Beyond Branding

   
Home page
The book
The authors
Updates
Pre-order
Contact us
Beyond Branding is written by members of The Medinge Group

The Beyond Branding blog


December 09, 2003

Bowling for Nokia 

Watched "Bowling for Columbine" for the first time on UK terrestrial TV this weekend (yes, about time I know).

In Michael Moore's powerful investigation of why the US is gripped by a misplaced fear of gun violence, a comment by Marilyn Mansun seemed to make a lot of sense. He argued that the potent mix of "fear and consumerism" on US TV (partic the news networks) was warping people's minds. And in many ways he is right. There is a powerful cocktail (almost "Molotovian") in the contrast between the instant gratification of live news broadcasts (often of the latest violent shooting hunted down by the networks satellite trucks and helicopters) and the "out-of-reach" gratification of the TV ads, showing the latest Lexus or HUV for example. Going back to my blog below on social anguish, one can see how this can cumulatively add up to a detrimental impact on society.

But, what was particularly irksome about Sunday's broadcast was that in the second ad break after Mansun's comments, up pops a new ten second ad from Nokia. It was an ad for its new N-gage mobile handheld game - I didnt catch the name of it but the voiceover went something like this, "From next week, you become the hunter and its time to hunt them down. The new first person shoot-em-up for N-gage" accompanied by screen animation of the game character firing an automatic rifle at his human targets...

Maybe this is the only recorded case of reality-entertainment-reality TV or something like that... even so, how damn inappropriate and a clear case of "cleverness over relevance"

permalink
Comments: Post a Comment
Links to this post

Links to this post:

Create a Link

 

Authors’ and associates’ individual blogs

  • Johnnie Moore’s Weblog
  • Steal This Brand
  • Jack Yan: The Persuader Blog
  • Right Side up
  • Chris Lawer
  • Ton Zijlstra
  • Headshift
  • Partum Intelligendo
  • Goiaba Brazilian Music
  • Detective Marketing
  • Chris Macrae

  • + Add Beyond Branding to your Blogroll

    Add feeds

    Aggregated blogs

    RSS
    WML/WAP

    Old Beyond Branding blog entries


    Add feed to Bloglines
    Add feed to Newsgator
    Add feed to My Yahoo!


    RSS feed from 2RSS
    CompleteRSS

    This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

    Get this blog via email

    Enter your email

    Powered by FeedBlitz

    Blogroll

    Previous posts

  • Hear hear!
  • Me-consumerism and social anguish
  • RSS feed for Beyond Branding
  • 20th Annual Xmas Survey on Freedoms of Networking ...
  • University of Stars - Final 2003 Update
  • P&G - know thy essence
  • Procter & Gamble: Enter the Hall of Shame
  • University of the Stars & Open Space Storytelling
  • Jonny Wilkinson – unintentional author of the new ...
  • What brand are you?
  • Beyond Branding bloggers

    Chris Lawer UK
    Chris Macrae UK/US
    Jack Yan New Zealand
    John Caswell UK
    Johnnie Moore UK
    Malcolm Allan UK
    Nicholas Ind Norway
    Simon Anholt UK
    Stanley Moss USA
    Thomas Gad Sweden
    Tim Kitchin UK


    Blogarama

    Webfeed (RSS/ATOM/RDF) registered at http://www.feeds4all.nl


    Listed on BlogShares
    Top of the British Blogs
    Blog Flux Directory

    Business Blog Top Sites


    Feed Digest
    nfeeds.com