thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Hyperbole is exaggeration for effect. It is an overused technique in advertising and now it appears to have become an artform called “Copyright Math” by comic Rob Reid

“a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.”

Of course – protecting IP is important but after heading some of these numbers you might wonder why we haven’t heard more comic routines based on this before.

Its only 6 minutes and you know laughing is good for everyone even copyright lobbyists.

“some people think string theory is tough”

So what do bananas have to do with branding? We now live in a world where the back story to our brands is as important as the one constructed by the PR people and the marketing team.

Branding is a 2 way process and anyone in the branding foodchain can tell their story quite easily. There is also a huge amount of business in selling bananas. According to this list of banana facts

“Banana is the most popular fruit in the world – people spend over $25 billion a year on the fruit globally.”

Now that online media is ubiquitous we can be sure that questions will be asked and / or that other stories about our brands will become known especially online. I like this project because it is an example of two growing trends in the branding universe.

1.  The old tactics of legal strong-arming (overly agressive PR) and related activities will become part of the story. Online everyone has some influence. Bananas have a long history in fair trade circles and while new routes to market have been successful most of the banana crop still comes via large companies so there is a lot at stake.
2.  Kickstarter allows project founders a clever way to publicise and productise their projects. Kickstarter as a brand has created a groundswell of community funding behind causes because the platform makes it easy to get involved. Being online makes it much easier for a few hundred people pledging anything from $5 to way more to participate and make projects happen. From a branding perspective this also helps to validate the project and ideas behind it.*

The video clip below comes from the Kickstarter project to complete a documentary on bananas.  As the film maker Fredrik Gertten notes

“It all started with my previous film BANANAS!* which recounts the lawsuit that 12 Nicaraguan plantation workers brought against the Dole Food Company, the largest fruit corporation in the world.

When the film was about to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Dole tried to stop it at all cost, claiming the documentary was “fraudulent” – although they hadn’t even seen it. Dole’s law firm sent us a “cease and desist” letter demanding of us to withdraw the film and close its website, or we would get sued. “

A 4m video clip about the project is below. The project will only be funded if at least $15,000 is pledged by Mon Mar 12, 3:50AM NZDT and as of today 13% away. I’ve backed this project as I have watched earlier work by Gertten and so I’m hoping that the doco reaches its target.

Kickstarter is a peer funding project that seems particularly suited for film projects and many documentaries have now been funded in the past 2 years.

* Imagine you have a new widget for the toy market like this Elevation Dock: The Best Dock For iPhone which closed on Feb 12th with $1,4m in funding from 12,521 BACKERS $1,464,706 pledged of a $75,000 GOAL so massively oversubscribed and the product developers have a backlog of actual prepaid orders in this example.

The economics of making more than 10,000 of the docks will certainly help that business scale up and build a great brand.

Update: Feb 25th. Looks like the doco above will get funded and here is another Kickstarter project with a NZ angle that you might like. Just funded with a goal of $90k.
BOY: the American release!A Narrative Film project in Los Angeles, CA by Taika Waititi

As promised I finished reading Jeffrey Sachs – “The Price of Civilization” – Economics and Ethics After the Fall. The book was an easy read but at the end of it left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Rebooting the US economic and political system is a tough dream to even think about.

Yes it confirms what we suspect about US politics – that it is monumentally dominated by big money and completely broken in a systemic way. The book argues for more government and better government in the economy which has also been hamstrung by the idea of low Federal taxation over many decades.

We already know that Obama’s administration has not been able to break away from the finance sector who helped cause enormous economic mayhem on the US and global economies. Sachs argues in favour of a new 3rd party. Or better a new movement (the millennial generation?) who will clean up politics. On page 249 Sachs tells this story

“The bad old joke complains about the lousy restaurant where the food is terrible – and the portions are small. Arguing for a larger role of government feels about the same. Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt – but we need more, not less, of it.”

Fundamental generational change might be the answer but  actual voting behaviour in Western style democracies appears to be down rather than up. In New Zealand we had an election less than 3 months ago and only about 74% of registered voters (down from 79.4%) bothered to even vote. This was down on previous elections for a range of reasons including a very pointed lack of faith in the system.

I’d suspect that saying the US political system is “incompetent and corrupt” doesn’t get voters excited to vote for more of the same. The paradox is many politicians and citizens alike share this view and yet remain optimistic about the future of our economies. We want to be optimistic, that is part of human nature – but how to transition towards a more positive future when the mainstream news is still high on doom and gloom.

Sachs thinks we can do it – I hope he is right and that Presidential elections in the US produce some real systemic change but I suspect that view is too rose tinted and too much of a long shot to believe in.

This is despite a Paul Krugman OpEd in NY Time Today

“That said, our economy remains deeply depressed. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, we started 2012 with fewer workers employed than in January 2001 — zero growth after 11 years, even as the population, and therefore the number of jobs we needed, grew steadily. The institute estimates that even at January’s pace of job creation it would take us until 2019 to return to full employment.

And we should never forget that the persistence of high unemployment inflicts enormous, continuing damage on our economy and our society, even if the unemployment rate is gradually declining. Bear in mind, in particular, the fact that long-term unemployment — the percentage of workers who have been out of work for six months or more — remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression”.

Who knew the US was in such dire economic straits? Clearly whatever the US government is doing now the policy settings have no significant effect on the top line job numbers.

Let’s say for arguments sake that there are a group of new emerging leaders who might organise and promote change where would these people be found? The green movement in NZ often gets criticised for having economic ideas and policies, but perhaps other green movements around the world might be the place to look for new leaders.

After finishing this book I wanted to learn more about Sach’s past history as an economic adviser.  It seems like he has glossed over some really terrible work in Bolivia, Poland and the Russia* where he was part of grand experiment in radical shock therapy style economics that had more in common with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics than his current views.

*Sachs was in Russia in 1992 and appears to have been genuinely caught out by cold war thinking by the U.S who (were) largely happy about Russia’s economic collapse. That failure seems to have been a turning point for Sachs. Naomi Klein (on page 250 of The Shock Doctrine) describes Jeffrey as sounding

“like a boy scout who has stumbled into an episode of The Sopranos“

Clearly in The Price of Civilization Sachs has a much more Keynesian view of the world that values mixed economies and sees a place for governments to mediate against free market failures of which there have been many.

On page 186 of the book are 8 goals and targets covering 2010-2020. Why the goals themselves look eminently sensible and specific e.g – Raise employment and quality of life, reduce poverty, improve governance and so on I doubt that any 2 politicians or economists would agree on how to do any of them. Therein lies the real problem for the rest of us.

I’ve been reading Paul Ormerod for years ( waiting 2 years for his next book Positive Linking: How Networks and Incentives Can Revolutionise the World) conflicting reports on what has happened to Iceland – Jon Danielsson says that the IMF programmes in Iceland were not successful or sustainable.

To top it off we are constantly told Japan is an economic failure which does not seem true at all The Myth of Japan’s Failure. At least part of the problem seems to be the different ways that GDP is measured and some cultural spin.

Luckily I also got Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow which so far seems to offer a more insightful view of behavioural economics than anything  else I’ve read. More on that and Naomi Klein next time.

Further reading – here are some stats and economics from 2009  from Juan Enriquez. These numbers are different from the ones that Sachs proposes but useful for comparison. Enriquez also

“covers the profound changes that genomics and other life sciences will cause in business, technology, politics and society”