It was a seminal moment. For the first time, breaking all convention, Ronald turned to the TV cameras and addressed himself to his viewers directly. It had never been done before, and it set off a revolution the consequences of which we still struggle to fight. When Ronald Reagan ended his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1979 with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, his media savvy changed mass politics forever.
But long before that, another Ronald messed with mass communications no less indelibly, paving the way for today’s politicians and pundits. Appropriately, the first Ronald was a clown. In 1963, sixteen years before Reagan’s fateful piece to camera, Ronald McDonald broke every rule in advertising when he turned to the lens and stunned children by speaking to them directly, saying:
“Here I am kids. Hey, isn’t watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald’s hamburgers. I know we’re going to be friends too cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do. Especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonald’s hamburgers.”
It’s easy both to wince at how crass this sounds, and to overlook its audacity. With entire TV channels premised on direct marketing to children, it seems impossible that there might have been a time where kids were considered anything other than shorter, louder, more pestering versions of adult consumers. But it wasn’t always thus. It took a canny cabal of admen to tap the pockets of a newly affluent generation of youngsters. They wanted to redefine the frontiers of what advertising in television age could be. And they succeeded. Keep Reading »
The Friday after Thanksgiving is traditionally the day when US consumers rush to the shops, and spend until their eyes bleed. But tomorrow doesn’t inevitably have to involve running around with a credit card and bags of crap we don’t need.
One man who takes shopping’s stigmata very seriously is the Reverend Billy, preacher at the Church of Stop Shopping. Keep Reading »
The parental commandment to ‘eat up because people are going hungry’ is, from a strictly economic point of view, nonsense. Eating less of the food on your plate for which, presumably, you have already paid will not increase the incomes of the hungry nor will leaving your greens and mash potatoes reduce the price of food for the poor.
In the run-up to Copenhagen, a splendid new booklet by Oscar Reyes and Tamra Gilbertson and published by the Trans National Institute is an arsenal of analysis and counter-point. And it’s short. Just the sort of thing to arm yourself with before the media starts getting it wrong in the run-up to next month’s summit.
This is a special posting for all y’all who receive this blog via email. At the end of this week, I’ll be moving my blogging over to RajPatel.org, and retiring this venerable site.
The World Food Summit has just ended in Rome, at which the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, lauded the declaration as “an important step towards the achievement of our common objective – a world free from hunger.”
Here’s a bit of a plug for the new book – out in the UK in December, in the US in January. I was lucky enough to get to make this book trailer with Scott Hamilton Kennedy, whose documentary about the South Central Los Angeles farm, The Garden was spectacular, well deserving the Oscar nod that it got (and it was a particularlygood year to be nominated ). Keep Reading »
