Awkward stereotypes sell border security in Dutch PSAs

From a purely digital marketing perspective, this campaign by JWTAmsterdam is brilliant. They use serial online video ads that track the user to create a highly-interruptive, running storyline:



The downside is that the stereotypes of the Asian and Arab merchant are pretty cringeworthy. Whether or not they are based on the creative/production teams' experiences abroad, they certainly take the ethnic clichés to a cartoonish level.

Could the campaign have worked without the send-up? I like to think so. While the stereotypes are played for laughs, the videos would have been just as interruptive and compelling with a little more subtlety (and respect) in the performance.

Tip via Ads of The World

Want to stop the seal hunt? First stop $11 peanut butter in Nunavut

We moved into their land, to get access to valuable resources. We brought the "civilizing" influence of schools, houses and grocery stores to Canada's northern peoples in Nunavut. And now that we've made our case that shopping is better than hunting, we offer them...

The problem, you see, is that almost anything made on a farm or a factory has to be flown in. The traditional diet was mostly meat — mammals and birds from the land and sea, supplemented with fish and berries in season. We're talking caribou, polar bears, seals, whales...

Yeah, that's right. Animals the world doesn't want hunted anymore. But what are the alternatives?

Some Nunavut activists have taken their story to the world, via a Facebook Group called "Feeding My Family". Here, they share their photos of outrageous food prices (the ones above showed up on Buzzfeed) as well as their stories of food insecurity. They have since shown up on The Consumerist,  CBC, The Toronto Star, Huffington Post, and elsewhere.

But what can really be done?

Well, when you have the world's attention, you seize the moment. Just last month, UN special rapporteur for food Olivier De Schutter stated that Canada has over 800,000 households that are considered "food insecure" — a shocking statistic for a first-world country. So an Iqaluit resident, Jessica Ann, started a Change.org petition to the Government of Canada, stating:

Over 70% of Nunavut families with children between the ages of 3-5 are food insecure. Poverty, climate change and high food prices mean that many families in Nunavut go hungry. The UN Rapporteur recently issued a report about Canada's 800,000 families who are food insecure, calling food insecurity in our country a "great concern". The Conservative MP for Nunavut, Leona Aglukkaq, shamed Nunavummiut with her immature and out-of-touch response to the UN Rapporteur. 

We, the people of Nunavut, deserve better from our federal government. Please sign this petition to ask for concrete, effective change that will address poverty and food insecurity in our communities.

There was a time, up there, when food security depended on skill, cooperation, weather and luck. Today, it depends on compassion and fairness.

If people really want to save the seals, etc., maybe we should look at providing affordable alternatives first.

F*ckedCompany 2.0

Do you remember FuckedCompany.com? It's dead now, but a decade ago it was the place to go to read about the implosion of the turn-of-the-century IT bubble.

It was one of those really exciting things in the pre-social web,  a place to get completely uncensored anonymous tips about the latest layoffs, freakouts, and outrages of the technology giants.

Now there's a new source for corporate muck, OfficeLeaks.com:

A kinder, gentler, and social version of FC, it takes the Wikileaks stance that forced transparency is more righteous than privacy or secrecy:

"we believe speech should be free

Often what should be said isn't because the messenger doesn’t have the right clout, title, or family tree.

Anonymity changes this. Only the quality of your thoughts and ideas have sway here."

They differ from Wikileaks, however, in that they want no proof. ("Office Leaks is focused on the subjective part of work life—emotion, culture and leadership.") So obviously, the potential for damaging mayhem put up by ex-employees or competitors is huge.

Here are their rules:

* You must be at least 18 years of age.
* You are not allowed to post an organization's trade secrets.
* You are not allowed to post copyrighted material.
* Don’t make shit up (i.e., lie).
* Don’t be evil.

Yeah. God luck with that.

Online identity theft

I'm not talking about the kind of fraud that runs up your credit card, destroys your reputation, and gets you on a watch list for your apparent love of dead puppy porn. No, this is even worse in some ways.

Adrants today posted about an anonymous woman from a convention whose pic he took and used on a post from some time ago.

She is also on his Flikr.

Well, today this shot of an unknown woman came back to haunt him — quite unexpectedly — in a cheap PPC ad.

 He points out that neither the woman, nor he (the photographer) consented to this use.

This isn't the first case of stolen identity showing up in the digital world. In 2007, The Smoking Gun reported that a British teen's online "sexy" picture (taken when she was just 14) ended up on the cover of an American porn DVD.

The fact is that unscrupulous designers and fly-by-night ad scammers frequently steal images to save time and money.

I captured this one last year:

That's French newscaster (and nerd heartthrob) Mélissa Theuriau. There are hundreds of photos of her posted on Google, yet the person who booked this ad didn't seem to realize subtlety can pay off.

Or not, as the internet has a way of uncovering even the most obscure intellectual property theft, like this Missouri family whose picture ended up in a retail ad in Prague.

How can you protect yourself and your family from becoming the unwitting spokespeople for some bizarre cult or flavoured personal lube? You can't really. Not completely, anyway.

Every photo you post to Facebook, Flikr, etc. that is publicly available can be downloaded or screen grabbed by anyone. Even profile pictures in forgotten online groups, or old shots scanned and posted by former friends and lovers, can be stolen and reused. It isn't legal, it isn't fair, but it is possible.

You can start by cleaning up your old albums and tightening up your security settings. But to be quite honest, the genie is out of the bottle. You might as well accept that you are only protected by your anonymity, and try not to do anything to get the scammers' attentio....

God Dammit...

Fly the way too "friendly" skies

Via BoingBoing

Public outcry against the U.S. Transport Security Administration's new "intimate" pat-downs has created a new meme —"don't touch my junk" — from the confrontation passenger John Tyner had with agents who he accused of sexual assault.



Taking the conversation further, activist organization Fly With Dignity has released these copyright-free images with a call for any interested or would-be art directors to make their own protest ads and sites:

Is it too much? Sociological Images, an academic site I follow, comments "Apparently when trying to make a point about being degraded or victimized, men don’t make suitable subjects."

This is a good point, as well as the fact that the style of the images almost fetishizes the woman's suffering, and thereby trivializes the experiences of assault victims.

How do they make you feel?

Personally, I prefer their approach to full-body scanners:

I had to submit to one of these scans for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. It was a little embarrassing, but I'll bet it was worse for the viewers than it was for me. At the same time, the scanners themselves have come under fire for their safety (from the pilots union) to privacy (over incidents of publicly leaked images).

My CATSA guy that day actually joked that I could see my pictures on YouTube that evening — thank God for his sense of humour!

However, next time I might return the favour by wearing a pair of these:

Via Animal New York

Update: Cancer Survivor Flight Attendant Forced To Show Prosthetic Breast During TSA Pat-Down

Update 2: "I didn’t really expect her to touch my vagina through my pants.” (I think — hope — that "vulva" is more anatomically correct, but anyway...)

Update 3: TSA Takes Nail Clippers From Gun-Toting Soldier

Update 4: TSA Molests 3 Year Old Child at Chattanooga Metro Airport

Update 5: Bladder cancer survivor was soaked by his own urine after a TSA agent broke the man's urostomy bag

Update 6: TSA Won't Grope [incoming U.S. House Speaker] John Boehner

Update 7: This is how Germans protest their country's body scanners (naked, obviously)

Update 8: Another amusing protest stunt: ‘Feminisnt’ Sex Worker Molests TSA Back

Update 9: Scientist: X-ray scanners deliver “20 times the average dose that is typically quoted by TSA.”

Update 10: On November 21, 2010, I was allowed to enter the U.S. through an airport security checkpoint without being x-rayed or touched by a TSA officer. This post explains how.

Update 11: TSA incalls on SNL: "It's our business to touch yours"

Update 12: Metallic ink on underpants makes U.S. 4th Constitutional Amendment (against unreasonable search and seizure) show up on your airport scan

Update 13: Work-travelling, breastmilk-pumping mom harrassed for wanting to bring her baby's dinner home on the plane. (video)

A new, and scary, kind of online PSA

If you haven't been to Please Rob Me yet, you should do so now. Not because you are in any imminent danger, but because it's an interesting new development in public service announcements.

Created by Dutch designers and developers Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld, and Boy van Amstel, Please Rob Me is just a template for displaying a specific type of Twitter search, one that amalgamates Tweets from voluntarily location-aware applications like Foursquare, and uses the context to tell everyone that the Twitterer is no longer at home.

From the developers:

"Hey, do you have a Twitter account? Have you ever noticed those messages in which people tell you where they are? Pretty annoying, eh. Well, they're actually also potentially pretty dangerous. We're about to tell you why.

Don't get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome.

...

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home."

And here's why I think this qualifies as a social marketing PSA:

"The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information."

Mashable adds:

"These guys have a legitimate point. Stories about status updates leading to burglaries are becoming commonplace. You may remember that video podcaster Israel Hyman was robbed after tweeting that he was out was out town, and there’s even evidence to support the notion that burglars are turning to social media to find their targets."

It's an interesting way of raising awareness of the way social media power-users are giving away far more information than they may have bargained for. But I wonder if it breaks any privacy laws itself. We'll see.