelling

Recently I watched a BBC mini-documentary about the Roman Emperor Augustus which threw up a really fascinating theory.

Without going into too much details, Augustus used the popular artform of his day to project himself as a pacifist to manipulate and gain the trust of the monarchists, who wanted Rome to be under the rule of a monarchy. He succeeded and came to power, placing Rome under his dictatorship. Interestingly, under Augustus’s rule, Rome flourished and enjoyed much prosperity because of his policies and reforms. BTW since this is the month of August, I did some checking and found out that the month of August was so named in honour of Augustus.

Throughout human history, across every language and culture, people have sought to articulate themselves through artistic expressions. We learn to tell stories and share ideas using images and sounds, from Roman sculptures to the wayang kulit and MTV. These mediums evoke powerful feelings and sometimes even alter our perception of reality. In today’s cluttered media landscape, we are constantly bombarded with media designed to assault our visual and aural senses. Art have always played a part and will continue to do so in the new media in the form of digital storytelling.

Politicians have long been able to skillfully exploit the media to engage and influence the masses. In this digital age, agendas are no longer set on canvas or cast in stone but enacted in the converging technologies of print, television and increasingly, the internet. We can expect to see and hear more politicians, celebrities and the average citizen tapping on the power of the new media in the now. Happy National Day.