Source: GERTIL

Day 7

Leaving my hotel about ten o’clock on Friday, One Last Bar is where I went first. Here I met a UN adviser named Scott who advised me that the next bar to go to was a Brazilian place down by the beach called Exotica. I took a taxi (it’s just outside of central Dili, the club, so the fare was US$2 rather than the standard $1 in-town fare), and as I was getting out I was accosted by kids trying to sell me trinkets covered with flashing LEDs. They were aggressive rather than malicious, but they were RIGHT THERE IN MY FACE and I gently pushed them and their blinking lights aside and went into the nightclub.

Watching the locals and internationals dance, I became aware of two things. One: the lovely way in which people from around the world, military and civilian, charitable and profit-seeking, have come together to help the Timorese build a country from scratch; there’s a wonderful feeling of camaraderie in Timor. I imagine it exists in other places, but I’d never seen anything like it before. Two: I noticed how Latinized the Timorese are in some ways. Sure, this was Brazilian music they were dancing to, but that didn’t create it, it only highlighted something that goes beyond dancing and into language, machismo and other areas of culture and demeanour.

And then I noticed a third thing: my mobile phone was gone. It must have slipped out of my pocket when I was getting out of the taxi, distracted by those kids! Well, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my evening.

At the bar I struck up a conversation with Arturo, a guy from Angola working for a French oil concern who’d come to Timor on behalf of his employer to assess the prospects, petroleum-wise. At some point we decided to move on to the next cool spot up the road, aptly named the Cool Spot. Here I ran into more people I knew and didn’t know.

There was Sean, whom I’d met a few days before at our round table and who publishes Discover Dili (Timor’s answer to Time Out, only it comes out annually), and his girlfriend Sierra, and a friend of his from Ubud, Bali, here on holiday. Sometime later, we clambered into a white van driven by a local friend of Sean’s named Christian. It was about 3am, but there’s one more stop to make: Aaj’s, a ‘post-funking’ (Sierra’s term) watering hole and former brothel downtown.

Slumped on the floor of the van along with several others, I was introduced to Liam, an Irish civil engineer who’d come to build bridges. Liam began telling me about his work in Timor and about the affection he was developing for the Timorese. Basically, he said, they don’t know what they’re doing yet (and why would they?) but they’re earnest and helpful and – this wasn’t the last time I’d hear this – there’s something particularly but un-definably rewarding about helping them. “But wouldn’t that be true in other places that are being reconstructed?” I asked. No, he insisted, actually it isn’t. “But where else have you been?” I asked. I was expecting to reveal his naivety but instead Liam rattled off the names of a dozen of the world’s trouble spots in which he had laboured. Possible further evidence, I noted to myself, that there is something special about the Timorese.

At Aaj’s there was billiards and the Macarena and the Ketchup Song and despite Sierra’s caution about men sometimes bringing guns with them into this establishment, I noticed nothing more odd than unpretentious people having a good time until the very, very, very wee hours.
________

In the afternoon, I went to a huge family barbecue on the beach where I sampled terrific grilled beef and sticky, almost crunchy rice made in a bamboo mould. I wasn’t feeling talkative or social, but I enjoyed watching the locals enjoying themselves, kids splashing after blow-up balls in the breaking surf, and Jesus Christ, arms outstretched, taking it all in from his perch on the hill.

In the evening I dined alone on cheap and delicious mie goreng (Indonesian pad Thai-like stuff) in the leafy, haunted courtyard of the legendary Hotel Turismo. Haunted, I mean, by its storied past. Until the advent of the Hotel Timor where I was holed up, the Turismo, dating from Portuguese times, was the international hotel. Every account of the 1999 referendum mentions it, sometimes at considerable length. But the Turismo’s legend predates those tense and turbulent times, and its war stories hark back to even earlier tense and turbulent times. Here’s a sample, from Australian journalist and fervent Timor champion Jill Jolliffe, writing in 1975:

At the Hotel Turismo, a Portuguese poet shouted his poems to the night air and Rita the monkey chattered in the splaying branches of the mango tree. Falantil soldiers who looked like black Abbie Hoffmans drank the copious quantities of “Laurentina” beer bequeathed by the Portuguese and juggled grenades across white linen table cloths.

Imagining in situ goings on such as these made my mie goreng and locally produced Lion beer taste even better. Then, walking home to my new international hotel, I turned in early, for the next day I’d need to rise before dawn for an expensively chartered boat trip to nearby Atauru Island.

Day 8

Somehow in my South Pacific travels I’d missed having a go in an outrigger canoe. Now was my chance as this was the available mode of conveyance for reaching the snorkelling spot a hundred or so metres from shore, just inside the reef.

Setsuko, an adventuresome 20-something Japanese woman also staying the night on Atauru, was joining me. As we left the house, I in my trunks and she in her two-piece bikini, Barry, the owner of the eco lodge we were staying at, hailed us. “You’d better cover up until you’re out in the boat,” he told Setsuko. “They’re very modest here and you’ll attract unwanted attention. Probably they’ll just stare, but they’ve been known to throw rocks”.

The missing ingredient, in a word, is musicality — just, quite plainly, the way the words sound. Rhythm. Cadence. Tone. Timbre. Vibrato. Phrasing. When it comes to a slogan, these things matter not as much but MORE than the content. They are the forgotten criteria of sloganeering.

In his book You Are The Message, Roger Ailes gives an anecdote about Mark Twain which illustrates my point. Twain, trying to get dressed one morning, pulled out three shirts in a row that were short a button:

Twain flew into a rage, swearing like a stevedore. When he was through, he was startled to see his wife standing at the door, fuming in her own way at his intemperance. Carefully, slowly, and without a trace of emotion, she repeated every obscene word just uttered by her husband….When she was through, she stood impassive and silent, hoping her display would shame Twain. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he puffed his cigar and said, “My dear, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.”

There you go: it’s what you say and the way that you say it.

Something to be said for stick-to-it-ness: Jamaica still uses the same typography, and seems to follow the same rules, as it did 45 years ago.

My copy of Ogilvy on Advertising sits on a shelf miles from here. I wanted to re-read the section on advertising tourism for Jamaica, as that might be the closest this genius of promotion came to weighing in on nation branding. I found, however, a student’s book report which summarizes Ogilvy’s tips on tourism advertising: “Ogilvy then addresses how to advertise foreign travel. A classical campaign in travel advertising is Doyle Dane Bernbach’s (DDB) Jamaica campaign [from 1960s]. When Ogilvy started an ad campaign for Britain, it was the fifth most visited European country by the time he wrote this book it was first.”

About the communications side of nation branding, David Ogilvy says:

1. Advertising for countries should be designed to plant a long term image in the reader’s mind.
2. Choose to illustrate things that are unique to the country concerned and not something people can do at home.
3. The job of the advertising is to convert people’s dreams about visiting foreign countries into action; this is best done by combining “mouth-watering photographs with specific how-to-do-it information” (Ogilvy 133).
4. Whenever the advertising is for a little known country, it is important to give the people a lot of information in the advertisement such as the weather, language, food, etc.
5. Charm and differentiation work well in tourism advertising.

Everybody, please take particular note of 1, 4 and 5 on that list.

Now, a final, and separate, point about these particular Jamaica ads, I want to draw your attention to the original campaign. The only example of it I could find online is at the AIGA archives. It’s a grainy black and white full-page magazine ad from 1964 that shows a photo of the Blue Mountain Inn followed by an evocative long-copy story:

Under cover of darkness, the town’s lonely bachelors climbed to this secluded inn on Blue Mountain. And it wasn’t for dinner.

Blue Mountain Inn has led a wicked, wicked life. For years, she was the queen of Kingston’s bordellos.

Can you imagine a more beautiful location? A thousand feet up a mist-touched mountain, on the banks of a crystal stream, with its own waterfalls and surrounded by giant tree ferns, climbing vines, flaming wild flowers and gorgeously plumed tropical birds.

No wonder there were mumblings of discontent among certain segments of the population when the lady was rehabilitated into an elegant inn. (Even though she’s reformed, she’s lost none of her appeal. Jamaicans still climb there. But, now, for dinner.)

In this once-scandalous stone great house, you can now order Chateaubriand and Mouton Rothschild, ’47. These days, a plump bed costs you $10, including breakfast. On another mountain, four miles from Kingston, is Casa Monte, of a style best described as neo-Italian-Jamaican. $6.50 buys you a room with a view so fantastic, visitors have been known to cap their bottles of Jamaican rum—just so they wouldn’t miss anything.

At the other extreme of the island is a hotel room (if you can call something that’s 50’ X 35’ a “room”) that’s at the other extreme of price. It’s the Honeymoon Suite at the Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, $100 a day for two, including your own private outdoor swimming pool. At that price, you may want to leave here under cover of darkness.

For more information about formerly wicked inns, $6.50 views and $100 a day suites, see your travel agent or Jamaica Tourist Board, Dept. IA, 630 Fifth Ave., N.Y.C.

Now, my question is, why don’t more advertisements tell real stories like this? My suspicion is it’s because writing a good story requires, among other things, massive selectivity — a knack for including the telling detail, the discipline to eschew the arguably attractive but contextually irrelevant “And what’s more…”, and the guts to leave in certain bits which whilst factually unimportant (“Do we have to say it was once a bordello?” I hear the modern-day marketing director ask) are narratively or tonally vital.

People as individuals are bad enough at all that; committees and ’steering groups’ are hopeless.

First, two seconds of background…. I’m working this morning on my chapter on measuring and monitoring place brands for the upcoming third edition of Destination Branding. Doing some reading and research for it. I discovered that in the Q4 2005 edition of what was then called the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index (which was less than a year old at the time), a company called Brand Finance added “a new and very exciting dimension” to the NBI: a financial valuation of the 32 country brands in the index.

Now, I’m a huge sceptic of brand valuation — or, to put it more exactly, I’m a vociferous champion of the limits of brand valuation; brand valuation can be useful, but mostly by examining its delta, its change over time (the absolute figures brand valuation comes up with, in the context of place branding at least, I don’t trust [speaking of provenance] for a New York minute).

Having said that (as Larry David would say), I love the idea behind the “royalty relief” method Brand Finance uses to perform the valuations:

This approach assumes a country does not own its own brand and calculates how much it would need to pay to license it from a third party. The present value of that stream of (hypothetical) brand contribution payments represents the value of the brand.

Even if the figure arrived at by the valuers has little more validity than a finger in the breeze, “royalty relief” is still a great way to think about your brand — whether you’re a place, a company or an individual person: if somebody else owned your brand, your good name, how much would he or she charge you to rent it?

Or, to turn it around and add action implications, if you owned your brand (as you, in point of fact, probably do), and wanted to rent it out, will what your doing right now, today, this week, this month, mean you can charge higher rent for your brand in the future?

Follow up: As if to confirm my point about the delta being the thing, Simon Anholt’s just written a piece for Foreign Policy about how Obama raised America’s brand value by $2 trillion.

Having lived and worked in Europe for the past seven years, where everything to do with mobile phones is always noticeably better than what’s on offer stateside, I was amused by this fake tirade by the Fake Steve Jobs, who describes a phone call in which he berates AT&T head Randall Stephenson for not realizing what a gift the iPhone is (AT&T mentioned offhandedly the other day that they’d like to encourage some people to use the iPhone less on their network, which has the device exclusively, as apparently 3% of the customers are responsible for 40% of the data usage).

Fake Steve Jobs screams down the line at Stephenson, comparing the iPhone to “Meet the Beatles”:

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not.

About America, Fake Steve Jobs laments:

We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product.

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

The whole article is an extremely tightly written piece of satire. Recommended for a hearty, bittersweet laugh.

21 December ‘09: A few days later the follow-up fake phone call story appeared.

What I want you to notice is how it manages to be: 1) real; 2) helpful; 3) humourous but not jokey (good, since Innocent’s cornered the market in ha-ha quips). It conveys, “Yeah, okay, this is a computer talking to you, obviously, but behind that computer are real people who are competent and caring. And whom you can get a hold if you really need to.” Compare and contrast with the typical: DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE bla bla bla, and the brand value of taking this higher — and not any harder — road becomes crystal clear.

Hello,

It’s Little MOO again. I thought you’d like to know, the following items from your order are now in the mail:

1 x MiniCards (100)

You requested Royal Mail delivery, which means it should reach you between 1 and 2 business days.

Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so if you have any questions regarding your order, the best place to start is with our Frequently Asked Questions. We keep the answers here:

http://www.moo.com/help/

If you’re still not sure, contact customer services, (who are real people) at:

https://secure.moo.com/service/

Thanks for ordering with MOO – we hope you love your order,

Thanks,
Little MOO, Print Robot

MOO
“We love to print”

Swedish Lapland's new beta site

1) This mockumentary satire ad for the ski resort of Åre should make you laugh. A representative of Visit Sweden showed it as part of her presentation to the Swedish Lapland Tourismforum, at which I spoke also. I’d seen it before, but it reminded me that humour — unforced, of course, as a natural expression of one facet of a culture — is, well, funny.

2) Lars Huring, web maven of Luleå-based creative agency Vinter, had us all in stitches gathered round his MacBook Pro watching this two-part segment — “The Stockholm Syndrome” — from America’s incomparable Daily Show. Taxes are too high here for my taste. But the fact remains, educated Swedes (the ones paying most of the tax) all speak excellent English, meaning there are two countries in the EU (Ireland and Britain) they could move to next week and get a job, plus 24 additional EU countries where they are legally entitled to wodrk and reside. If they remain here, and the country’s tax base isn’t shrinking unsustainably, then the Swedish system’s either satisfying them or, as is the premise of this comedy sketch, brainwashing them.

3) On a related point, reading Monocle in a Stockholm cafe today (a pretty damn Moncole thing to do, think of it), I was struck by this, from the PM of Bhutan:

[Gross National Happiness] is based on the theory that since happiness is the ultimate desire of every human being, it is the responsibility of the policy-makers to create conditions whereby citizens can pursue happiness. Happiness is a state that one is able to attain when equilibrium is achieved between the body’s material needs and the mind’s emotional and psychological needs.

According to the never-wrong Wikipedia, the GNH incorporates seven measures of wellness: economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social and political.

I don’t know a thing about Bhutan or how happy its people really are (I’m a little sceptical; to be happy myself, for instance, I need to travel a lot, and US$1,900 a year, which is Bhutan’s 2008 GDP/capita, wouldn’t cover much airfare). Nonetheless, I like that a politician (Jigmer Yoser Thinley his name is) can articulate this thought like that. Also might be nice if brand owners/managers (of place brands and private brands) would take such a holistic view of their marketing practices and their products.

China, with a stronger economic performance than expected despite the global downturn, has moved up to 22nd from 28th last year. The host of the 2008 Beijing Olympics has improved its rankings for Exports, Culture, People and Tourism dimensions. However, inequality, human rights, clean government, and environment still being challenges, China places at the bottom on Governance with an even lower ranking in 2009 (49th in 2009 vs. 48th in 2008).

As Simon previously wrote about China:

China’s international image continues to slide quite rapidly downhill: exactly the opposite of what China’s leadership was hoping for in the buildup to the all-important Beijing Olympics. Almost all of the ground its image had gained during the highly disciplined and stage-managed Olympics, plus some international sympathy as a result of a bad earthquake, was virtually wiped out as a result of a bad poisoning episode from baby milk, and the botched attempt to cover it up. It remains to be seen whether China’s still relatively strong economic growth, as other major economies falter, will help to achieve what such ‘nation branding’ initiatives have so far failed to do, and persuade the world that China is a country to be trusted, and admired.

China, trusted and admired? I’m not convinced.

Photo by Juan Pablo Ramirez of me on a broken wing.

In Portuguese times the dark pink pousada we lunched at was called the Hotel Flamboyant. In Indonesian times it was known as the Red House and was a notorious prison and torture centre. Norman Lewis alludes to it in Empire of the East as ‘one of the most disturbing places in the world,’ writing:

Baucau had been the administrative centre of the government forces deployed against the turbulent eastern end of the island, a dishevelled town full of barracks and interrogation centres with high, windowless walls and electrified fences. Baucau had been the end of the road for so many real and assumed supporters of Fretelin, the resistance movement.

Distraught wives searching in other locations for vanished husbands and sons were often turned away with the macabre jest, “He’s gone to Baucau to finish his education,” and with that they understood that their quest was at an end.

Now the pousada is back to offering weekend packages to tourists and expats coming down from Dili, or fine lunches of fish with banana and sweet potato to the likes of me. They even have ice cubes made from pure water.

________

We paid a visit, too, to a spot near – but unfortunately not at – the Baucau airfield where a Russian Antonov transport plane crashed two years earlier, killing all six crewmen and smashing to smithereens the cargo they were bringing which, give or take, amounted to Timor’s entire would-be telecommunications infrastructure.

Because of this accident, the country had to wait a while longer to get its phones up and running. The wreckage is gut-churningly intact. We walked up the wing to the fuselage, which afforded a better vantage point of the children at work on another chunk of airplane, banging and bending, salvaging whatever metal bits they could use back home to make tools for cooking, farming or fishing.

Day 6

We were back on the road before daybreak, passing a box of Froot Loops around the cab and out the window to our friends riding in the truck bed.
Suddenly, the traffic snarled and we came to halt in the middle of nowhere. What’s going on? Someone had set a fire in a trunk knot of an otherwise healthy roadside tree, weakening the trunk and collapsing the tree across the two-lane thoroughfare. The trunk, still smouldering, was set upon by men with machetes and ropes who synchronized their efforts spontaneously and managed to void the tree from the roadbed after about 20 minutes of hacking and tugging.

________

The expansive President Xanana welcomed us with open arms, almost literally. His office is presidential and comfortable, with the requisite big
desk at one end and a living room ensemble at the other. We sat in the living room part drinking [presumably] Timor coffee out of China cups sporting
the Timorese flag.

The president speaks confident but halting English. He laughs and smiles and joshes and gesticulates. Castro-esque in some of his mannerisms, Xanana wins you over – easily. He smokes Marlboros. Timor is lucky to have him, I thought to myself. We covered a lot of ground in our one and a half hours together. The president is keen to see Timorese culture embraced in tourism initiatives, keen to use veterans of the resistance as tour guides, keen that Timor not try to compete with places like Bali in the things that places like Bali are good at.

When we asked him what is the essence of East Timor, he hesitated for precisely three-tenths of a second before answering: ‘The warrior spirit.’ Without a doubt, this notion comes closest to capturing a single ‘core idea’ of Timor-Leste. But we later realised two things about it that make it (in our view) unsuitable as a ‘headline’ for Timor’s identity as a destination: it is not distinctive enough (see Papua New Guinea’s web site, for instance, for all the warrior spirit you can shake a wellsharpened stick at) and it emphasises fighting at the expense of other useful concepts, like winning, as well as non-combative themes (like cultural fusion and a land untamed) that are equally true and alluring.

More surprising to me was the thought — obvious enough when you think about it — that “trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic.”

What fascinated me most was this inset box, and what it suggests about design and branding:

What turns a dummy pill into a catalyst for relieving pain, anxiety, depression or the tremors or Parkinson’s disease? The brain’s own healing mechanisms, unleashed by the belief that a phoney medication is the real thing. The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor’s bedside manner, but the colour of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine medications.

Yellow pills make the most effective anti-depressants, like little doses of parmaceutical sunshine.

Red pills seem to contain power and can give you a more stimulating kick.

White tablets — particularly those labelled ‘antacid’ — are superior for soothing ulcers, even when they contain nothing but lactose.

The colour green reduces anxiety, adding more chill to the pill.

More is better. Placebos taken four times a day deliver greater relief than those taken twice daily.

Branding matters. Placebos stamped or packaged with widely recognized trademarks are more effective than ‘generic’ placebos.

In other news, buying branded handbags gives consumers more pleasure than buying generic bags. Anyway, read the original article if you want.