Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Benetton’s Unhate Campaign – leaders of the world, kiss and make-up

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Benetton Unhate Campaign China USA

Jintao and Obama

If you cannot love your neighbours then at least unhate them!

It’s been a while but United Colours of Benetton are back with another campaign – should we call it an advertising campaign or are they political campaigns – or is there no distinction? Both as they are being acts of persuasion in the art of selling, whether goods and services or ideas?

Benetton’s campaigns usually make it off the advertising pages and on to the news pages. Their latest the Unhate Campaign is no exception. And as advertising goes 24 hour news coverage is hard to beat – it costing them not a penny in airtime – and in advertising being noticed is everything, better still to be loved as well but if you cannot be adored then better to be hated then ignored.

The campaign came to my attention via this blog post on the My Modern Net site and the posted manipulated images of various world leaders in intimate kissing.

Benetton Unhate Campaign Pope and Imam

The Pope and the Imam

However as noted this Benetton campaign has quickly migrated to the news pages. I had first heard about it just hours earlier on the radio in respect of the withdrawal of the image of the current Pope Benedict XVI kissing a senior Egyptian Iman Ahmed el Tayyeb.

The only question for me on hearing this was which of them would be the first to express outrage. On this occasion it was the Vatican unhappy it seems with the commercial intentions of the image as whether it was blasphemous or not.

An ironic outcome for Benetton bringing Catholics and Muslims together in mutual antipathy!

Benetton say their Unhate Campaign was established to ‘invite the leaders and the citizens of the world to combat the ‘culture of hatred’.

I wonder why the word Unhate was chosen rather than the word Love? Perhaps they are suggesting that the hate-filled parties must first learn not to hate before they can love?

Executive Deputy Chairman Alessandro Benetton goes on to say “At this moment in history, so full of major upheavals and equally large hopes, we have decided, through this campaign, to give widespread visibility to an ideal notion of tolerance and invite the citizens of every country to reflect on how hatred arises particularly from fear of ‘the other’ and of what is unfamiliar to us,”.

Benetton Unhate Campaign Obama and Chavez

Obama and Chavez

Perhaps unsurprisingly Barack Obama as leader of the world’s most powerful country is featured twice, the first kiss with Chinese Premier Hu Jintao and the second kiss with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. These are kisses then not so much of love but ‘of kiss and make up’?

The one image I find the most puzzling though is the one between French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel – I had thought from my British perspective their diplomatic relationship already quite friendly, even cosy – indeed in the press their names are often unflatteringly conflated together as ‘Merkozy’ suggesting that they are of one mind, one heart – or something like that!

I would have thought a more appropriate kissing partner for the German Chancellor would have been our very own British Prime Minister, David Cameron, seeing as their current political friendship seems far more frosty.

Likewise for Sarkozy the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have been a better world leader to exchange spittle with after his recent off-mic remark to Obama that ‘he cannot stand him. He’s a Liar’ (!) – though likely that remark occurred after Benetton had made their leader selections.

Benetton Unhate Campaign Merkel & Sarkozy

Merkel and Sarkozy

Netanyahu in any case is pictured kissing Mahmoud Abbas President of Palestine.

The final image is of Kim Jong-il the Supreme Leader of North Korea  bridging the divide as it were with a peck on the lips with Lee Myung-Bak the President of South Korea.

And indeed why should such images be controversial? World leaders should make more of an effort to get along – to engage each other diplomatically rather than militarily. And perhaps UNHATE is a better term than love which itself is not necessarily a desirable thing in world politics. It is like the so called implied Love In of Governments of National Unity. Sounds nice and reasonable but it lacks plurality – as a democrat I want the market-place of ideas not a cosy cartel of them where all the political parties have merged into one effectively leaving us the electorate disenfranchised.

In the UK we already have a coalition government of Conservative and Liberal Democrat, and the leaders of each, Cameron and Nick Clegg, already holding hands with each other, I don’t want to see the leader of the opposition Labour party Ed Milliband with his tongue in either of their mouths as part of a Unhate Triangle!

Benetton Unhate Campaign North & South Korea

Jong-Il & Myung-Bak

Is this campaign displaying a confusion between Love and Unhate? Is it being implied as the same thing if we see world leaders represented kissing each other? Not hating someone and wanting to kiss them on their lips is quite an emotional jump?

The Unhate campaign is challenging world leaders to put aside their ideological differences of politics and religion but in picturing leaders of the same gender kissing they are challenging yet another emotive issue?

The campaign has homophobia in its sights too?

There is only one image of a female world leader kissing a male world leader but then that is as much due to yet another issue of gender discrimination and the dominance of men in politics and the global power-play.

Though the campaign included just six images – and now five! – with a world in which alas there are so many global, regional and local conflicts clearly there are many more images of leaders kissing their ostensible enemies that could yet be mocked up.

I am expecting a fair share of spoofs on this campaign too. And as is well-established all publicity is good publicity, then well done Benetton for that.

I am still left wondering if this campaign is a cynical commercially self-interested one though. By withdrawing one image so soon there is already a question about the strength of their convictions as surely they must have anticipated the nature of some of the responses they would get. And the fact that there is an outcry about it and I am blogging about it…job well done. I’ve been played?!

I do hope there is more to the Unhate campaign than that.

Benetton Unhate Campaign Palestine Israel

Abbas & Netanyahu

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X-Men: First Class – Hit me baby one more time

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"Canada is on our northern borders - who knew?' - Obligatory Google Image Hits Photo

X-Men First Class – did you think so? I don’t care – as the saying goes ‘I made you look’ and that is all that matters to me, granted not to you.

I hope you don’t feel cheated that I lured you here in under false pretences? You were searching for this current big-grossing US box-office draw and I have peppered this post with such phrases to drive up the hit count on my blog whilst not providing you any new information on what you are looking for or indeed any information at all outside the words you Googled. You will pass on perhaps irked perhaps even cursing me but no matter whether you stayed with this post to its bitter end or no more than a nanosecond before clicking back to the Google page you came from it is all one hit for me.

At this juncture I will throw in the words Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and sex but be careful enough that their sequence is ambivalent enough to see me not sued for libel in the process of getting that hit. Sweet Lady Gaga Madonna how foolish that would be.

Pippa Middleton's sister - obligatory Google Image Hits Photo Two

Like stating Cheryl Cole secretly wishes to marry Simon Cowell. Thankfully it is not a claim I am making just a string of words with search engine on its mind.

I now want to share a dream with you, a nightmare indeed. I am still a little shaken by it involving as it did US Representative Anthony Wiener doing unspeakable – so grateful to implicit not explicit speech – acts over images of Newt Gingrich’s spouse – I would say Callista but her husband is even more hit-worthy – more than compensating for any stray Calista Flockhart hits I pay pick up along the way.

The trick to be rolling in the deep is not to sledge-hammer in these phrases so that they seem like a contrived web-bot generated collection of random nonsense but that they read as if written by a human if with no more enthusiasm for the subject than a monkey typing away the proverbial thousand typewriters – sorry Apple iPads.

Before I go this just in on the Gossip Wire, Cloud Cuckoo Land, I can reveal that Kate Middleton, future UK Queen no less,  indulges in extreme couponing. A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace commented ‘We really are all in it together’. Okay now I am just being silly.

Yes everything in this post was a big fat lie.

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The Alyona Show – political smarts

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The Alyona Show is an hour long weekday news and current affairs TV show from the international news network RT (formerly Russia Today).

I live in Scotland and it is broadcast between four and five in the morning – I hope it is broadcast a more social hour where you are?! RT the channel itself is not a mainstream broadcaster in my country either so then we have The Alyona Show hard to find in time and place but well worth your trouble to seek it out.

If though you don’t have TV access to The Alyona Show you can watch clips of it on the program’s RT website page.

Host Alyona Minkovski

Hosted by Alyona Minkovski and based in Washington DC, USA the shows addresses both domestic and international news items – even the US domestic ones though not always that relevant for me as a viewer in the United Kingdom I can see the issues are being addressed in depth and not beholden to the Republican line as they would be on Fox News or the Democrat line as they would be on MSNBC – rather a more critical line of both parties.

If they are critical of Barack Obama it is not against his progressive agenda but because it is not progressive enough.

It is refreshingly cynical too of Big Business and the Mainstream Media.  A show too that is comfortable with the web rather than the more aloof attitude of much of television news – whose attitude to web journalism is akin to newspaper journalists attitude to them half a century back.

I share much of Alyona Minkovski’s views so am likely to take pleasure in her presentation and interviewing style but I also consider that she puts those views across clearly and unapologetically - it is refreshing to watch a presenter who has passion yet remains clear-headed.

The show is not about Alyona Minkovski alone though – there is an excellent team of contributors as well as an interesting selection of people interviewed.

This is a show I will be making a regular appointment with – even if via my PVR!

US Mid Terms – another victory for Crony Capitalism

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The Republican victories in the Mid-Term election were more I hope a disapproval of Democrat incumbency rather than endorsement of the Republican alternative.

An exasperation that too much was done to mollify Wall Street and too little to help Main Street, big business was schmoozed, small business ignored – the Democrats trying to out Republican the Republican party – and look where it got them.

The US public is clearly angry of the Crony Capitalist instinct of both parties – only problem is they have to see-saw between the two of them as there is no other game in town.

And now the President talks again about bi-partisanship – enough with bi-partisanship – we have democracy so we can have differences in our parties and if we don’t like what a party is doing we vote them out – we need something to choose from otherwise we have in effect one party government.

But I fear the US public may have cut off its nose to spite its face – now there will be legislative gridlock and anything the public may have wanted the Democrats to do they will no longer be able too.

Ultimately a victory for the very rich and a huge defeat for the rest of the United States of America.