We have received sufficient supplies for immediate humanitarian aid.  The shipping costs are heavy and there is very little free shipping available.  I am raising funds through the International Buddhist Center for shipping and rehabilitation efforts. 

1. Canned milk food for babies.  Apparently there are many children affected and there’s no milk food.  Baby bottles are also needed. THIS IS A PRIORITY.
2. Many are injured with cuts and bruises and need anticeptic cream, band aid, bandages,  and minor first aid supplies.
3. Drinking water is polluted and they need water purification tablets very quickly. A PRIORITY.  Please try to locate sources to get these items.
4. Clothing for children and adults are immediate needs.
5. Tylenol and tablets for digestive disorders.  People are already suffering infections with the wounds being exposed.
6. Sheets, towels, blankets.
7. Many have lost eyeglasses, a collection of old eye glasses will help for immediate distribution.
8. Canned food – soups, vegetables, milk, canned fruit, are urgently needed.
9. Powdered milk for adults.
10. Various forms of crackers, toasted bread and items that can be kept.
11. Rubber gloves, masks for rescue efforts

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I have some names of people the media can talk to, for eye-witness stories, and to get a sense of the relief measures underway.

Two organizations doing a great job are Sirasa (the radio station) and Suntel the natonwide fixed-wireless Telecom provider.

PEOPLE TO CONTACT:

Shohan Chandiram:  Tel: 011-94-777-729949 (He is in Galle, a city with severe damage and loss of life)

Shirani Saunders : 011-94-112-699166 (In O&M Advertising, visiting churches and temples in Mutuwal and Modera) Email: shirani.saunders@ogilvy.com

Russell Miranda:   Tel: 011-94-777892-399 (McCann-Erickson advertising, working with Sri Lankan Airlines in massive relief effort)  Email: russell_miranda@yahoo.com

Viran Constantine: Tel: 011-94-777-721291 (Suntel relief operation) Email viran@suntel.lk

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Many have asked me what the status is in Sri Lanka, and have asked for ways to help. My parents and my wife’s parents are safe, but the devastation is severe.

I just got an update via text message that water levels are rising, and the fear of the ‘second wave’ has not materialized. Death toll is supposedly around 10,000 (one BBC report says 13,000) but I am hoping these estimates are not actual.

As the reports indicate, the hotel industry is crippled, with several beach resorts destroyed. This means a huge hit to the economy that has been recovering in the last few years, since the cessation of hostilities after nearly 20 years of terrorism.

For those who would like to help, I will be posting some links in the next 2 days, once I find the best mechanisms available. The people in Sri Lanka are really devastated by this right now, and appreciate your prayers and concerns. Money, appears to be the best way to help even though medical supplies, food, clothing etc are very immediate needs. The Lanka Academic Network, Lacnet, has good updates, including ways make a tax-free donation, and for someone to contact a loved one in Sri Lanka.

I write for a business magazine, LMD, in Sri Lanka, and will post some updates from the editors, when I get them, shortly.

Thanks for your concern.

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I keep discovering new variations on the subject of the New Advertising that I cover. Two classic examples are the Honda ad that is all about the people who buy the car, and not the car itself, and the Amazon.com short films now running on the ‘Amazon Theatre’ -er, the Amazon.com landing page. In case you haven’t heard, Amazon Theatre has been screening these films from November 9th for a 5 week stint.

First the neat trick about the Amazon films. They are billed as a ‘Fallon Worldwide production’ meaning they are produced by an ad agency. This has all the makings fo what  the Madison & Vine concept was all about –a marriage between hollywood and Mad Ave. One film, Be careful what you wish for’  is about a married couple, a confession, and an insect, with flashbacks to their youth. You bet it’s got wacky suspense.

Then there are the rolling credits, a great indicator of where things are headed in ad land. The CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE has the wife listed at the top, ad the husband listed 5 credits below. Inbetween are –I am not maing this up- blankets and lamps.

Fallon throws in some star power by having Daryl Hannah play a tiny part. But it’s the storyline, and not the stars that matter, because you are always wondering what the catch is. No the products cannot be clicked on, and no there is no overt selling in the storyline. It is even –perhaps deliberately– slow moving story for a short film, but has a neat punchline/kicker.

The real deal turns out to be in the Credits. You can click any of the Credits and they turn out to be links to the the lamps and jewellery in the film. In another much more pacy film, ‘Agent Orange’ with a boy-meets-girl theme, credits for the Fossil watch, Diesel jeans, camera etc are also linked to items on sale on Amazon.

As a technique I can see where this is going. Amazon knows exactly who its shoppers are, and can nicely target the films at each demographic. A man buying CDs of Barry manilow, probably doesn’t need to be targeted with the Agent Orange film. The products listed could be someday worked in with more interactive features, rather than to pages where they are listed. Fallon is one of the few agencies following up with work that reflects the passing away of the dumb TV commercials.

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Yahoo must be taking Google seriously. Notice how it has just hired Ogilvy to do its advertising. Actually, with the new interest in Search –with the entry of Microsoft– both Yahoo and Google would be looking hard at communicating the larger strategic values of their brand.

There is another way, too to market your brand using advertisng: Get close to the ad community! Google, as this story shows, has moved to not just hire great agencies, but turn ad folk into evangelizers of the brand.

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After my post on Monday about the power of Brand Voice, and Southwest Airlines, I made a serendipitous discovery of an article (at MarketingProfs.com) by copywriter-turned-psychotactic idea man, Sean D’Souza (who also calls himself a cave guy and fire starter…)

His site, Psychotactics.com, is a wealth of ideas about ideas on marketing, including access to books with Tom peters-like titles (Lessons from the Cave, Brain Train etc) 

Check him out!

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Bob Garfield’s   ad reviews may be sometimes out of whack, but this week he was spot on. In a column in Advertising Age (November 1^st, 2004) that’s much longer than his regular weekly staple,

Garfield deconstructs a broad range of campaign tactics as seen through the lens of Bush and Kerry’s ads. His conclusion: the uber negative campaign has a toxic effect on America, and not just on our politics.

Interestingly, his column was penned before the results, so he sides with an Annenberg study that found how attack ads reduce voter turnout. Bush’s ability to get the popular vote, despite many predictions to the contrary–especially after 2000— is an indication of something else that neither advertising nor academic theory could explain. Maybe, just maybe, attack ads actually work, and all our nice ideas about brand image and consistency, and brand equity are irrelevant. Maybe politicians, not being boxes of detergent, do appeal to people because of something that works at a more visceral level. Speaking of brand equity, Bush yesterday spoke of the ‘political capital’ he has earned, and intends to ‘spend.’ Maybe the inarticulate one has a smarter understanding of his ‘brand’ than we think!

Both campaigns –and I refer to ads, speeches, debates, Web sites etc– made one thing clear: they didn’t give a hoot about traditional branding. They waged their campaigns, not as a cola war, or a beauty pageant, but as something more basic. We may have been appalled and made to feel queasy, whether it was the ‘wolves’ ad or the cheap shot about Mary Cheney, but the net effect was that we were spending less time thinking if the candidate was the fixit man for the economyhealthcarewaroutsourcingterrorism problem and more time wondering if he was on our wavelength. My personal stance was I was angry at both, and longed for someone with more common sense — like John McCain.

After listening to several Republicans and Democrats friends, and the respective media in the post-result whining/gloating phase (Hannity and Air America radio ) I got the feeling that both Bushies and Kerry huggers were struggling with the same queasiness because the two candidates were so unlike them, and their values. So, IMHO, the attack ads served the purpose of one thing alone: to ‘prove’ (with lies, damned lies and statistics) just how off base the opponent was, and what a terrible thing it would be to vote for him. Which explains the big ‘undecided voter’ phenomenon. Or, to put it another way, the attack ads were effective in giving the undecided voter a reason to vote with his/her gut –rather than heart. So, yes, I abhorred Kerry’s position/non-position on abortion, and gay marriage, and yes, I was appalled at Bush insisting on spending an insane amount of money on bringing democracy to a country that never asked us to deliver it. Neither was on my wavelength!

Thomas Friedman, in his November 4^th column, seems to say it best, always drawing on an analogy that everyone can relate to when making a political comment.

"This was not an election. This was station identification. I’d bet anything that if the election ballots hadn’t had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, "Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?" the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way."

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Greg Brooks’ post about how stupid it is for an ad agency to pitch for an account using an ‘unauthorized’ commercial, makes an important point: that it is bad business practice, no matter whether it falls under marketing (selling the agency) or business development.

If you want to find out what a guerilla marketing tactic looks like when it loses focus on the goal, read this. It’s a sobering thought to anyone who thinks that setting up a special web site, will ‘send a message’ to the client. The site, called Project Hijack (how smart is that, when the agency declares that it wants to ‘hikack’ the process?) states they want to:

“hijack the pitch process so that our little agency can get our big idea on the table.”

The agency, Vaughn Whelan & Partners, was pitching for the Molson beer account. They actually ran a TV commercial they created, and paid for the airtime, according to the New York Post story (linked from the agency Web site.) Maybe they are really, really short of a strategic planner, and a copywriter. How else could someone have the guts to write that:

“Rather than pitch to the boardroom, VWPA elects to make positive noise.”

Clients –and I can speak as one, even though I tend to speak for the other side more often– don’t want ‘noise,’ for sure. Even when accompanied by very ‘edgy’ tactics.

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I’m not a big fan of the cameras in camera-phones, but since it was a beautiful –and very important–morning, I took this while standing in line to vote. As any photographer knows, sometimes the subject compensates for the bad camera or cameraman.

Today was my opportunity to vote for the first time in the U.S. As a new immigrant, this is indeed an exciting day for me. Too many people tend to take voting for granted. It annoys me that people complain about the long lines outside voting booths, but have no problems spending as much time in a queue at Starbucks. The line this morning at Starbucks was much, much shorter, so one hopes that some of that lost traffic was queuing up elsewhere…

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Take a closer look at this picture.

London Bloggers Annie Mole (at London Blogger Underground) links to a story about creative vandalism.

London Bloggers seem to form a community, as you can see fromthis site.

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