I'm intrigued by the widespread indignation that has greeted the announcement of the corporate brand for the London 2012 Olympic Games. There is an ordinary professional scorn as a matter of course for graphic designers whenever identity work of public significance is unveiled. But here it has been subsumed by a greater and much more personal reaction — there is a public atmosphere of grievance, because everyday people who are excited by the event it now heralds feel aggrieved.
This will be an interesting study in corporate obstinacy, and will indicate the extent to which the 'new way' in customer relations has infiltrated big business — wherein brands are 'democratised' in a big push-pull-push action with half-militant, half-brainwashed consumers. I don't know which way it'll go; I do know that the Games corporation will need balls of steel to stick with it. But at least until recently, balls of steel were an essential survival trait in male-dominated, crusading boardrooms.
The software giant will announce at the D5 conference today that it’s built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world... Forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on.
Get your fingers out of the way, Bill — some of us are trying to work.
I'm not the guy you perceive
You tell me that I'm drinking too much
Y'know, I could never believe
You tell me that I'm drinking too much
Go on, pack your bags and leave
Give us this day our daily splash
Forgive us our hangovers
As we forgive all those who continue to hangover against us
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil, and someone... give us all a ride home.
While we're on the topic of Telstra and football, I went to a game at the Docklands over the weekend. During the quarter breaks, the scoreboard exhorted the 40,000-odd crowd to protest against 'the ACCC, which is shirt-fronting highspeed broadband in Australia', among other dubious footballing metaphors, by clicking on some buttons at nowwearetalking.com.au. (The ACCC is Australia's competition regulator — it has the authority to rebuke businesses for practices that it deems anti-competitive.) The ads carried no branding, and the only mention of Telstra was in the hasty 'authorised by' line at the end of the message.
Telstra is obviously playing bully here. It's clear to most observers that Telstra is the primary obstructor (as it has been for oh, ten years?) preventing the development of internationally and nationally competitive broadband services in Australia.
Which, ironically, is exactly what nowwearetalking.com.au was saying late last week:
I don't have much sympathy for Telstra's rivals in this whole debate either — it's pretty clear that everyone wants to make a buck out of the big goldmines along this new frontier, and the only entity that might even conceivably have the interests of consumers at heart (the ACCC?) is in way over its head.
But far more objectionable is this craven, cynical attempt by Telstra to mobilise citizenry on the back of blatant misinformation, manipulating their desires without giving them the facts — 'we're trying to bring you faster broadband, but the regulator won't let us'.
When social leaders stir up other elements of society with this sort of mischief, the result is a lynch mob. And that's precisely what Telstra is trying to achieve with nowwearetalking: an on-line lynch mob to do its dirty work.
I'm glad someone kicked them in the balls for it. And of course it was someone in particular — probably a five line script written out-of-hours by an Optus or Primus employee. Sadly, it wasn't a bit of push-back from the citizenry. But still, Telstra got very churlish about it:
