I knew the Irish were still not over that Thierry Henry (double) handball that helped put Ireland away from World Cup 2010, but I never thought some companies would go as far as using it for marketing purposes. As a supporter of fairness in sports I already wrote about my opinion on the subject, and I’ll be joining the “Anyone But France” team for this World Cup. It would be even better if Portugal was the one to beat them. But I digress.
The point of this post is to show that companies are creating campaigns based on France performing badly in the South Africa World Cup. It’s not only random people planning a drinking session when France is out, but well-known brands offering incentives to be anti-France. So far I’ve found 2 such examples.
The electrical retailer Currys has adopted the slogan “When the French lose… the Irish win!” and is offering vouchers of up to €100 to TV buyers, to be redeemed when France leaves the tournament. They even have a cheeky ad to go with it:
A long term investment in France’s demise, which might take longer than most people would like.
Pizza Hut is going the route of instant gratification. They’ll offer a free pizza for every goal scored against the French. The Facebook page will provide the ordering codes to get one of the 350 pizzas (yes, there’s a limit) each time France concedes a goal.
Do you know of any other anti-France World Cup offers? Please share them in the comments.
Tyrannybook was born as part Amnesty International’s plan for 2010 of getting more involved in social networks, both to gain the visibility inherent to these web platforms, and to facilitate the contact between the causes it promotes and the public. The network aims to generate a global consciousness about the countless atrocities that take place across the globe.
As the name implies, the website is a Facebook clone, and looks almost exactly the same, with the familiar blue giving way to an aggressive red.
Using a following system, the users can be updated about the faults committed by those leaders against the Human Rights. It’s up to each user to decide which leaders they are most interested to watch. The profiles of the tyrants are released by Amnesty, and can be updated both by the organization itself and by the users.
For now there are ten tyrants in the site: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Than Shwe of Myanmar, Hu Jintau of China, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Radovan Karadzic of Serbia, Aleksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov of Chechnya.
Inside the Tyrannybook all their actions are reported through news articles, with a link to the source.
Between them, users can become allies (the equivalent of friends on Facebook), exchanging points of view and discussing current issues. Much like Facebook, it’s possible to create groups, events, and upload videos and pictures.
The homepage shows a News Feed displaying all the activity on the site, from all the users. I believe this should be tweaked to only show updates from allies and the tyrants one is watching.
This is a very interesting way of approaching the problem that Amnesty is faced with. It’s not that this information is not already available in lots of other places, but keeping everything in the same place and wrapping it in something familiar to a huge number of people might be a powerful way of raising awareness to the task at hand.
There’s not a lot of functionality on the website, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves as more users sign up. One thing is for sure, people will try to abuse the system. At the time of writing, there is a user in the site that calls himself George Obama as a reference to both George Bush and Barack Obama. This user is also using a picture of George Bush tinted red (like the pictures of the tyrants). There’s also a group for the president of F.C. Porto (also tinted red) and a few other groups for completely unrelated subjects. If the site grows a lot, which is the whole point of it, the admins will have a hard time getting rid of all the abusive behavior.
Check out the promotional video that also serves as a guide through the website:
TomTom users can now have their turn-by-turn directions read by Sith Lord Darth Vader. The GPS manufacturer announced on Star Wars Day 2010 (“May the 4th be with you”) a partnership with LucasFilm and VoiceSkins to add Star Wars characters to the list of voices for its GPS devices.
The voice of Darth Vader is now available, complete with memorable quotes, such as “I find your lack of faith disturbing”, and the ominous breathing sounds. Over the next few months, 3 more voices will be released: C-3PO, Yoda and Han Solo. I’m disappointed to not see Chewbacca on the list. That would be awesome!
Watch Lord Vader during the recording of his GPS voice:
I don’t know about you, but I kind of feel like buying a GPS now…
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