furtherandfaster

Ethnoculture

Heard today that anti-semitism in the UK has reached a new high. But slightly disturbed that included in the classification is critcism of the state of Israel. Hm tricky one - I've been harangued as a Brit abroad  about the conduct of my governement and wrongly identified as an American (to hear similar diatribes) but I'm not sure this really counts. Look I think the Bush administration has been a disaster for America inc and I can't wait till Tony Blair gives up and shuffles off onto the premier speaker circuit but that doesn't mean that by posting those views I'm inciting racial hatred against Americans or indulging in vile self loathing. 

What we do need to take seriously the possibility that people's consciousness is shaped by their ethnicity.  Doh! Well if its so flipping obvious then why does marketing pay so little heed to it?  I know someone in the agency community in his own time is a martial arts instructor to ensure that security can be maintained at synagogues in North London. Paranoia or prudence? Either way the mindset will affect the way those involved in the training - and those in the synagogue view the world.

A couple of days ago I had a brainstorm with a view to exploring events we could run for marketers. One of the topics was looking at how the impact of Al Quaeda and the Iraq war had affected the perceptions of the 1.5 million Muslims in this country in terms of their cultural outlook and the impact on their purchasing behaviour. Perhaps we should roll the Jewish community into that session too.

Check out Richard Huntingdon's Adliterate for a current blog about ethnicity

The lure of the artificial

Well this evening there's a shindig over at the IPA - as John Grant and John Lowery debate whether blogging is killing planning. And I won't be there because I'm on familial taxi duty. Which gives me time to listen to something a little different. I've been devouring Johnny Cash's last recordings. And tonight it was time.... to play the Ratpack.  Cycling through Sammy and Dean and Frank was bizarre. What struck me was how artificial the whole crooning thing was. Authenticity was about being sophisticated which meant having flashy big band arrangements and singing as if you were rather bored and world weary - which was probably terrifically exciting if they were using radio and TV to engage with mass audiences for the first time but seems (at least to me) very superficial now. Frank didn't sound remotely legendary - a big band vocalist who had got too big for his boots. Dean sounded lazy.. I shan't blame it on the drink. And Sammy was hammy - I love ieeeeuuuw - in the style of a night club singer.  We're not quite in the place of authenticity euqtes to  plucking a small guitar without a power lead in sight. I think popular music is quite artificial at present and we're not that bothered about it. But listen to the ratpack if you want your faux worldweariness laid on with a trowel.

Now wash your hands

Had a meeting this afternoon at the Institute of Directors and was amused to discover that in the loos they put a wash basin in each cubicle. Which they probably thought was rather trendy but suggested to me that directors of English companies wanted privacy to wash their hands of things  - which seemed quintessentially English and rather droll.

Congestion and how to deal with it

Eating sushi with Kevin Sugrue at the JAL building today. in Hanover Square. Kevin is one of those intriguing people who sees himself as a planner though his remit is to develop the branded content for phones4u as a client. One of the clientside planners then - a select bunch.  Planners are always up to something (in my experience) and Kevin is no exception. It turns out that he's also a property developer in Second Life. So we had an exchange all about how to plan events in Second Life - something I'm involved in at the moment and where he's had experience. What objects and astral bodies you can rent for example.  Then in an aside he commented that you had to be careful about the buildings you designed in second life because every brick added wear and tear on the system so that if too many people arrived at once the processing would get so massive it would slow the whole experience down.  So don't be planning to build the millenium dome then. All of which gave me cause for thought that perhaps Second Life had found the answer to congestion which the south east of the UK has patently failed to do. It goes something like this: create a connection between the bricks and the people. The more of both you have the more congestion you have. Simple systemic answer then - the more people move into London the more buildings we take down... until they leave. Elegant.

Dr Who theme tune

How did they do it? Find our how the BBC sound archive does the sound for the Sci fi classic Dr Who. Great haircuts and dodgier keyboards.

Running repairs to book reviews

I managed to find a load of book reviews I though I had lost which had somehow gone missing during website updates.

There's quite a list covering globalisation, advertising, marketing, creative thinking, technical, company culture and Over the Edge. Go and have a look.

Step back from the clothes

Walking through John Lewis this afternoon, their mother swerved towards the clothes rails - my daughters suddenly leaped into action - 'Keep your hands where we can see them - Step back from the clothes'.  I assume this had been 'borrowed' from TV but a terrific line nonetheless next time someone you know is overcome with the need for retail therapy..

A class apart

Telly film we watched tonight about the council estate boy who gets put into a public school for a social experiment and in the process his mother Kat (from East Enders) gets off with the headmaster. Posh tosh. Why were we watching it?  Because it got filmed in Hoddesdon and up at Haileybury public school on the hill and my son was supposed to be on one of the location shoots. Well.. we never got to see him. I suppose I should be cautious on the basis of 1 programme to generalise about TV but I'm going to anyway. You see having lived in the area for 20 years - and 13 of them in a road of council houses it was a bit of an eye opener how a TV production shot locally reduced everything to 2 dimensional stereotypes.  The local council estates weren't gritty enough so they dropped in some cooling towers during postproduction to make it look more wretched. Working class women wear thongs, talk about shagging and jump drunkenly on bouncy castles. On council estates they don't have conservatories - they sit in burned out cars instead. Posh people of course do none of those things - they have affairs and send their children to private school where they are academically successful and emtionally confused. Well I've lived alongside working class and middle class people for a long time and I don't recognise either of those stereotypes. Now perhaps this is all TV is capable of - in which case I wonder why bother. It did make me wonder how many other TV dramas abuse locations in the same way and reduce locations (and characters) to crude stereotypes. Even George Cole was struggling. 40 years ago he was here on the Easney estate filming the St Trinians films. About as realistic. It shows how much depends on the actors to create real drama and human interest in the foreground. But on TV the settings are stage sets. Even if you don't need stagehands to paint them. End of rant.

security problem

Back to London on the train with Fiona Blades of Mesh Research (another RLF founder). She had cut her finger on her business cards last night. Which had turned out to be an issue because her Vaio is security enabled using her fingerprint. So she can't get back to work until her finger is better. Hilarious. I wonder if they thought of this when they designed it. I have a similar funtion on my HP pocket PC and haven't activated it precisley because of this kind of silly situation. Imagine calling a helpline and trying to find ways past the security. If you can't get into your Vaio press 8 on your keypad..... nightmare.

Breakfast at Hamptons

A few of the revolutionaries were staying at Hamptons B&B. After 4 hours of sleep I can't quite believe that Beverly Clark and I managed to get into a heavy discussion over an English breakfast about the application of mathematical techniques on the analysis of quant and qual data and how Bayesian fuzzy logic could be used as a soft predictor. I can only say I recall it as being a coherent conversation and is a vivid reminder either that planners need to get out more or how many interesting people you meet doing what I do! Beverly is the author of Re-thinking TV and is doing a lot of rethinking through how media research should be constructed and delivered (at ids).