On The Turning Away

Crossposted.

Crossposted at the new blog.

One of the interesting postmortems in France’s presidential election last weekend is the fact that Segolene Royal failed to win a majority of the women’s vote: only 48% of women voted for her. She may have paid a price for focusing on gender at the expense of her policies - the image of the classic femininity as agent of change and mother to the country can only take you so far.

If France is any guide, so much for sisterhood - the assumption about women gravitating toward women does not hold. In contrast, Senator Hillary Clinton makes appeals to female voters but she “plays up her gender less on the campaign trail”.
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Everybody is talking about Snickers. The controversial ad by Mars in which two men’s bellicose reactions after they accidentally kiss in a Snickers fight beats Coca-Cola’s highly stylized grand theft Coke and Anheuser-Busch’s vigoriously promoted Bud.TV. In an era where negative publicity is the new hype, Mars simply “pushed” to get attention by jolting people.

The Snickers ad sparked complaints from gay and lesbian organizations for its perceived prejudice and homophobia (resulting in the ad being pulled) but also created immediate buzz. In trying to cut through the clutter, Mars certainly feels a need to be controversial - or at least outlandish. The NYT pontificated that the Snickers commercial “offers a cautionary tale about the echo chamber Super Bowl advertising has become”; AdAge deemed it to be “crossing the line”.
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Are you psyched to be rolling with football fans? It seems the whole country is glued to their television sets in the biggest sports day of the year with the Indianapolis Colts meeting the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI in Miami - a host of bloggers is liveblogging the Super Bowl as well as the Sideshow - that is, the “million-dollar ads, weird diversions and Prince’s halftime spectacle”.

This year, the hype is on “user-generated” ads - the cute Dorito ones are all on YouTube. If you’re predisposed to a slightly more fey stuff, Cirque du Soleil is crashing the Super Bowl in the hope that you rejoice in the day with “man-tights and harlequin finery”.

Before you’ll all get wasted on “Doritos and a contact steroid high”, enjoy the dude routine and all manners of cross-dressing pervading the manly all-American Super Bowl this year.

On the eve of Super Bowl, Time Inc. is making a splash in the digital sports space with the decision to buy FanNation.com, a sports enthusiast Web site for fans, fantasy game players, and bloggers. To be folded into Sports Illustrated (SI) Group, FanNation.com will help “enable [it] to compete in the Web 2.0 space” by aggregating, filtering and customizing sports information while allowing users to contribute their own content.

SI.com, contributing between 15% and 20% of the franchise’s total revenue in 2006, lags behind top sports sites like ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, AOL Sports, and CBS SportsLine. According to comScore, last September, SI.com drew 5.8 million users, while ESPN.com and Yahoo Sports pulled in audiences of 20 million and 17 million, respectively.

1.3 billion-strong people. In China, that is.

Amid the growing signs of cultural integration with the west (read: America), reality show has entered the Chinese consciousness. And the Chinese are cleverly riding on the genre’s growing popularity for a patriotic cause. China Central Television (CCTV), the state-run TV monopoly, is launching a reality show this fall, officially called “China Olympic Coxswain Competition”, with the goal of plucking someone from the nation’s 1.3 billion population to become an coxswain in the country’s Olympic rowing team.

Last year, the finale of a reality show style singing contest, “Super Female Voice”, modelled after “American Idol“, drew a stunning 400 million viewers. By comparison, its American original attracted 36 million to its finale this year.
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In hindsight, we may have been onto something - OCD aside - when we predicted it’d make a while for the red mist dust to settle. Today it came this news from AFP via Yahoo: Zidane’s headbutt spawns chart-topping hit.

A song called “Headbutt” written the day after the WC final is the most downloaded track in France over the last two and a half weeks with 80,000 downloads. Distributor Warner Music said it would be highest selling in France this week judging by mid-week sales figures from supermarkets. The song is slated to be distributed in 20 countries, including Japan and the Philippines, and Italian and Spanish versions are planned.

Come to think of it, had Zidane (Zizou) and France won the World Cup, he probably would not have commanded such adulation, would he?

Zidane’s headbutt is booming at YouTube. The latest, lego style. Sadly, YouTube currently doesn’t support posting to WordPress, so you have to click on the link above to play the clip.

Last week YouTube broke the 100 million download mark, a milestone that may have been helped by an unexpected source: Zidane’s headbutt. Its audience grew from 7.3 million to 12.8 million in one short week, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings report via SF Chronicle. What’s more heartening, viewers are also spending more and more time on the site, nearly half an hour - an average length of a sitcom.

If it’s any solace to Zidane and his ardent fans, the Guardian reported that FIFA today banned Materazzi for two matches for his part in Zidane’s infamous sending-off during the World Cup final. The Times said that FIFA denied video evidence was used in the red mist.

On balance, who is worse off coming off the headbutt? While Zidane was fined 7,500 Swiss francs, Materazzi is 5,000 Swiss francs worse off. Zizou has agreed to do three days’ community work with children on one of Fifa’s humanitarian projects. Besides, the Azzurri won the trophy.