Scary Spice.

For maximising the potential of social media in masterly fashion I take my hat off to W+K – but, strategy aside, and ignoring the fact that the Old Spice executions rely more heavily on irony than insight, I'm really not being swept away with the online tide because I just can't erase the stench of the anticlimax of unwrapping a present and finding a gift pack of aftershave, deodorant spray and talc rather than a toy or at least some chocolate bursting out of my stocking on Christmas morning.

Specifically, while the multiple online replies are the result of a superb piece of planning, the branding is scarily really just dressing (smelly) mutton up as lamb.

A glutton for punishment.

Like hungry Chinese ghosts with a surplus of food but with mouths too small to ingest even the tiniest of morsels, it appears we're beginning to drown in the one thing that we treasure the most – oil.

Landing the ego.

Gone are the days when sending a pizza to a hiring ECD is enough to grab his/her attention, in the Tweenies you have to make yourself heard digitally with something truly bleeding edge – like the kind of stunt writer/director Alec Brownstein pulled off. By playing to the egos of Gerry Graf, David Droga, Tony Granger, Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone, Alec got both a job at Y&R New York and won two pencils and a Clio while he was at it. By simply purchasing Google Ad Words for the creative directors' names, which costs him $6 in total, he communicated his talent to them directly in the one place he knew to find them online – Googling themselves.

Via ID3.

Future tense.

Already an eleven million-plus viral Youtube hit, the centre piece of W+K's Nike 2010 World Cup campaign is a three-minute spot built on the tension surrounding the future impact of success and failure on the pitch – with a good or bad pass or tackle – with players' lives off the pitch.

The likes of Wayne Rooney and Ronaldo flash-future themselves into the colourful lives of national heroes and villains in scenarios that include an English trash trailer park, a maternity ward, a South American shopping channel, an episode of The Simpsons and Youtube itself, and cameos that go further to prove – Pepsi take note – that with the right level and tone of drama a commercial can successfully host a roster of stars.

(What's the story) mourning or glory?

The apocalyptic counterstrike and mayhem of the consequent meltdown of wednesday the 19th may have carved a large chunk out of both the Bangkok cityscape and the collective middle to upper-class psyche, leaving a still-weeping, iconic wound that will fester for years to come, but the real loss – which has largely been ignored, and which will never truly be known in full is of those (on both sides) killed fighting in the street battles leading up to and in the final flourishes of the crackdown.

At the loss of city infrastructure many are sad and quite rightly so. At the loss of businesses many are angry and quite understandably so. Of the loss of duped pawns in an old money versus new money political game, no one really knows.

Witnessing the debris first-hand in the hours after the fall and subsequent sacking of Ratchaprasong, smoking malls, burnt-out stores, vandalized banks and charred ATMs, melted phone booths, smashed glass, broken paving stones and bullet holes were visible at every turn, as well as the remnants of looting littered in shop fronts all around – stripped mannequins, coat hangers, security tags, big-brand boxes and bags and even the odd piece of merchandise. But in the embers of what was Bangkok's elite playground, too, lay thousands upon thousands of simple items of lost property: ordinary shoes, clothes and bedding, cooking equipment and food itself – the possessions of a large number of protestors, possessions that seemed discarded before a mass, hurried, unplanned exit. Or worse still. We will never know.

Even factoring in the relocation of several thousand people to Wat Pathumwanaram pre-crackdown, the half-cooked noodles, unpacked clothes, broken, orphaned shoes, unfinished soup, cheap, multi-coloured space blankets and square traditional Thai pillows, suggest an interruption of truly unknown proportions – but now the loss of a sandal or two is being seen as nowhere nearly as grave as the loss of a knock-down party frock. The unpurchased party dress is being deemed of greater importance than the only pair of shoes you own.

And that's understandable – when the state are also claiming the high moral ground, mourning over the tragic material loss of city infrastructure, as well as reveling in a glorious victory over terrorism. But as microblogger Ethan Schmohawke quickly pointed out: "...the Thai regime should realize that you can either crush an opponent or paint yourself as the victim, but you can't really so both..." – not least for the fact that when you do both, when both views are mutually held, an increasingly feverish, polarized stance is further galvanized, a stance that does not allow for any other side to this story.

(Frame grabs, from my upcoming documentary, shot at Siam Square and Ratchaprasong on the 20th of May, 2010.)

Breaking the mould.

Whimsical, eclectic Japanese/Hong kong product design duo The (aka Sherwood and Mihoko) have permanently changed the food container category with a simple but deadly (at least seemingly so) bag to protect homemade lunches from as they say, "...sticky-fingered coworkers or schoolyard bullies...". Their anti-theft lunch bags combine the practical and playful to keep away any potential rotten thieves.

Via Teehan + Lax.

The great firewall of China.

What China censors online.

By Information is Beautiful.

Via Angus Whines.

Panda bared.

Whether it's comic books or Kungfu Panda, pruned poodles, photo-stickers or Harry Potter, roti buns, AF, yellow, pink or red shirts, Korean boy bands, Twilight, anime eyes or BB messaging, the fickle Thai frenzy bandwagon continues to flitter from one fad to the next.

And with a whole TV channel dedicated to Lin Ping the Panda, streaming live video 24 hours a day – monitoring the animal in exactly the same position in its cage, toys occasionally thrown in to add colour to the frame – one is left wondering what will eventually be of the panda when the press strip down his qualifications for stardom. Lin Ping, I suspect, will probably conveniently get sent back to China where he'll be left to ponder his career/life.

Art by Lora Zombie.

Nestlé crunch.

Writing big cheques for social media gurus to hook up your Twitter to your Facebook and your blogfeed to your RSS Reader might be both unnecessary and foolish, but equally running headlong DIY into the online world too can be dangerous – that is particularly so if your brand is super-unscrupulous and you lack basic manners, like Nestle.

Having 92, 242 fans on your Facebook Fan Page is not always a good thing. In short: epic social media fail.

Via White and Wong.

The hurt locked in.

In spite of having both declared outright war on their arch-Oscar enemy and being hunted by former bomb-disposal experts, the tension, drama and gritty realism of the narrative of The Hurt Locker won (over) the film Academy Awards – and though for all its heroism leaves you feeling a taste of victory that is bitter for altogether different reasons.

Bomb diffusion maybe the most perfectly desired metaphor for America's role in the continuing Middle East conflict, but The Hurt Locker uses this as a guise to lure one into a false sense of approval, cheating one into jingoistic pride so that by the time we see the protagonist shooting at some faceless Middle Eastern 007 baddies the whole cinema is cheering – an effect that is heightened by the sense of relief that our key trio's initial desert encounter is with handsome, English Ralph Fiennes and not local Arab militia. There's no such relief though when we (eventually) realise the film is pro-war patriotism dressed up as peace.

One can understand the vast amounts of hurt locked in after the 9/11 tragedy, but is this sort of ethnocentric group therapy the way forward? No. And as so as a movie, this deserves to, er, bomb.

The power of dreams.

While over at bleeding-edge blog The Musings of an Opinionated Sod I was reminded (again) of the power (and economy) of simplicity, clarity and candour in Asian marketing. Sex, in one form or other, is one of the dreams that sell; status – if you want to split the atom – is the other.

This was brought into sharp relief as my head returned to the psychobabble of the brief on my desk. Much of the marketing that surrounds us is blighted by impossibly broad and unobtainable communication objectives, a target market that's often as wide as the world market itself and the continual pestering of mass client intervention that W+K talk of here. The autonomy that Bernbach secured with Avis only very few (can) (dare) look for.

In the rural Cambodian shantytown of Poipet (described by the Lonely Planet as "the armpit of Southeast Asia") subsistence living forces a brevity and directness unheard of in the region's glitzy, excessive, neon capitals onto the locksmith and his brand. His communications – which contain the essential requisites, for his specific target, product illustration (literally, here) and call for action, are boosted by a simple but killer injection of emotional value – the power and status associated with getting a step closer to fulfilling one's dreams of (and with) owning Honda, even if it's just a key ring, at first.

Write it off.

More a passport office for the next life, rather than a graveyard for business careers in this one, Cards of Change celebrates the positives of being sacked by giving those that have been freshly laid off license to rewrite the scope of their new world post-job on their own business card. Online group therapy for a world still in recession.

Set up by former TBWA/Chiat/Day employees, united in Unknownlab.

Hitting back.

I've for a long time been a fan of the subversion of media in and by advertising – as in, and excuse the unabashed self-promotion, THEC's Thailand Open campaign – though this Cyberbullying spot is the first time I've seen media made as the idea online.

Although the video production quality is a just a bit too polished and the faux Youtube graphic ever so slightly off (both points are really only caveats) this work really punches.

Not taking stick anymore.

Fulfilling the societal potential Brand Republic's Rory Sutherland talks of while rejecting the weapons of Naomi Klein's noughties activism – propaganda, protests, lawsuits and boycotts – in favour of coaxing reform of vendor behaviour positively with financial reward and improved reputation, Carrotmob are re-enforcing the most basic rule of the market: that the market holds the force.

The collective support of outlets that apply previously agreed-upon changes to social and environmental working practices and procedures is achieved through none other than the materialist's favourite pastime – shopping.

At a supermarket aisle near you soon.

All we need.

I have a vile contempt for the use of emoticons and other such faddy pseudo-punctuation, but this, the SarcMark, for sarcasm – the first serious addition to the Arboretus Punctuationitis – there is a need for. Really.

Via The Guardian.

Prize draw.

Offering cash rewards to grasses of benefit fraudsters is one thing, but actually giving bounty directly to criminals seems an altogether wilder crime-tackling tactic – though scheming Bangkok police recently faked a prize draw by sending out congratulatory letters informing over a dozen convicted criminals that their ID card numbers had been picked out of a hat and they'd won big, all in a sly attempt to draw the hard criminals in.

The cons, many of them months on the run and among them rapists and thieves, were pounced on when they turned up to collect the swag – TV sets and cash cheques being amongst the advertised prizes – and given rather less attractive jail sentences instead.

Via popular redneck expat forum ThaiVisa.

How does £3.50 sound?

Following on from Schofield's marvelous vendor bullying spot comes another dramatization of the poor treatment of creative freelancers – this time in animated form using Xtranormal's Text-to-movie software.

Mental Designer's Graphic designer Versus Client melds all the madness and patronizing megalomania of every bitch of a client you've ever met into one brutal assault on honest decency, undervaluing and disregarding the creative process and spitting in the face of professionalism with the common client insult of half-hearted familiarity.

Obey the lure.

While the police mannequins that have popped up on Bangkok street corners over the past few months have not really posed a serious deterrent – as the boys in brown, in their last, permanent inactive posts, are far too easy to detect as being the dummies they are from a distance of even a block away – there is one theory that this is all part of a bigger, less innocuous ploy.

Eventually, so familiar with seeing the plastic patrol cops all over town, Bangkok drivers may be lured into a false sense of security and naturally begin to speed by every intersection, confident that the only eyes upon them are resin; though the real police meanwhile may just take advantage of this lax attitude and reappear on duty, keeping as still as the dummies themselves (something that shouldn't prove to difficult for some considering their lack of manoeuvrability) thus catching out the lackadaisical motorists and fining them (all very fairly) on the spot.

Photography by Asit Prueangwet.

Downside up.

Thailand has long demonstrated true creative innovation in the fields of graphic, interior and product design but has, quite understandably, never been famed for its inventive use of English copy – not for want of trying – though the corner now might have been turned.

Either error has played the mother of invention and a poor parking lot signage order (double the amount of 'up' signs needed and no 'downs') forced Bumrungrad hospital into a resourceful rethink, or the signs are part of a deliberate design choice with an intentional economy of words. Either way it's a playful inversion and a sign that the craft of copywriting is on the, er, up.

Photography by Asit Prueangwet.

Plane Stupid.

In spite of rising scepticism – specifically the exposure of the conspiracy behind the 'anthropogenic warming myth' – climate change propaganda is continuing to get stronger it seems with agencies like Mother London creating hard-hitting commercials for the anti-aviation expansion group Plane Stupid featuring dead polar bears falling from the sky.

And whether or not you buy into the stat that there are more bears now than in 19XX, if you think shorthaul flights are, er, a bare necessity then in my opinion you are plane stupid. Our earth needs looking after whether it's getting dangerously hot or not right now and filling the atmosphere with CO2 is never (ever) going to make the world a better place to live.

Directed by Rattling Stick's Danny Kleinman.

Via Brand Republic.