Beijing

Grainy, biased, poorly edited reports from Beijing complete picture

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Controversy demands source variety. The Olympics, like war, is poorer when the variety is constrained by commercial or political decree.

Jamaican sprint wonder Usain Bolt’ display of speed and celebration spurred much commentary –even a conspiracy theory about him slowing down. All this seems to make the official NBC coverage bland.

We also faced what I hope would be the last Olympics with a news blackout –messages like “Sorry, this media is not available in your territory” — from big (old) media outfits like the BBC, that is ironically doing a great  job of unfiltered reporting through new media.

Then there are plenty of citizen journalists in the village: athletes with cameras and blogs. GroundReports.com features some real street-level reporting complete with shaky camera, grainy video and poor audio. These reports don’t compete with the big guys but they sure add pressure for the media to rethink how it covers and keeps us informed about our world.

The Lenovo blogging program, Voices Of The Olympics, has been responsible for more than 1,300 athlete posts. “It isn’t really a program about making millions of impressions in the traditional marketing sense,” says Lenovo, but about those “thousands of connections between athletes and fans.”

Over at Bleacher Reports, another CitJo outfit that’s connected to FoxSports, a reporter called Zander Freund had this to say about the controversial tie-breaker between Nastia Liukin and He Kexin.

“If I were in charge of the IOC, I’d tell Liukin and Kexin to get their butts back up on those bars.”

Not exactly the way NBC’s Bob Costas would have put it, but it’s as authentic and grainy as you can get.

Image is everything –until you tick off the media

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

This is the flip side of my last post on image management –the futility of trying to control things.

The British journalist removed from the scene of a protest in Beijing on Wednesday can undo much of gains China has been making in the first few days of the Olympics.

The hand-covering-camera-lens tactic worked in times gone by. Today there are too many cameras that don’t look like cameras. There’s audio. There’s Twitter. And as we have seen only too well, reporters don’t have to be credentialed to cover a story. Images like this will gain more currency when mainstream people are ticked off.

As I more or less predicted last month, media rights mean nothing if someone has a story to tell and an audience.

Addendum:

This comment from David Wolf, on a post on Digital Watch, a blog out of Ogilvy China sums it up well:

“the IOC has yet to come to terms with the Internet and what it means to the way people enjoy – or at least “consume” – the Games.”

Beijing Olympic Report: Branded Entertainment

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

By amazing coincidence, I heard a bit of Rush Limbaugh this morning, philosophizing on the reason the Olympics attracts a female audience, and his theory was that the Olympics is a hugely ‘chickified’ event filled with stories of rags-to-riches and oppressed people overcoming the odds. They dig it not for the sports, but for the emotion, he went on. Limbaugh is famous for this kind of nonsense, but he’s going to feel vindicated because of how Kleenex plays into this angle.

I’ll leave it to Rohit Bhargava, my guest blogger from Beijing to take it from here.

If you are one of those people that gets in front of the television every evening with a box of tissues to get ready for the melodramatic overload that is the American television coverage of the Olympics, then you’ll be thrilled to know that as part of their sponsorship of the US Olympic team, Kleenex commissioned a documentary to take an inside look at some of the most powerful tear-jerking moments in the Olympics over the past few years. The film is mostly focused on the US (to match their sponsorship) and takes you on a hosted journey with a nameless host who plays the part of “good listener” as past and future hopeful US Olympic athletes are interviewed on a blue couch about their Olympic moments and aspirations.

I had the chance yesterday to go the film premiere at the USA House here in Beijing and it was a well attended affair with lots of recognizable US Olympians, including Julie Foudy, Scott Hamilton, Lenny Krayzelburg, and a few others (see my photos on Flickr). The venue was “homebase” for USOC team members and lots of American gear was available for sale. It was the perfect venue for the premiere and a well put together event. The film itself is a really nice piece of branded entertainment and does well to promote the role of Kleenex brand in the Olympics and in each of our lives, encouraging people to “let it out” without being overly branded. Great job by brand manager Anya Schmidt and the rest of the Kleenex team to keep the branding soft on this project.

I am a fan of Kleenex brand, but I do think that they have a larger strategic problem that likely won’t be solved by a campaign like this or even through an Olympic sponsorship. One of their biggest challenges surely must be the commoditization of their brand. The fact is, people call every kind of tissue a Kleenex. They own the category, but need to continually explain to people why it matters that you buy Kleenex instead of the cheaper store brand. Just once I would love to see them take the road of comparing their brand’s superiority to cheaper imitations. I can already picture the thirty second spot. Guy and girl on a first date go to see a sappy movie. Girl is crying and guy tries to be smooth by handing her a “Kleenex.” She blows her nose, the tissue rips and she messes up her expensive “first date dress.” The ad ends with her looking at him angrily as the tagline fades in: “Kleenex … Because Everything Else Blows.”

Damn, I’m good. I should do this for a living.

PS – Check out the trailer for the film below – its actually really good and will be premiering for a limited engagement in theaters in 25 cities starting August 13th across the US. It will also be available on www.letitout.com from August 14th.

To read more real athlete’s stories, visit Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games!

Image is everything. Beijing we don’t have a problem

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

So easy to criticize lip-syncing, now that the news is out that Lin Miaoke (the girl on the right) who ‘sang’ at the opening ceremony, didn’t. She was simply mouthing the words from Yang Peiyi (left).

“The reason why little Yang was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation,” the music designer Chen Qigang has observed.

I understand the transparency/ethics brouhaha. But when we get to this level of production, since this is ‘theater’ after all, what’s real and what’s fake? Wasn’t most of what happened on the massive stage an analog-to-digital suspension of disbelief?

Before you rant about the fakeness of it all (al la Milli Vanilli) consider too that the pyrotechnic creation of  29 footsteps leading up to the opening event was –for want of a better word, and I don’t mean this badly– fabricated using CGI for the billions of TV viewers. It was part real, part fake.  No different from how special effects around major events are staged, pre-made, and whatever Thesaurus word you can find to fit.

It’s all about the right image, whether we call it advertising, marketing or an opening ceremony. So give Beijing a break.

Analog to digital highlighted at Olympics opening ceremony

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors communicated across vast distances by beating out messages on drums. Today we relay messages across the world on Twitter, using our thumbs.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics combines both these communication impulses in a country that is seeing this dramatic shift from the analog and digital. The balance and alternation of signals is a powerful metaphor for much of what we do, no matter where we live.

The visually lavish opening ceremony with its human tableau set on a digitally created scroll was just the start. Bamboo scrolls gave way to print; and in a striking opposite effect, 2008 drummers played out a digital spectacle with their choreographed beats made to look like a LED screen which spelled out the count down. That too in Roman and Chinese numerals. How much richer could we get?

One Daily Mail journalist summed it up this way: “This was a feast for the eyes cooked not from the books of ancient culture so much as the latest Microsoft manuals.” I don’t think this is accurate. It was a feast for all our senses, cooked from a user manual that’s a mashup of the Little Red Book and Microsoft manual.

A few millenia after the drum and the torch, here’s how we send and receive information:

  • There’s a Twitter tag 080808 set up by three Chinese to connect everyone’s tweets.
  • Watch cell-phones streaming live video on Qik, a service also used by the Sacramento Bee to cover the torch protests.
  • Newspaper and TV journalists are blogging to give us expanded, less time-delayed coverage.
  • Text alerts (and video) on your phone is available at NBC at NBColympics.com
  • Several Facebook groups in support of, and as a protest to the Olympics.
  • NBC has a widget you could add to your blog or social network.
  • The Voices of the Olympic Games, courtesy Lenovo provides great back stories from the athletes themselves.

Ambushing the 2008 Olympics, too irresistible

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments
Beijing, 2008

Beijing, 2008

Someone’s going to pull off an ambush next month in Beijing. It may be a brand ambush, but it could also be a story ambush. There’s going to be a PR controversy over a brand defending the tactic, or someone attacking the ambusher.

I say this because of two trends that have collided:

  • The capacity to blur the lines between mainstream and viral, and
  • The field of diamonds that awaits the publicity seeker because of so much media attention on China

It could happen in a variety of ways, such as the old methods of sneaking in a T-shirt with a logo, a sign with an caustic slogan, or accidental product placement. But there are more sophisticated ways of beating the logo police. The whole idea of ambush marketing is to get attention not inside the Olympic village, but outside it. To you and me.

And that means defying not the logo police but the publishing police. Portable media such as smart phones and cameras can do that all too easily. Naturally the authorities have been cagy.

Rings around social media. And how about video sharing, live streaming, blogging? It’s so easy to stand up in front of an Olympic landmark -even a competitor’s sign –shoot a video and post it in a few clicks. The Official TV sponsor, NBC, may have the rights to all the venues, but rights means nothing to someone who has audience.

Rush to blog. Blog policy is being debated for obvious reasons. NBC has made sure it won’t be usurped by some media upstart, and is embedding its own journalist-blogger, Alan Abrahamson, at the games. Other blogs have cropped up fast, such as the New York Times‘ Rings, and The China Beat written by a group largely comprised of academics. Not media people, mind you! If I remember correct, athletes are still allowed to blog.

At the time of writing, there are 23,800 YouTube videos that come up for the keywords “2008 Olympics.” This includes a BBC clip using a ‘pollution detector‘ that tells a damaging story. In sixty days you can bet that number will be a lot higher, and quite possibly include a few that document tales of ambush.