Tag: Super Bowl

boom bang

At 6:30PM today, the Packers will hit the Steelers who will definitely hit back.

Boom Bang! Boys and girls, both will be watching NFL football (it is worth noting that there has been an increase in NFL female audience).

$3 Million per Ad . Lots of eyes balls. Wear this, take that and drink those.

Consumer spending is needed to move this ailing (disconnected) economy forward.

Spending is stimulated first by advertising. ” The first time, I ever saw your face.”

With exposure comes retention and familiarity (brand recall).

Green Bay, the 60’s team, was famous for Lombardi’s line ” Winning is not everything, it’s the only thing”.

To join this virtual-arena culture, I already bought hamburger helper and ground beef to stay in. My daughter picked the Packers.

(If she lost, she would have to do yoga for the rest of her life).

Boom Bang. Freezer scored an intercept touch down against the Bears two weeks ago.

That did it for my daughter who only watches football once a year.

Millions like her will join in to watch tonight’s broadcast event.

It’s not just the game which attracts the crowd. It’s quintessential American.

The crowning and culmination of team work, hard work and dream-turns-reality.

The President was alluding to it in his State of the Union “let’s make Science Fair as desirable as Super Bowl” (to paraphrase him).

Tell that to today’s students: you must learn the Periodic Table, clean the table and sit at the table to learn Chinese. No game online, or watching the Super Bowl.

It would amount to an eternal time-out (we were conditioned to participate and engage).  Even expats asked where they could tune in to watch the unfolding game.

Soldiers away in war are no exceptions. People even showed up to watch the game outside of the Arlington arena.

No feeling comes close to watching a shared event with millions (GW Bush, Travolta).  The crowd, the hype and the blood-thirsting. So modern (neuro-marketing, protective gear etc…) yet so primitive (the cheer, the chant and the contact). Boom-Bang. Stay alive. Stay strong.

The tough gets going

Steelers‘ number 33 and 34. Back to basics. One yard at a time to Super Bowl.

On the field or off it, we have to retrench and defragment. USA Today cover story features “the faces of today’s unemployed”, showing a nuclear family, sitting in the back of  the family pick-up truck, with two beautiful young daughters, a wife and a Dad who couldn’t turn to face the camera.

What have we done to ourselves?

Instead, we managed to distract ourselves with I-pod and I-pad, scrapbook and Facebook. User-generated content but not corporate-generated income.

World leaders are heading to Davos on private jets, while world factory workers take a nap on the last train home (Chinese New Year).

Instead of  having another Sputnik moment, we can barely have a picnic moment in the park, whose benches often serve as home for the homeless.

Each demographic cluster has its own “medium” of expression. In this case, card-board signs that say “anything helps”.

The longer the red light, the more time for guilt to build up (they should be in Davos street corners this week holding those card-board signs. Better donor pool).

I have noticed that:

– Star Wars and Apocalypse Now re-release (Blu Ray), the former made it as memorabilia for future generations.

– Men grooming sector surges with the rise of unemployment (first in Japan and now in the West).

– Virtual funerals, instead of “the Big Chill” reunion (In traditional China, they even hired mourners to jazz it up).

– McDonald did well during the Recession, so they can afford to raise the price, while Arby’s is up for sale.

– The life cycle of tech companies (or their CEO’s) is shortened as compared to brick-and-mortars’

– Starbucks’ new logo is not the answer to boost sales. Another bubble is.

– Facebook photos, men in long shots, while women in close-ups

– Amazon keeps plugging away, under the radar, to position itself for virtualization and cloud computing

(while letting Google, Facebook and Apple steal the headlines).

– Yahoo, AOL and My Space already look like dinosaurs from Web 1.0

– China is leading in solar panel manufacturing. This plays to their strength (very similar to India’s momentum post-Y2K).

So, we are content with old institutions e.g. Larry King Show (whose guests feel like they are on America Got Talent), Regis Show and Tonight Show while Boomers seek familiar routine and route (35 miles an hour speed limit, same channel on TV, same store for breakfast. No wonder they can afford to raise the price. No place else to go!).

Some old tricks still work, as the case with the Steelers’ that got them to the Super Bowl. Makes one wonder if we should bring back Reagan-Thatcher’s strong-handedness (whose inflationary consequences are still felt today). This time, it is going to be without Mr Stockman.

This Bud’s for Saigonese

The Bud‘s Bus is here. Clumsily made its turn around tight street corners, where beer drinkers sat on baby-size stools, surrounding a hot-pot or sea food grill.

I saw the Budweiser chariot and horses at the  Super Bowl in Miami.

And now, the brand appears here on the opposite side of the world.

Still, someone in International Marketing needs to take context into their planning.

Can’t go around the tight streets of Saigon with a moving billboard which can’t turn the corner.

Things have to be nimble and the look has to “fit”, like KFC on-wheels (scooters).

Now, that takes experience (KFC happened to buy all the Chicken Town outlets for instant dominance).

I must admit, the Bud girls tried hard. They helped out the servers at their assigned restaurants, on par with Hennessy PR girls, who dressed up as if the were beauty contestants.

Bud is playing catch up, before another Japanese brand, locally brewed, begins to make its entrance.

It’ s hot here. And beers have become the liquid of choice. Either that, or you get ENSURE as hospital-visit gifts.

Vietnamese male don’t like to go anywhere near milk, except when it’s mixed in their iced coffee milk.

I notice two beverages that dominate here, and have been for a while: iced coffee milk and Heineken.

One to put you to sleep and the other to wake you up.

And the cycle has never ended, at least for the past decade or even longer. The spirits business promises higher margin than food, which in the Vietnamese slang, “moi”, i.e. appertizers add-ons, translated into higher bill, which requires drinkers to work harder, thus, more stress to be released….)

It’s the loop, very much like the loop in the States, except in the States,

people live to work  (to pay for their expenses, largely bank-own housing.) Here, at least in the South, people work to live, as observed by one Vietnamese now lives overseas. Knowing this, Budweiser should

take a page from KFC play book: beer on wheels, and not huge trucks that can barely negotiate the turn.

globalize, empathize and digitize

It’s Kitchen God day in Asia.

Super Bowl weekend here in Miami.

And the DOW is down across the board.

Oh when the Saints oh marching in….

People were guessing, just like Mr Watson, that maybe the world can make use of a few computers, or move to digitization perhaps 15-20% of current load. Well “you’ve got news”: when e-government and e-MR digitization finished their conversion, we will be in for a surprise: perhaps more than 50%-80% current work load will get digitized (the more service-oriented the economy, the higher the percentage).

At this rate, we will be tutored by online English and Math in-pat teachers (as opposed to expats).

Pepsi decided against participating in the Super Bowl, a move which signifies the fork on the road: the online world now commands huge Corporate dollars traditionally allocated to the big Three over the past six decades.

New Orléans will celebrate, no matter what. Just showing up this Sunday has already been more than a boost for this Katrina-ridden town.

Next weekend, more than a billion and a half will celebrate the year of the Tiger.

On top of that, we got Valentine and President Day here in the US.

A warm spot in the midst of uncertain news and unwelcome weather.

Hold it: Defense, defense, defense.

For three hours this Sunday, I will join in and try to forget all bad news.

And I trust that our Kitchen God will bring full report Upstairs.

In Asia, we got our priorities right: food comes first. It brings harmony and social cohesiveness.

You eat soup, not Campbell, but from a huge common broth (Pho).  It’s up to you to throw in your basil leaves.

But on a cold evening, the context which gave rise to the Noodle King in Japan, there is nothing comes close to a shared bowl of Pho with friends.

New Orleans also knows how to celebrate, to put emphasis on food and drink (French Quarter). No wonder the Colonial theme pervades, both Hanoi and New Orleans : the coffee and pastries. Bon Vivant. After all, the French are now factoring in Happiness into their GDP equation, to count what really counts, according to their worldview.

I can empathize with that. After all, I learned my conjugation charts and early childhood songs, deciphering on the map where Lyons,  and Marseilles were. I know in this globalized world, we evolve, and borrow brilliance. We might try to solve one problem and end up generating a host of others.

The French got their shares. So have we. But this Sunday, some of their descendants will march and cheer. And I “want to be in that number, Oh when the Saints are marching in.” Today and tomorrow, Best Buy will sell a lot of HDTV‘s. Build it (digitizing), they will come. Still cheaper than going down there (or stuck in a snow storm with canceled flights), secure tail-gate parking, get to the stadium and not even sure you could get that kind of close-up views.

If you put TV and computer screen time together, we are on the way to be couch-potato nation. That’s one thing the world has in common, World Cup or Super Bowl, besides Katrina-size disasters.