In an unprecedented chain of events almost a month ago, Unilever buckled at its knees in response to a fervent backlash by Greenpeace.

Greenpeace was successful in its protests against Unilever for the role of its Dove brand in destroying Indonesia’s peat rainforests. The protests were staged in Europe, where the NGO is granted more freedom to air its views. Greenpeace produced a pastiche of Dove’s “onslaught” film, alerting viewers to Dove’s use of palm oil, a crop that is fast replacing Indonesian rainforest. The film, called “onslaught(er)”, was posted on YouTube.com:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odI7pQFyjso

Meanwhile activists dressed up as orangutans protested outside Unilever offices and chained themselves to supply lines at Unilever’’s Merseyside HQ and gathered at its London offices. Greenpeace singled out Unilever’s beauty brand Dove for criticism. The protesters placed a giant billboard ad outside the Port Sunlight production plant, which parodies the brand’s Campaign for Real Beauty. It depicts a group of orang-utans against a white background with the words “Gorgeous?.. Gone?”.

Greenpeace also targeted the offices of Unilever’s marketing services agencies including the ad agency Ogilvy Advertising and public relations specialists Jackie Cooper and Lexus PR. The action coincided with the release of a new Greenpeace report entitled ‘How Unilever palm oil suppliers are burning up Borneo’.

Unilever said that it started working on sustainable palm oil 10 years ago by developing its own guidelines with growers and suppliers, leading to an industry consensus on criteria for sustainable cultivation.

Patrick Cescau, chief executive of Unilever, said: “Now we need to take the next step. Suppliers need to move to meet the criteria, by getting certified both the palm oil from their own plantations and the palm oil they buy from elsewhere. We also intend to support the call for an immediate moratorium on any further deforestation in Indonesia for palm oil.”

John Sauven, Greenpeace UK director, said “Unilever’s commitment to sourcing sustainable palm oil will be meaningless unless its suppliers stop trashing Indonesia’s rainforests - this is why the moratorium is so important. Every day that Unilever keeps buying palm oil from these suppliers, orang-utans are pushed closer to extinction.”

It all ended well when Unilever responded by pledging to source palm oil only from sustainable forests. The owner of brands including Dove, Persil and Flora said that it aims to have all of its palm oil certified by 2015.
Another company also got into hot soup recently. Popular actress Sharon Stone sparked uproar in a statement made on the red carpet at Cannes Film Festival recently when she linked the Chinese earthquake with the country’s policy towards Tibet and ‘bad karma’. Cosmetic giant ‘Christian Dior’ who Sharon represents released an apology from the actress and at the same time announced her dismissal from its campaign in the country.

PS: As a continuation of their efforts, Greenpeace is now gearing up for a campaign targeting Olympic sponsors with the release of a report highlighting the environmental failings of sponsors.

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A REALITY CHECK ON SPIN OUTSPUN!

The mass media, as we know it, is under microscopic scrutiny post elections. And the ones who are holding up the big magnifying glasses are none other than advertisers themselves. For them, mass media is everything. And they don’t like what they are seeing.

Are billions of ringgit being spent on an indifferent audience?

As relentless as rain, spin had been the diet for Malaysians as long as I have been alive. But the tide is changing at the speed of light.

If mass media don’t get their content right soon enough, it could spell doom, and provide opportunity for newer players to replace them, quicker than they can think. Consumers are voting for their choice of media too. And they don’t care if myopic media monopolies keep focusing on the interests of the board, instead of the bored.

Even sms-es calling for the boycott of certain media have been circulating at reckless speed. This is the world of alternative media and marketers are watching the space. Blogs, interactive chat sites, mobile communities, all now have cult status - the devoted kind, not the stabby kind.

When infamous columnist Nadeswaran aka Citizen Nades got hauled up for a ‘telling off’ by the then Menteri Besar of Selangor, little was revealed about what Nades said in response. Perhaps, if the people knew, he would have been voted into the state government too.

His retort went something like “Nobody tells me what to do.”

So there you have it, the voice of the people has spoken.

Yet media masters distance themselves from the very man who can show them how one should talk to readers.

Will media habits change? Will SMS news alerts be more than adequate for the busy amongst us? Even if we signed up for 10 relevant alerts a day, it’s still cheaper than newspapers for a month.

Will a glance across the main pages of the papers do? Most of us read the papers with a built-in timer not to spend more than 7 minutes. Or what that 9? Is that a reasonable aperture for the ads in between the pages to actually work? And do we need three newspapers to tell us the same thing? Isn’t this like doing a Google search where you almost always read the first page only, and not the 133 subsequent ones that somehow match your query. I’m talking content here people. Nobody buys the papers to read ads.

Unless you’re a real estate agent or looking to sell your car. Content. Period. Get it wrong and you’re history.

Of course, the biggest charade surfaced post elections when readers and viewers watched with delight as some serious back-paddling of content by the main media took place. Again, another serious flaw was displayed: intellectualisation for its own sake. They’d gone from denial syndrome to senile syndrome, with chameleon slickness and shameless presumptions. A disaster recipe for surefire irrelevance.

Arrogant, self-serving content belongs to club newsletters, not in your daily state-of-the-nation update.

Spin is not a new jargonised expression I’m tossing around in this argument. Advertisers are the smartest when it comes to spin; they recognized that sloganeering was dead a long time ago.

Unilever Chairman for Malaysia and Singapore Noel Lorenzana put t succinctly in a recent ADOI Conference when he noted the shift: “From Intrusion to Inclusion”. We in advertising have been talking about engagement for almost a decade.

Adding to that, Datuk Vincent Lee articulated in his recent newspaper column about marketers’ trend to spend more online, “As a hardcore ad man, I don’t think the ads that are at fault – it’s the media guys that have created the fallout. We know the old model of disruptive media will not hold on.”

He goes on to elaborate, “AOS (Advertising Overload Syndrome) is a bigger pain than George Bush is to the American voter,” citing a recent Adweek/JWT Report.

Does this mean mass media spend will go down? Have media specialists become irrelevant in this chaos? Will content (read creative) be the new messiah? More importantly, who will grow
the industry?

Who’s responsible for the new digital divide between brands and their consumers: Media or Creative? Isn’t it time for a gap analysis?

And finally, will advertisers dictate content to save the day?

I believe it was advertising great Bill Bernbach who once said, A little confession can get you a lot of compassion.”

Immortal words for our media capitalists!

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