Celebrity Product Placement and Palin's Arctic Cat Coat

I'm a little behind on what's going on in Alaska, but I see that Linda Kellen Biegel at Blue Oasis has riled up a bunch of folks for filing an ethics complaint against Gov. Palin.

The complaint alleges a conflict of interest when Governor Palin wore specially designed snow-machine gear advertising her husband Todd's biggest Iron Dog sponsor, Arctic Cat Inc. She did so while acting in her official capacity as Governor of the State of Alaska and official starter of the Iron Dog Snow Machine Race.

[The picture is from the Blue Oasis post too so you can see what the complaint is about.]

According to later posts, she's gotten a lot of nasty comments, emails, and phone calls. Some of the comments on her blog carry a theme of "So what's the big deal, I wear logo stuff all the time on all my clothes."

So I googled around to find out about product placement and celebrity endorsements.

In an article published last October in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Sarah Jane Gilbert wrote about Harvard Business Professor Anita Elberse whose favorite research topic is described as "the value created and captured by superstars."

Anita Elberse: The sports marketing industry, covering everything from television rights to endorsements, sponsorships, and merchandising, is an important sector and growing rapidly. In its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that the sports industry accounted for around $50 billion in revenues in the United States in 2007, up from just under $35 billion in 2001. On a global scale, total revenues are expected to be nearly $100 billion this year, compared with $70 billion in 2001.

As far as endorsements are concerned, marketers increasingly turn to athletes to promote their products. The marketing executives I spoke with told me they value these endorsements especially because it is getting more and more difficult to reach a wide group of consumers using traditional ways of advertising such as television commercials, and harder to gain credibility with commercial messages.

You can read the whole Elberse interview at the Harvard link above. Here's one more excerpt:

[B]ecause star athletes and other celebrities are "brands" that have certain meanings for consumers, companies can spend millions of dollars to align themselves with those celebrities. They hope those celebrities' brands "rub off" on the products they are trying to sell, be it apparel, cars, or beauty products. . .

Considering the limited free time an athlete like Sharapova has in a year filled with training sessions and tournaments across the globe—less than 20 days remain for sponsorship commitments—I found it remarkable to learn how much value is generated.

There are also articles that suggest that the return on investment isn't really there. InnovationsReport writes, for example, that

Advertisements featuring endorsements by celebrities such as David Beckham are less effective than those featuring ordinary people, new research suggests.

Perhaps the marketing people just like being around celebrities so pushing endorsements gives them that opportunity. Whether on the whole these product placements are worth the money (we all now know about the fallibility of banking experts who pushed the various home loan packages, so why should marketing experts who push celebrity endorsements be any more reliable?) the fact is that businesses believe in them enough to spend tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars every year on them.

In an article about strategies for getting celebrities to publicly use their products, Jonathan Holiff, describe as the president and CEO of The Hollywood-Madison Group, offers three strategies for getting products out to celebrities.

1. Gifting the talent (this usually involves supplying products for gift bags at live events)

2. Product seeding (products are distributed more widely in hopes of securing a promotional benefit and kicking off a trend)

3. Barter relationships (individual celebrities agree to participate in custom programs in exchange for valuable products).

He says the most effective is the third, barter relationships. He goes on to give an example of promoting the Sony CD Mavica digital camera.

Sony wanted to involve celebrities with its products and wanted that involvement to influence the public in a meaningful way. They sought a high-profile event—preferably benefiting charity—upon which to launch a yearlong press campaign in time for the Christmas shopping season. The focus: to promote the simplicity of CD-based photography.

So, with a limited budget, Holiff's company suggested getting celebrities to take pictures of what "freedom" means to them, that would be auctioned off for charity. The point was to use several ploys here to entice the celebrities into participating:

Such an artistic challenge, coupled with the prospect of receiving free Sony products, not only served to induce celebrities to participate but also offered us an extraordinary opportunity: to frame these pictures and mount an exhibition that raised money for charity. Indeed, the charity component attracted higher-caliber celebrities and provided the "hook" to draw media attention. . .

Fifteen top celebrities demonstrated the practical use of Sony's product and authorized the use of their names, likenesses and opinions about the product for press and marketing purposes (for one year). Sony received free advertising for its product in print and online for three months (worth an estimated $100,000), as well as 3.6 million Web page impressions (auction as a whole) and national press coverage, including Entertainment Tonight.

Clearly, some celebrity marketing campaigns work better than others. Martin Roll, who is described on VentureRepublic as a

world-renowned thought-leader on value creation through brand equity

describes some essentials of celebrity endorsements.

* Attractiveness of the celebrity: This principle states that an attractive endorser will have a positive impact on the endorsement. The endorser should be attractive to the target audience in certain aspects like physical appearance, intellectual capabilities, athletic competence, and lifestyle. It has been proved that an endorser that appears attractive as defined above has a grater chance of enhancing the memory of the brand that he/she endorses.

* Credibility of the celebrity: This principle states that for any brand-celebrity collaboration to be successful, the personal credibility of the celebrity is crucial. Credibility is defined here as the celebrities’ perceived expertise and trustworthiness. As celebrity endorsements act as an external cue that enable consumers to sift through the tremendous brand clutter in the market, the credibility factor of the celebrity greatly influences the acceptance with consumers.

* Meaning transfer between the celebrity and the brand: This principle states that the success of the brand-celebrity collaboration heavily depends on the compatibility between the brand and the celebrity in terms of identity, personality, positioning in the market vis-à-vis competitors, and lifestyle. When a brand signs on a celebrity, these are some of the compatibility factors that have to exist for the brand to leverage the maximum from that collaboration.

Palin scores high on the physical attractiveness. I would say the audiences are split on her, but she has some extremely enthusiastic followers along with those fairly strongly opposed. So it's mixed on the second criterion. But surely there aren't too many - maybe none - celebrities of Palin's level who is so compatible to snow machine racing. So, this is probably a pretty good celebrity catch for Arctic Cat.

But Ronnie05 on his blog points out another celebrity endorsement:

Research In Motion and Blackberry do not require any celebrity endorsement. Why would they when the biggest celebrity in the world, the single “hero” in the world and in America, is doing it for them and is not charging a single cent. Barrack Obama’s penchant for the “Blackberry” has steadily found its way into the press.

The question is whether Palin's use of the Arctic Cat coats is the same thing as Obama's use of his Blackberry. The Blackberry is a tool that many people use and presumably Obama picked his up on his own and the press happened to catch him using it. I guess we should dispatch someone to find out if the Blackberry company gave it to him in hopes he would be photographed using it.


Given the amount of money spent on celebrity placements, and the careful planning placement specialists seem to go through to get the right people to publicly use their products, I think it would be of interest to us all to hear exactly how it came to be that Gov. Palin wore that coat at the opening of the Iron Dog race.

Two basic questions we need answered are:

1. How did Palin get the coats? Did she go out an buy it? Was it something that she had in the closet and that she wears all the time? Was it a gift from Arctic Cat?

2. Did Arctic Cat in any way influence Palin to wear the coat at the start of the Iron Dog race?

If it was a gift from Arctic Cat, given what I've been reading on product placement, it probably wasn't just an accident that the Governor of Alaska opened the Iron Dog Snow Machine Race wearing the coat. There were probably product placement pros carefully plotting the whole thing.

Just as Jonathan Holiff outlines how they plotted to get celebrities to use the Sony cameras by setting up a contest that benefited charity, Arctic Cat's marketing specialists probably said, "This will look so natural. We already sponsor her husband, so why wouldn't we give him and his family jackets? And then all she has to do is wear it when she opens the race. Bingo, we'll have pictures of Sarah Palin, one of the most well known celebrities in the US, who also happens to be linked in the public's mind to snow machines, all over the place."

There doesn't even have to be any sort of additional payment to Palin (though Biegel's complaint says Arctic Cat is Todd Palin's biggest Iron Dog sponsor, so the Palin family is getting something from the company.) And Palin likely did not give them any rights to use the pictures (though we should ask about that too just to be sure).

And Palin might have been lulled into all this just as all those celebrities who get gifts are. You get a free camera, we challenge your ego by getting you to take pictures we're going to sell for charity, and we'll throw in "Freedom" as the theme for the pictures. Who can resist?

But Palin isn't just a celebrity. She's a government official. She's a representative of the People of Alaska, the head of our government. Our governor must separate private product endorsements from her official duties as governor. And yes, making appearances at the openings of events, cutting ribbons for new roads, etc. in her capacity as governor are official duties. [Would she have been invited if she were not the governor?] And furthermore, this is a politician who became governor in part on her strong stance against public officials whose personal interests and public interests overlapped.

So for those who say they wear clothing with brand names attached all the time, I would say I suspect this isn't some trivial incident comparable to her happening to put on Levis and someone complains that the little red tag in back is an endorsement. These are big conspicuous coats with giant endorsements all over them. This is big business and potentially worth lots of money for Arctic Cat.

So, did Sarah buy these coats or were they given to her?
How did she decide to wear them to the opening of the race?
Did Arctic Cat and/or their marketing company have a plan for getting Palin to wear the coat at the opening of the race?

If this were an isolated event, I might be more likely to lean with those who say to give her a pass on this. But sometimes the problem is a series of small events, no single event being that big a deal. And if we are serious about having politicians who aren't tainted by special interests, then we have to call every single case so that politicians finally learn that their jobs are to serve the public without getting extra benefits for themselves along the way. If all these sorts of special perks are too much of a hassle, then maybe the people who run for office to get them will find more hassle-free endeavors.

And it means holding Democrats accountable as well as Republicans.

J Went to a Thai Cooking Class

Food was big yesterday. Got Vegie Thai lunch, then J came home with the results of her cooking class today. It was most of the day. They got to do six items each. I think it was 900 Baht (about $25). So for dinner we had som tam, tom kha kai, and green curry. All quite good. She thinks she can get what she needs back in Anchorage. We'll see.

The som tam picture was just not good enough to post. But it was definitely good enough to eat.

Vegie Thai Part 2 - West Chiang Mai Vegie Option

So yesterday we went to Vegie Thai for lunch. Today they delivered. I have to say, the food was really good. And I like that it's not delivered in styrofoam, but in a reusable plastic (I know, but a little at a time) container. Here it's on my desk after being delivered. 30 Baht (US$0.84 on my computer conversion table) delivered. It's vegie healthy and tastes great.



Why didn't I figure this out before my second to last week here? But some of the others in the office are happy to know about this option. He still is working on the English part of the website. The tabs have English, but then there is almost none on the pages. I'll try to help, but I'm not here for long. But he does speak English so if you call or email, you can probably order a lunch or dinner to be delivered. Don't worry about what to order, you'll get what they are making that day.

And he's using produce from small scale farmers.

For Chiang Mai vegetarians, I translated some of the instructions for how to order:

Note: Please circle the days when you want to receive a meal. Then underline to show you want noon or evening. The food is all vegetarian to promote health. There is no MSG.

Delivery Area: Chiang Mai University; Nimanhamen Road, Sirimangklajan Road (?); Suthep Road; Soi Wat Umong and Bong Noi.
Outside the delivery service area, the cost of delivery will be calculated based on distance.


You can choose which day you want to receive a meal.
Lunch will be delivered by noon. (30 Baht per person)
Dinner will be delivered by 6pm (You will receive three items for 120 Baht for 2-3 people OR two items for two people for 80 Baht. Or two items for one person for 40 Baht. Brown rice is 10 Baht extra per person.

Contact Vegie Thai (Bento without meat): 0 eight seven-324 97two eight

Vegie Thai and My Own Cicada Shots

Tok had shown me the VegieThai website. It's run by a friend of his who is an accomplished chef and who has started a business that includes delivering vegie meals, as well as special meals based on health needs. You can also pick up food or eat at the place. Which was near my office, but I couldn't figure out the map on the website. It is in the foothills, west of Wat Ramphoeng on the southwest side of Chiang Mai. It's good for people around Nimanhamen and around Chiang Mai University.

So, today Ew called early (last week we called too late) and booked us for lunch at the place. I say 'place' because it isn't exactly a restaurant. It's a private house with some tables in the yard. But even though it's close, it isn't easy to find. There were two Thais and me in the car. They called him and still went the wrong way. It took three phone calls to actually get there.

But it was rather special. It was just us. The food was beautiful and delicious. And the price was more than reasonable. We spent a good part of lunch talking about English translations of the Thai menu. I didn't think 'condiments' conveyed what he meant. His condiments included lots of fresh greens. We talked about the possibility of memberships, paid in advance, like a gym membership. As long as people have to call in beforehand - even at the house - he needs some sort of system to let people know how and when to order. At this point you don't have a choice of food, just a choice of days, and you take what is cooked on that day. But there is a full monthly menu in Thai. The English one doesn't quite capture the sense of things. And I too was at a loss for how to say it better.


I'm not sure this is a business plan that can work - especially given his location. You need to make several turns this way and that after you get off what is a through road, but certainly not even close to a main road.

But I wish him luck. It's a great project if he can pull it off. And his working with some of our farmers and pushing for more organic vegetables. We had a great papaya ice for dessert.


And as we left I spotted these two cicadas - after having posted a borrowed picture yesterday. This first one, I think, has a live animal inside.

The second one is an empty skin. And not even the first one was tymbalizing.

They're about the size of a walnut.

Listening

Ann Marie sent me some materials from a workshop put together by the Collective Leadership Institute whose mission is to build competence for sustainability.

I was struck by this quote and I'm still thinking about it. What does he mean by 'silence?'

“I don’t know if you have ever examined how you listen, it doesn’t matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing waters, or how you listen in a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or husband…If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses: when they dominate we hardly listen at all to what is being said…In that state there is no value at all. One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quiet; then, it seems to me, it is possible to
communicate…..real communication can only take place where there is silence.”

Krishnamurti

Cicadas in the Background

The last week or two has been highlighted by the sound of cicadas in the background more often than not. A particularly loud spot is the hill along the south side of Wat Umong where I recorded this clip as I rode to work.

Click on the yellow button with the black arrow to hear the cicadas. Cicadas by AKRaven


I'm not sure how this will come out on your computer, but use speakers or ear phones and put the volume up to get a good sense of this. J estimates that they are at least 70 decibels when they are loud. At the moment, they are silent.



Here's a picture from ChangThai.com (Chang means elephant in Thai)







Cicada Central adds this information (plus a lot more on their site)

Cicadas are probably best known for their conspicuous acoustic signals or "songs", which the males make using specialized structures called tymbals, found on the abdomen. Female cicadas do not have tymbals, but in some species the females produce clicking or snapping sounds with their wings. Some males augment their tymbal sounds by making winc clicks as well. After mating, females lay eggs in grass, bark or twigs; the eggs hatch later in the season and the new nymphs burrow underground. As juveniles and adults, cicadas use piercing and sucking mouthparts to feed on the xylem fluid of plants. All but a few cicada species have multiple-year life cycles, most commonly 2-8 years. In many species, adults can be found every year because the population is not developmentally synchronized; these are often called "annual" cicada species. By contrast, the cicadas in a periodical cicada population are synchronized, so that almost all of them mature into adults in the same year.

Lee Chang-kook, in an informative, but also very human, article in the Korea Times, writes:

We know what cicadas look like. They are large bugs with two transparent wings. The male cicadas make a loud, shrill and droning noise by vibrating two membranes on their abdomens.

It is generally believed that they spend many years as larvae underground (some say 15 years, some 12, and some seven) and live a sadly short life (some say only 15 days, some a month, and some three months) and die, but most of the important knowledge we have about cicadas is no more than just inaccurate and commonplace hearsay. Nothing is fixed, verified or proven.

And, do you know that they eat nothing during their entire life? Indeed, through my long experience in watching them I have not found any of them trying to catch anything to eat or eating something.

I wonder if they have a mouth at all. I wonder how can they sing so energetically all the time without eating anything at all. No doubt they are the greatest singers in the world. They sing to death. It is said that dew is the only food for them.

You can get the whole fascinating article at the Korea Times link above.



If you want to learn and hear more about Thai Cicadas you can buy a copy of

Cicadas of Thailand Vol. 1 by Michel Boulard

With Audio CD

The first of two volumes on Thai cicadas, the most fascinating and also least known representatives of a family of sonorous insects. Cicadas neither sing, nor stridulate, but tymbalize. The volume reveals the existence and the double life, larval and imaginal, of cicadas encountered during six years of research in Thailand's sub-mountainous forests. The body of the text includes two chapters discussing general characteristics, acoustic and procreative ethology, and exceptional or enigmatic aspects and behaviour. The text is enriched by drawings and photographs, mostly of living insects. It is accompanied by a CD comprising forty cicada sound productions (or tymbalizations), the acoustics made visual in ID and ethological cards, which form an original feature of this pioneering study.

And finally, Club ALC offers some cicada haiku. I liked this one by Robert Leechford:

a cicada emerges
from years of silence
singing and singing

Sustainable Farming the Old Fashioned Way - Karen Village

All this is in the context of the modern debates on global warming, sustainable farming, and land rights for the various hill tribes living in official forest land in Thailand. What we saw yesterday was a bit of paradise in some ways. Westerners looking at the pictures of the housing might cringe, but all things considered this is much more comfortable than a lot of the housing in rural Alaska villages. And, what I learned 40 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Thailand, what Westerners have over less wealthy cultures is a physical standard of living advantage (one that has shrunk considerably in the intervening years, at least for Thailand) and what the Thais have is a social, cultural advantage - things like connectedness to the land and to each other, traditions and ceremonies that tie them together, friendships and family connections that are close and supportive. This advantage is also shrinking.


Of course these are generalizations for both sides. But that discussion seems a pertinent preface to the pictures and comments below.

J's been helping S get his oral English ready for his nine month's training program at the Asian Rural Institute in Japan. He leaves next week. Yesterday he picked us up at 7:30am and drove us the not quite two hours up into the mountains. The following will be a bunch of pictures with some description. At 1200 meters above sea level, it was delightfully cooler than Chiang Mai at about 600 meters up. After we passed the tourist elephant camp, the road up got steeper and windier. J's stomach usually isn't too good, but S drove slowly. Then he stopped at a little shop and came out with a plaster (I'd say band-aid, but it wasn't really) that he said to stick on her belly, which she did. She had no problem up or back.



We got to the village and then his house where we met his mother, brother, sister, and niece. All but the sister were in this picture. They were looking at the Alaska calendar we brought them. We were given Karen style shoulder bags she made - a beautiful burnt orange color.

Here's the house. This has been added on to over the years to get to this stage. The original house is what is just the kitchen now.










And just like in any family anywhere, his niece's artwork is up for everyone to admire.



I had to go to the bathroom and I was led to a little building out back with a row of blooming orchids in front. The bathroom had running water and a regular toilet. He said they have a natural draining system with different materials besides a large hole. Unlike tanks, this one drains well and never fills up. My understanding was they used various natural materials as a drain/filter.



In their English lessons, S had told Joan that they had what he called a "lazy garden" around the house. It's where they threw things and let them grow on their own - unlike the more cultivated fields away from the house. We had passed rows and rows of beautiful lettuce, but I didn't get a picture. The lettuce and some other crops are part of the Kings Project and they get picked up and sold at organic vegetable markets, but he's not sure where.
And not everything in the lazy garden is quite so casual either. Here are some seedling avocados. Avocados were also introduced through the King's project.




And a macadamia nut tree.










This is a fishtank where they can get dinner when they need fish. Though we had fish that didn't come from the tank for lunch later.








This earthen house was built by a friend - there's a big hole still next to it where the earth was dug up. It's in there on the edge of the lazy garden.














And this bamboo, look at S standing at the bottom of it clump. It's huge! You may have to double click to enlarge the picture to see S.







Here's a pig pen right next to the house. Ordinarily this could cause some serious odor problems.









S's holding a bottle of a mixture he's concocted to make the pig pen's smell better, well, not so bad. It's got honey, salt, garlic, oyster sauce, ginger, and I forgot the other ingredients. It's mixed with water and put into the pig sty. And it really did not smell bad there at all. Not like the factory pig farms we passed that were pretty disgusting to smell.






Here's another one of the pigs.








Now we are in the kitchen. It was pretty dark in there and they didn't turn on any lights. There is electricity, but I didn't notice it on - except when his sister was ironing. I took some video tape of him explaining how the kitchen works. It's pretty dark, but I'll try to get it up eventually.







There's a lot of stuff sitting around. But it didn't look like a junkyard. Rather things all seemed to have a place. This is a 'modern' electric rice huller.










Next to it is the more traditional type of rice huller.










And there was a cow too. I think elsewhere there are some water buffalo but we didn't see them. And, of course, there were chickens and chicks running around. They eat the eggs, if they can find them. The eggs we had for lunch later were from the market.





And there's a coffee plant too.










Then we got back in the car and drove up what became a more and more marginal road for a couple of kilometers and then got out to go for a hike. One of the joys of this location is that the vegetation change is most notably visible by the existence of pine trees.









Another ethnic Karen, R, who works at this village through an NGO in Chiang Mai, joined us for the hike. He actually comes from a different province neighboring Chiang Mai.




It was nice to see greener scenery than we generally have in Chiang Mai, now well into the dry and hot season.




It was a bit late in the day to see birds. We could hear some, but it was also very hard trying to find them hidden in the trees. But S showed us some bird calls. I have a video of this too and will try to get it up in a post later. None of the other three of us could make a sound this way, but then they couldn't copy my whistling with two fingers in my mouth. I was able to get some sound out later in the car and I'll keep practicing.



We stopped here in this spot dedicated by Buddhists, animists, and Catholics who are all represented in the village. There was a sign that S translated as "This Forest Forever."










I posted the insect pictures from there in the previous post. Here are some fungus we saw. They do look fairly similar to things we have in Alaska. Also saw some ferns that - at least superficially - looked like ferns we have too. I suspect they're different.











It was a lovely hike back.












When we got back S began gathering greens for lunch - a late, 4pm lunch. The food would be better, he said, because we were so hungry. These are from a tree which reminded me of greens that our friends in Beijing collected on a trip out to the country side in 2004. But I'm sure there are lots of things that look alike. These ended up inside omelets.







Here's what he collected.










S started the fire in the kitchen. A lighter and a piece of soft pine got things started quickly.





J and S were working on the greens.










There was also some Pak Bung, another key vegetable in Thai diets. But he cooked this up with a bean sauce and some honey and it tasted different and delicious.
















Here the greens go into the egg mix. That's S's niece under the blue plastic basket.












And the Pak Bung gets cooked.















And in less than 45 minutes, lunch was ready.











And we all helped clean up. Really, I did more than take pictures.













The dishwater sink drains out to a small culvert and the grey water gets recycled into the garden and the chickens are the garbage disposal getting all the bits of rice and green that were still on the plates when they were washed.



Things are not perfect here, and there are issues of land ownership, and the government is still trying to get people out of the forest areas. But you can also see that this is a pretty sweet place to live. All sorts of tropical and semi-tropical plants grow, with little effort. S's family - and village - lifestyle is pretty in synch with nature and all the stuff we are trying to relearn in the West. Imagine what he will learn after nine-months of training on an organic, sustainable farm program in Japan.






S also pulled out an album and showed me this document which was a work contract for his great, great grandfather to work for a British timber company. He was hired because he had an elephant that was important for getting the logs out from the deep forest and out onto the roadways. I still think we should consider this in the roadless areas of Southeast Alaska. There are still elephants in Thailand who know how to do this, but they are pretty much unemployed as much of the forest is protected. (The elephants in the earlier pictures are now for tourists to ride.) The document is dated 1908 and shows that S's family has been here for at least 100 years. This is of significance because many argue that the Karen all really came from Burma, but this shows a long provenance in Thailand. The Consulate is in Chiang Mai and the other language is Thai, not Burmese. It is interesting to me, because unlike most Thai writing where the words all run together, in this document, each word is separate like in English.





And here are S's sister with her youngest child as we were leaving.