Posts Tagged ‘India’
Stats for the Changing Game
Thursday, December 4th, 2008Deepness
Friday, April 18th, 2008
One of the things that enthralls me about the art of improvisation is how deeply spiritual it is. I know, right? — the same form that yields the antics of Whose Line Is It, Anyway and Kenneth the NBC Page on 30 Rock is somehow connected to, like, your ch’i, your soul, your dharma?
The threads of my contention lead back to Viola Spolin’s work in the 1930s and ’40s, before her son Paul Sills and his cronies at the U. of Chicago focused her techniques on their forays into comedic improv with Compass Players and Second City. (more…)
Medium of the People
Monday, November 19th, 2007A book I’m reading, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, a compilation of mindful writing by Michael Bierut, has an essay in it entitled “India Switches Brands.”
It’s about how the 2004 elections in India featured a ‘360 media campaign’ by the dominant and favored-to-hold-power Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against a much simpler and less expensive grass roots campaign by the underdog Congress Party.
The name of the BJP campaign ( in his essay Bierut calls it the ‘brand’) was India Shining. Produced by Grey Advertising’s Indian division at a total cost of $100 million , it was designed to subtly credit BJP for India’s surging economy and its new hifalutin status in the Networked World. It had all the anytime-anyplace-any-platform bells and whistles, from TV spots to SMSpam, the same kind of blitz Hollywood launches four weeks before a Spielberg film.
It didn’t work. (more…)