Some embarrassment for the British Humanist Association at the weekend as it emerged that the models in their latest billboard campaign are actually happy (probably clappy) young Christians. The siblings, Charlotte and Ollie Mason, are featured in the follow-up to the Atheist Bus campaign beside the slogan ‘Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.’ This second wave of adverts has been launched in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and has set out to “try and change the current public perception that it is acceptable to label children with a religion.” Even if they look as happy as Charlotte and Ollie.

Of course, these are not conventional adverts – they don’t seek to promote a product as such, rather an idea, a philosophy even. And apart from amusing Christians and vexing bus drivers it’s hard to gauge exactly how they’ve affected anyone.

I doubt very much that their entreaty last year to “stop worrying and enjoy your life” actually fell on the ears of anyone who was worrying and not enjoying their lives because they thought there probably was a God. Likewise, the sight of two cheerful young Christian children is unlikely to persuade anyone to leave their kids at home in front of Hollyoaks while they go to church on Sunday.

The back-cloth of the new advert is a list of ‘labels’ inappropriately attached to children: Buddhist child – Protestant child – Atheist child…etc. So far, so inappropriate. But there, hiding behind Dickie Dawkins’ email address, is the really interesting one: Capitalist child. Quite how you raise a child avoiding the trappings and woes of Capitalism today is beyond me, and one could quite easily argue to the effect that juvenile exposure to Capitalism is more harmful than the Church of England. It seems a little inconsistent to hold that being raised a Capitalist is less objectionable than being raised a Christian if the labels are comparable violations of a child’s rights.

Children aren’t starving and slogging in sweat shops because of religion. It’s dollars and cents.

I’m tempted to send a postcard of their new billboard back to the British Humanist Association, and scrawl on the back: “They’re probably happy. Now stop worrying about them and get on with what matters.”

Twitter has announced it’ll be dropping the ‘suggested user’ feature following some disquiet about how the list is compiled. When you sign up for an account the service has been offering this ‘suggested user’ list to get you started, a sort of twitterary canon of prominent users to wean you onto it. Inevitably those users included on the list get a significant boost in followers and therefore assume a rather inflated – some say immoderate – influence among Twitter’s communities.

Twitter has been making its user recommendations by handpicking those “who show that they provide value by posting often and engaging with their followers” – which would seem like reasonable criteria. However, the problem with any such list – or canon if you will – is the suspicion that inclusion may not be by virtue of merit but by complicity with another agenda. Hence the controversy in the US where political watchdogs in California claimed that Twitter’s ‘suggested user’ list was contrived in favour of Democrats over Republicans.

It’s a point I’m sympathetic with. If the list is handpicked and lacks objective scrutiny it’s a service that can be manipulated in a political way, and we ought to be wary of any bias manufactured into the design of a media platform. Having said that, I’m not convinced that any meaningful partiality for the Democrats was in evidence, nor do I think it makes much difference – I hope that most people choose their political colours by more sophisticated means than Twitter popularity.

The ‘suggested user’ list is to be replaced by something more systematic, recommendations programmatically chosen to deliver “more relevant” suggestions than the subjective endorsements of Twitter executives. Quite how they deliver this relevance to brand new users remains to be seen. My concern is that Republicans only get recommended to Republicans and Democrats to Democrats; that insisting on relevance is actually more likely to politicize Twitter by recommending like minds to one another.

One of the great things about Twitter is their humility at the moment though – if the new system doesn’t work they’re big enough to hold their hands up.

When so many people in social media are trying to convince you they’re experts it’s refreshing to hear someone of Biz Stone’s stature admitting “Everyone is still experimenting. It’s still young, it’s still early. Anything goes right now as we figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

I’ve got mixed feelings about the new video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, apparently the most anticipated title of the year. It’s just been launched with a West End premiere amid much online commotion, and apparently “gives players the chance to be a member of a military strike force that takes on a Russian ultra-nationalist terrorist group.” Now I know what you’re thinking – that sounds like a pretty ordinary Tuesday to me. But evidently some people don’t get this chance in life, so some kind of virtual substitute is in order…

As usual, that old debate about levels of violence in video games has reared its head, this time with a Commons spat between MPs Keith Vaz and Tom Watson. Watson is a prominent defender of the gaming industry and, while acknowledging its content was unpleasant, argued that the safeguard in place for the sale of this game (i.e. an 18 certificate) was sufficient – or as sufficient as safeguards in other mediums – to protect young children from ‘adult’ content. He accused Mr Vaz of collaborating with the Daily Mail to create moral panic (I know, who’d have thought?) and has apparently set up a Facebook Group Gamers’ Voice (I can hear it now) for fellow gamers sick of politicians “beating up on gaming.”

Now, while I would normally side with anyone pitting themselves against the Daily Mail, I’m also pretty repulsed by any MP using the phrase “beating up on.”

I’m not likely to ever play this game; call me old-fashioned – in fact call me civilized – but the idea of sitting in front of my TV playing “the Citizen Kane of repeatedly shooting people in the face” isn’t my idea of fun, although I’m sure I’ll be hearing our next-door-gamer murdering his way to the usual profane climax. Apparently major studies have shown no conclusive link between video game usage and violent activity, although I can’t find any studies on the link between video game usage and being a lumpen bore.

Mr Vaz stressed that his point was not about censorship but about protecting children. I guess what troubles me is the implication that the content is otherwise suitable for adults. Of course, nobody is forcing anyone to play the game; naturally, we should all have the right to choose. It’s quite telling though, that even the game’s defender Mr Watson concedes that he finds it unpleasant – I’m quite sure that no MP would come out and say otherwise – and yet there is no fundamental objection to the consumption of violent content per se.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just not an adult yet.

A friend commented on my recent blogs likening me to a ‘Charlie Brooker-type columnist.’ I’m pretty sure he meant that in a nice way, although I couldn’t hope to emulate Mr Brooker, whose latest piece on the Stephen Gately article by Jan Moir last week was a clinical dismantling of the wretched woman’s logic.

Jan Moir’s response to the widespread condemnation of her column was to question how many of her critics had actually read it (how convenient to conjecture a thing that no-one can prove) and to suggest that she has been the victim of “what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign.” Hmm. Had she written a glowing tribute that proved so virally popular as her invective I wonder if she would have considered herself the beneficiary of a heavily orchestrated internet campaign? Somehow I doubt it.

When a subject trends on twitter, when a thing spreads virally, it is fairly meaningless to call it a heavily orchestrated internet campaign. Jan Moir’s suggestion (notice that these are what she peddles rather than facts) seems to be that a small number of people contrived to alert a larger number of people to the publication of her views and somehow influenced them to find her objectionable. What Jan doesn’t seem to realise is that a) this is how the internet works, and b) people are quite capable of finding her objectionable on their own.

I came across Jan Moir’s article on Friday morning before it started trending on Twitter and while it still held the original headline: “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death.” Of course, Jan had no new intelligence, no insight into the work of the coroner – she had simply slung the word natural lazily between inverted commas to make crass, sweeping inferences of moral dubiety. This headline was later removed, perhaps because the Daily Mail realised that Jan Moir is no more the arbiter of what is natural than she is of what is logical.

The Press Complaints Commission has received in excess of 21,000 complaints about Jan Moir’s wicked little rant, and I do hope that some kind of censure is forthcoming. For now, enough ink has been spilled on this thick and hateful woman.

I went to Natwest this week for a meeting with my bank manager. I say meeting – it was all of five minutes while he gave me his business card and told me to do it all myself online. So not really a bank manager either. Anyway, this ‘meeting’ was long enough to be interrupted by one of his colleagues, who popped her head around the door to impart something essential about lunches. I recognised her, after a beat, as the girl from the advert – the one bantering cheerily with the engaged couple while Will Young croons profoundly in the background. I have to say I found this an unwelcome distraction.

I don’t know what it is with banks featuring staff in their adverts, although I wouldn’t mind one showing, say, Fred Goodwin spending his bonus – at least that might be interesting. The latest rather baffling offering shows us Natwest’s leaftlets being printed. I have no idea what they want me to think.

I have a friend, Ray, who worked for HBOS and was selected for a photo shoot to promote their staff pensions (I’m assuming they didn’t get my audition tapes). They had him pose on a beach. In Scotland. With a motorbike. Ray doesn’t ride motorbikes. Come to think of it, don’t think he had a pension either… 

Of course this convention of ‘starring’ ordinary staff in bank ads started with HBOS, who gave us Howard. A man with such gravitas he didn’t need a surname. Following the acquisition of HBOS by Lloyds I had a rather tremendous idea for a viral involving Howard and Black Beauty. They didn’t get it. Humourless bankers.

Si

I’m following the Church of England on Twitter. Being a ‘son of the cloth’ I felt duty-bound to some degree; it’s an abiding condition being the progeny of a vicar, not a brand that obtains for the sons of other professions. You don’t hear of sons of the boiler suit or sons of the fluorescent tabard, and yet we are earmarked for life with this strange credential that our fathers went to work wearing dresses. As if life weren’t complicated enough…

So I guess I’d thought that after a childhood’s vassalage to the C of E the very least they might do is follow me back on Twitter. You’d think, in fact, that they’d follow everyone in return as a matter of course; anything else, well, it wouldn’t be very Christian, would it? At present the C of E has 3,512 followers – a modest congregation by web standards – and is following only 1,977, which would seem to suggest a surprisingly choosy approach to their online ministry. People are not turned away at church doors for being too trivial, there is no agenda to the welcome tendered there; why then, would the church not follow its own disciples on Twitter?

The Church of England’s profile offers the following Bio: “We’re here to learn and engage with the Twitter community and talk about some of the work we do.” Did I expect too much then? Am I just being conceited to think that they might have anything to learn from or reason to engage with me? It may be that my Dad exposed me to a particularly liberal strain of the faith, but my understanding was that there was nobody with whom the church did not want to engage, and that this was fairly essential. Yet online it seems that the curious politicking of Twitter precedes the fundament of the Christian encounter, even for the C of E. On Twitter we weigh up whether it’s going to be worth our while to follow someone, we examine their Bio and peruse recent tweets to see if their updates and their association is likely to be of any value to us. And basically, I guess I find that a bit un-Christian.

So I wonder if there is a Christian way to twitter, and how it is religious organisations approach the opportunities and pitfalls of social networking. One problem is that the task is too great of course; administering the Christian mission to a worldwide web is logistically overwhelming, so the networks that do exist appear to do little more than sustain the relationships of the already converted. I’d like to see the C of E be a little bolder with their strategy, to actively engage with people rather than sit waiting for the faithful to draw near.

The received wisdom on Twitter is borne of a particularly modern status anxiety and tells that we should seek to be more followed than following – the so called ‘Golden Ratio’ whereby the people that follow us should outnumber those we follow. By this measure the C of E seems to have the balance about right. But I’d like them to surprise us, to unnerve us even; I’d like 5,000 people to wake up one day to find that the Church of England is following them out of the blue. The tweeting of the 5,000! Show, really show, that they’re more interested in listening than having an audience.

In the meantime, if they could just follow me back that would be great.

Si

There was no open-top bus tour this time around. No jaunt around the capital for hungover heroes, no throngs or flags or fanfares in Trafalgar Square. England had regained the Ashes and sure, we were happy, delighted even, but there’d be no parade this year; the nation hadn’t been captivated quite the way it had four years ago.

Nor will there be such a swell of interest in the game, a generation of kids inspired to emulate the feats they’d followed all summer on the TV. Oh, but that’s right: it wasn’t on TV, was it? Or at least it wasn’t on terrestrial TV, save for Channel Five’s brief highlights package each evening. Little wonder then, when this gem of a contest had been cleft from the TV sporting calendar’s ‘crown jewels,’ that we weren’t to muster the same excitement.

For those of us too poor or principled to pay for Sky Sports to watch our national game then, it was Test Match Special we tuned in to. The likes of Aggers, Blowers and Tuffers to talk us through the action, punctuated by reflections on the frequency of local omnibuses and tangents of schoolboy innuendo. And this year our commentators also took to updating us on Twitter, engaging their many thousands of followers with inside stories, breaking news and twitpics from behind the scenes. It’s been a real feature of the team’s coverage this year and has set the benchmark for journalists of other sports, although perhaps the sedentary nature of watching Test cricket gives particular expedience to the distractions of social media.

While technology is generally employed to complement the game well, one thing we shall never see is that aberrant scenario depicted in Nintendo’s advert for the Wii Ashes cricket game. A particular bugbear of mine, the Wii adverts. This one has a couple of batsmen waiting forlornly on the square for the fielding side, who are having far too much fun in the pavilion playing cricket on a computer to go and play, erm, cricket. Actual cricket. With real people and everything. Bats, balls, fresh air, sunshine even… 

Okay, it’s tongue in cheek, but I’d have thought these were the nadirs of pointlessness that Nintendo would have been seeking to avoid in their marketing for Wii products.

Next thing you know, we’ll be able to ride the bus on a virtual victory parade. Oh don’t tell me…

Apparently there were ‘raised voices’ at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television festival on Friday night following James Murdoch’s keynote MacTaggart lecture. Murdoch had launched a pretty scathing attack on the BBC, and in particular the “chilling” predominance of the corporation in the world of online journalism, where its commercial rivals are looking at having to charge users for content because of declining advertising revenues. By all accounts, Murdoch had a colourful exchange of views with the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston at the post-MacTaggart dinner, lending a little personal animus to a really quite essential story.

The advertising slump has made a significant dent in the earnings of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, and he’s sought to engineer a debate in the media towards a free market approach to online journalism where users pay to view content and quality will inevitably win out. That is, consumers won’t be prepared to pay for lazy or disingenuous journalism so only quality news corporations will be successful. The problem for Murdoch is that the BBC doesn’t rely on advertising revenue and therefore doesn’t have to opt in to a commercial model for its online content; the problem for democratic society, according to James Murdoch, is that this gives the BBC a monopoly on broadcast news in a world where market forces obtain for all its rivals.

It’s an important point and a genuine concern, although Murdoch’s scaremongering does him little credit, especially given the vested interest of News Corporation in the demise of the BBC. They’re familiar rhetorical devices – invoke Orwell and appeal to the intelligence of the great British public: You’re not stupid, right? So you wouldn’t pay for rubbish, would you? Hmm, perhaps not, but Murdoch cynically muddies the waters with his insistent portrayal of the BBC as state-run media, when few governments would argue that the BBC has ever done them any favours. What’s more, he rather overlooks the problem of those people who can’t afford to pay for news. As Peston puts it: Should we be relaxed if ‘can’t pay’ means ‘can’t know’? Removing subsidy from the news market removes access for all to public service journalism, and if corporations are partial about their public I’m not so sure they’ll be impartial about their news. 

The debate continues over on the Guardian site…

- Si 

Okay, so I know it’s a couple of months ago, but I thought it worth mentioning that we at MOOM won our first award this year. The first of many..? Perhaps. They clearly hold significant value in this industry, indeed they’re a veritable industry in themselves judging by the entry costs, ticket prices etc… I’ll admit it was the first awards ceremony I’ve attended and the first award I’ve collected since meriting the Young Cricketer of the Year honour for Cutnall Green in 1998, chiefly by virtue of being the young cricketer of the year in 1998. Still, an award’s an award, right?

Needless to say, the Chip Shop Awards, held this year at London’s (s)wanky Fabric nightclub, were an altogether more sophisticated affair than the piss-up we had back in ‘the Green’ in ’98. We were up for an award in the category ‘Best Remake of an Existing Ad’ with our entry The Bus Delusion – a sort of pastiche of last year’s Atheist Bus campaign…

Clever, huh? Well I guess the judges must have thought so because we ended up winning a much vaunted ‘chip’ for it. As a small and relatively new agency we were naturally delighted with the win, and as a Manc (sort of) and big fan of Elbow I was thrilled that they played Grounds for Divorce as I strode to the stage to accept the award. I say strode. In reality I was politely excusing my way through a crowd of rowdy creatives trying to hand me their empties. I wonder what the collective noun for creatives is..? A spectacle? Do send me an email if you know. Or perhaps that’s asking for trouble…

Anyway, we afforded ourselves a celebratory drink, but as a Manc (sort of) I wasn’t going to stick around too long with Becks at £4 a bottle. If this was the price of networking in London my twenty wasn’t going to make me many friends.

Si

I have to admit feeling a bit sorry for United Airlines, who’ve suffered a spell of rotten PR at the hands of disgruntled passenger Dave Carroll. In case you’re not familiar with the story, Mr Carroll, who happens to sing with a folk-rock band called Sons of Maxwell, had his guitar broken while taking an ill-fated flight with United en route to a gig in Nebraska. Following protracted exchanges with the airline, during which Mr Carroll sought vainly to seek recompense for the breakage of his favourite Taylor guitar, he informed them that he would be recounting the experience through the medium of song. Three songs, to be exact. The video for the first of these has now been viewed by about 4 million people online, who all now know that ‘United Breaks Guitars.’ 

It’s an excellent story of a man’s moral victory over a huge corporation, and the mishap has done wonders for Mr Carroll’s career. The episode has won him the kind of publicity he might only have dreamed of, in addition to receiving two free Taylor guitars from the manufacturer and securing a donation of $3,000.00 from United for the charity of his choice, the Thelonius Institute. This gesture was a recovery of sorts for the airline, who have also pledged to use the video as a “unique learning and training opportunity.” The public relations and financial damage has been done though, and we wait to see what further embarrassment Dave Carroll’s next song causes.

I don’t suppose there’s an established protocol in customer services for when someone threatens to make their complaint into a music video, although I imagine it may at least get your case escalated following Mr Carroll’s example. It’s symptomatic of the way in which the internet empowers consumers, giving them the capacity as individuals to harm a company’s reputation by broadcasting their grievances online, whether on forums, social networking sites or indeed Youtube. While not every customer is going to be a Dave Carroll, United will tell you that one Dave Carroll is quite enough to do very palpable damage to your brand.

I feel sorry for United Airlines because, strictly speaking, they probably weren’t liable for the breakage of Dave Carroll’s guitar. Having said that, they sought to discontinue communications with Mr Carroll when it perhaps ought to have been his prerogative to decide when the matter was closed. These days, you need to engage with your customers well enough to know if that’s a liberty you can afford to take.

- Si