凯旋门上的Adidas

看了Adrant的一篇个人博客, 名为Adidas Tracks White Stripes On French Monument。其中介绍了Adidas在法国凯旋门用标志性的3条白条做的巨型广告。笔者本人对这个广告评价还不错：

To celebrate the opening of its performance store last fall, Adidas released an ad with its three telltale stripes running up the Arc de Triomphe. As a general rule we like the fusion of contemporary culture with traditional icons. So the ad is interesting in that way but there's not really much else going for it.

不得不说，Adidas把这个logo打在凯旋门上面非常有气势，创意也是一流。凯旋门作为法国的地标，将其传统图腾式的一面充分与Adidas的现代感结合在了一起。不过，联想到最近星巴克在中国的紫禁城事件中受到中国网民的待遇，这个创意在中国或许又要受到众多非议了。

The internet comes back to life

After 32 days without stable access to some key sites and tools that I regularly used, such as MSN Messenger, Site Meter and Blogger.com, the Internet got recovered yesterday with surprise (to me). I know its time to catch up everything.

The month-long disconnection caused dramatic decreased number of subscribers to my blog at CBN, slow transfering of my blog data to Blogger.com, unstable work of Gmail and Google Reader, and completely disability of MSN messenger and webmessenger. It took ages to read some foreign bloggers' ideas. Now all the troubles are gone well before Chinese Lunar New Year, except for the increase of subscribers to my weblog =).

Let me find out what I have done during the disconnection with the cyber world:

• finished 3 books
• continued posting new entries, especially comments to FT Chinese
• moved to and decorated a new apartment
• Shen Li, the chairmen of NAAS was out from Winner100 and had a gathering with committees
• waiting, waiting and waiting for the reconnection. How sad!

Top 150 marketing blogs

Blogging is about writing and reading. Writing a blog is to publish and share ideas and information, and reading is for learning. 2 Minute Commute published an article introducing the existing top 150 marketing blogs in the world recommended by Todd And. The article briefly introduced that the 150 blogs are selected based on PageRank of Google, Technorati, Blogline subscription and the viewpoints from Todd And himself.

To me, and everyone who has interest, this is a convincing and powerful list of marketing blogs that share great ideas. Among the top 10 blogs, Duct Marketing blog is the only one I have subscribed to and have no idea how good it is. Thanks to Todd and 2 Minute Commute, these blogs are well organized and compared to one another.

Please click the link to see the full list.

YouTube to share revenue with uploaders

YouTube to share revenues

Today's FTChinese online reported that the leading video-sharing website, YouTube, is to share advertising revenues with its video uploaders, like what competitors are doing. This actually is what some experts have been arguing about, i.e., instead of merely making use of netizens, it should share interests and benefits with content contributors.

SEE I SEE

I didn't know that An internet-based research company, CIC Data, has already started its own blog named SEE I SEE, which talks about netizen insights, consumer loyalty and market watches discoverd through its professional research into weblogs and Chinese BBS. The big boss Sam Flemining attended the 2nd Blog Conference last year convened in Hangzhou and the Client Service Director gave a very nice and fluent presentation about its businesses. The CEO Sam and the company are well know for his newly coined term IWOM (The Internet Word of Mouth). I think it is actually Word of Net. The blog is new and I think there will be something more useful coming up.

The business is interesting. According to the book BRANDChild, the Chinese young generation spend a lot of their time online and the Internet has a very strong influence over their purchase decisions. It's a smart move for CIC Data to start such a business in China.

又说星巴克

前两天在FTChinese上发表了个人对于故宫与星巴克的观点，名为《请星巴克顺应中国文化》，有幸被编辑刊在FTChinese上。但让人郁闷的是，在个人给编辑的邮件中，此文的原标题不是《请星巴克顺应中国文化》这样一个有明显偏向、观点鲜明的题目，而是以《从星巴克看中国的“文化”和“主义”》这样一个中立的标题引出人们对于中国“民族主义”的思考。大概是由于编辑的善意改动，使得另一位读者提出了相对的观点，称看了我的观点之后有“不吐不快”之感，并取题为《谁不顺应中国文化？》。在此，本人实在对于编辑的改动使得我的文章立场倾斜而感到一点可惜。由此可以看出，读者们对标题的观点更加映象深刻。鄙人将特在此重申观点。

首先，对于此事我主张认真思考，也曾经在办公室与同事争论。根据我的博客原文，并非将该星巴克与故宫的“恩怨”上升到文化高度。我曾经主张将星巴克请出故宫，是因为文中提到的“不搭调”——即风格上的格格不入。不过，我曾经在文章末尾提到“我们绝对可以要求星巴克作一些顺应文化的事情”确实欠妥，但言下之意为：星巴克6年前被请进来和被请出去或许都不由得自己，而如今，如果紫禁城以“文化”为理由来决定星巴克那一家店的命运，或者决定后来者们的命运，也有其理由，但绝对不能说明中国就反对星巴克所代表的东西，更加不是美国文化，否则，哪里会在京城看到如此多的咖啡店和麦当劳？

其次，错不在星巴克，而在星巴克和故宫这样的一个“组合”上。故宫更加没有错，重点在于故宫它不是京城和大上海的写字楼。

最后，可能大多数在故宫消费咖啡的人的确是国人，但却说明不了紫禁城将其请出就是不为消费者提供方便，就是不让消费者做出选择和决定的权力。消费者其实并不一定期待这样的决定权——有了，只会觉得多了一个选择；没了，我也不会觉得故宫的旅游少了点什么。鄙人认为此事件其实反映出了商业现象——其一，“咖啡并没有深入国人生活中”，否则今天讨论的话题就根本不应该是话题了；其二，之所以有国人用“文化”来衡量，证明国人的“民族主义”强烈，这是历史原因造成的，短期内还会存在；其三，类似的国外品牌不能不对国人这样的情节保持谨慎。

其实，通过几天的讨论，读者们的观点大多都趋同了，即不单用“文化”理解，而是理性、冷静地就事论事。这应该才是FTChinese和读者们最希望看到和应该拥有的态度。

我在金融时报的观点

《请星巴克顺应中国文化》——这是我在金融时报中文网络版上的，就Starbucks的事件发表的读者观点。其实就是我的上一篇博客从Starbucks看中国的民族主义中节选出了一部分，特地投给编辑的。呵呵，没有想到居然被编辑接受了，以示鼓励。