"Hula" STI app offends indigenous Hawaiians, plans to carry on regardless

Via Wikimedia

It's getting to the point where marketers are being challenges to rethink our causal brand appropriation of cultures — even when we mean no harm.

Case in point: The Hula app, "a free way to find STD testing, get the results on your phone, and share your verified STD status," has made some native Hawaiians angry.

From Global News:

An online petition is asking for the “Hula” app to change its name.  

...

The three college students who started the petition say they are not opposed to the app’s functions but don’t want to see the hula dance – a beloved cultural art form – exploited. 

“My culture is more than a tourist destination,” said Kelly Luis, a student at Columbia University. “It is more than a place to go for the summer. It’s more than just sexy hula girls on the beach. There is a culture there.”

The Change.org petition, which so far has just over 1200 signatures, details how Hula was a sacred art form that was suppressed by colonial missionaries, and is now degraded by sexualized portayals in popular culture.

Some protestors on the Hula Facebook page also bring up the supreme irony in naming an STD app after a Polynesian sacred rite. Following European contact in the late 1700s, venereal diseases introduced by foreign sailors decimated indigenous Pacific island nations. From the time of Captain Cook's landing in Hawaii in 1778 to 1853, the population of the islands fell from an estimated 300,000 to just 71,019.

Screencaps via Hula

I have no doubt that the people developing the Hula app and brand bore no ill will towards the Hawaiian people.

Global reports that the company posted the following on their Facebook page:

“We are in the process of learning more from your community, discussing internally and hope to address your concerns shortly.”

I can't seem to find it, however.

The company's CEO and founder, Ramin Bastani, told AP that he is going ahead with the brand name, but will stop using puns like "getting lei'd" because he "didn't realize that it was offensive."

Here's his story about the brand evolution:

The app was originally named Qpid.me, but it sounded too similar to a dating site and was changed to "Hula" because the company wanted to evoke a "sense of beauty and being relaxed," Bastani said. "It was a pop culture sense of the name." 

"We loved the idea of calm and beauty of anything Hawaiian," he said, "which is the antithesis of anything having to do with health care." 

Learning about Hawaiian culture has taught him that dancing hula is a "communication tool" used to pass on information among generations, Bastani said. "That plays very well with what we actually believe as the core of the company."

To be honest, I could have made the same mistake. It's really easy to see cultural traditions, which have been treated so superficially for so long in popular culture, as nothing more. And indeed, Hawaii itself has marketed a sexy, silly, version of Hula for some time.

This instance is not easy to be judgemental about. Native Hawaiians have the right to define what their cultural and religious properties mean to them, and are more than justified in being offended. At the same time, "mainstream" western culture has a tradition of treating its own religions irreverently.

The Hula people most likely believe that the controversy will blow over. In the meantime, they will probably actually benefit from the publicity, since everyone now knows who they are.

Meanwhile, the Hawaiian students have an international stage on which to start to redefine the way we perceive and treat indigenous cultures and their best-known rituals.

In a weird, cynical, marketing-world way, everyone kind of wins this one.

On second thought, perhaps this "tap booty" ad conveys the wrong message...

Boston Magazine reports that the above ad, which appeared on Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority vehicles, has been voluntarily removed by the advertiser.

Hollaback! Boston, the local chapter of an international anti-street-harassement organization, had complained to MBTA about the ad's appropriateness, especially in public spaces where sexual assault and street harassment happen frequently.

“We get stories constantly about groping incidents on trains,” said Britni de la Cretaz, co-site director of HollaBack! Boston. “The cartoonist made it super sexualized, and the reason I felt that was inappropriate is because a lot of people riding the trains have their butts touched without consent all the time.”

Ironically, Ms. de la Cretaz points out, the "Tapbooty" ads were appearing at the same time as MBTA was running its own anti-harassment campaign:

“I know in general [the T tries] to be good about talking about harassment and how it is not OK," she added. "Maybe they just didn’t even realize that’s what [the advertisement] looked like.”

Interestingly, both Tapbooty and Hollaback are in the apps business — Tapbooty as a "social games for fun & rewards" one, and Hollaback! with a tool to report, analyze and protect oneself from street harassment incidents.

McDonald's Australia offers supply-chain transparency app

The changing consumer perception of food is starting to have a real influence on fast food chains. In 2011, McDonald's USA started a "farm to fork" campaign about their ingredient sourcing. Last year, McDonald's Canada launched an "ask us anything" site to try to dispel urban legends about their food. Now, according to Burger Business, McDonald's Australia (Known there as "Macca") has gone even further with the marketing transparency, creating an app that can source the farms and producers who created the ingredients for your actual meal. This video explains:

Burger Business writes:

In its Facebook film explaining the app, McDonald’s admits that there remains “some confusion about just how real our food is,” despite its having spent many years and tried a variety of approaches to explaining its food sourcing and preparation. No amount of food-quality information will suffice for some fast-food haters, vegetarian activists and food elitists, but McDonald’s has provided far more transparency on this issue for a longer time than has any other QSR chain.

I'll give McDonald's points for effort, if not for the actual products. Supporting local farmers and producers is great. Pushing highly-processed packages of sugar, salt and fat on families... somewhat less so. But it's great to see big brands reacting to grassroots change.

Is this app just asking teens to sext?

Snapchat, which has just been made available for Android devices (it's been on iPhone for a year), is an app that lets people put an expiry date on the photos they share with friends on their mobile devices.

As of October 28, they were celebrating "over 1 billion snaps" shared worldwide. Users set who can see their pics, and how long they can see them for before they are deleted from the snapchat server. If the recipient takes a screenshot, the sender is notified — but cannot erase it.

The main product benefit advertised is speed: "real time picture chatting" that goes faster than e-mails or other messaging (since the picture lives on an external server).

At the Apple Store, the app has the following disclaimer:

Rated 12+ for the following:Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive ThemesInfrequent/Mild Sexual Content or NudityInfrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude HumorInfrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References

In other words, they just expect — even sanction — that users are doing all the unfortunate things they do with their camera phones now. But does making sexting seem safer actually encourage it?

That might not be fair. I imagine the encouragement will come from horny jerks on the other end of the line, who will use the "temporary" nature of the picture as a reason for oversharing.

But snapchat has this warning for its customers:

When you send or receive messages using the Snapchat services, we temporarily process and store your images in order to provide our services. Although we attempt to delete image data as soon as possible after the message is transmitted, we cannot guarantee that the message contents will be deleted in every case. For example, users may take a picture of the message contents with another imaging device or capture a screenshot of the message contents on the device screen. Consequently, we are not able to guarantee that your messaging data will be deleted in all instances. Messages, therefore, are sent at the risk of the user.

As Buzzfeed's Katie Heaney concludes:

The app's message, then, is a mixed one: We don't guarantee security, and we can't imagine you using this for anything unseemly. But here are some tools to make sexting easier. Not that we think you're sexting. It's the app equivalent of a head shop.