Wednesday, February 15, 2006
I shop therefore I am
In true opposition of the world's most commercial holiday (and due to the fact that I tend to always be single on this day), I spent Valentine's Day in my jammies crunching KFC HotWings and watching movies.
Rented Cesky Sen, in English, Czech Dream, and didn't regret it.
I remember hearing about the Czech Dream scandal some time after I returned to Prague in 2004. In Czech Dream, two FAMU film students, Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda, stage an elaborate prank on the citizens of Prague. The pair manage to persuade one of the country's biggest, most prestigious advertising agencies and other media agencies, including an image consultancy and a lightboard/billboard company to donate time and materials to create a massive media campaign for Czech Dream: a fictitious new hypermarket -- the 127th to come to the country in a mere five years.
Over the past decade I've watched Prague fall victim to the shopping malls, which have mushroomed around the city. My own Prague 5 is home to Novy Smichov, a perpetually busy mall filled with florescent lighting, bored housewives, pensioners and shops brimming with not-so-cheap crap from China.
Yes, as a decadent Westerner, I can look down my noses at these monuments to capitalism (and usually also bad taste). The shops are all the same; the quality is crap, the prices inflated and there's just too much out there to choose from. I just don't need to choose from 647 kinds of breakfast cereal!
Which is exactly why the Czechs love their hypermarkets. The film (part documentary, part mockumentary, part reality TV show) ask Czechs why they have so wholeheartedly opened their hearts to the hypermarket concept. It's unanamous: Everything is in one place. There is variety, there is abundance. There is something for everyone
The big banana queue
At the beginning of the film, clips from the 70s tell a tale -- of lines. Lines for the butcher, for the druggist, for the bread, and definitely lines for bananas. In Czech Dream, a man tells his story about standing in lines for hours for 1 kilo of bananas. You didn't have an option to buy 3 kilos or 10 kilos, he says. You got 1 kilo, if you were lucky and they didn't run out by the time you inched your way to the front.
I got my first banana story by way of a letter. It was 1990 or '91. I was living in Kansas, still hadn't decided to come to Prague yet. My friend described being in her office one afternoon -- she worked in a big international consultancy -- when someone announced they had seen bananas at the local shop. That was followed by a mad stampede for the door.
Another friend told me her banana story. It was Christmas, around 1998 or so. Her brother was presenting his son with a banana for Christmas. He tries to explain to the boy that, when he was a little boy, such a gift under the tree was treasured and often took great pains to acquire. His son listened for 5 seconds and they went to find his latest computer game under the tree.
How quickly the young learn. But the old don't forget, and they prefer their new world of endless choice as opposed to the old one of endless lines.
The Kozeny connection
The film touches on a number of issues -- do ad men lie to sell? (They claim they don't.) In fact, the creative team, appropriately bleached and pierced as a testament to their creativity, were offended when pushed to acknowledge that what the were doing was in fact lying.
That said, in one of the outtakes on the DVD, the creative team leader, exclaims during a brainstorming session: "Although I'm not yet 18 I would still buy the coupon," a comment that prompted a remark to "Best not turn over that stone" from a colleague.
The comment, of course, could only refer to the country's greatest scammer, Viktor Kozeny and his Harvard Fund coupon privatision scam that bilked billions of crowns off people in the early '90s. Using the same kind of savvy – and after watching this I was truly amazed at the level of advertising / marketing talent in this country – Kozeny managed to convince the entire country to give him money for a dream of riches, and little else factually or materially, although I hear his Harvard Fund promotional T-shirt today fetches a fine price on eBay.
And what about the media?
Afer one year of work, the filmmakers had TV spots, radio spots, a jingle (with such great lines as: It will be a big bash/If you don't have the cash/ Get a loan and scream/ I want to fulfil my dream."), 200,000 flyers featuring private-label Cesky Sen-branded products at communism-era-level prices, billboards, light boards and tram ads adorned with a cartoon thought balloon that told them "don't come", "don't spend" (Czechs are contrary creatures, even more so than most.)
Two weeks before the "grand opening" to the dream, the ad campaign finally announced the location of the nonexistant store--near Letnany exposition center--literally, a field with a crappy parkinglot. In the middle of the field, some 300 meters away was what looked like a large brightly colored building. In reality, it was no more than scafolding, with a printed drop cloth. The directors made no attempt to hide the construction of the scaffolding, and at any time prior to the opening, any journalist could drive by and blow the whole prank.
But it never happened.
The media happily continued to print whatever press release Mark/BBDO sent them. After all it was Mark/BBDO.
The footage filmed on the day of the grand opening was priceless. The directors chose May 30, 2003, a day of a partial solar eclipse. Shoppers, armed with plastic bags and trollies came as much as three hours early. By the time of the ribbon cutting, there were more than a thousand people, running across the field to be the first into the new store.
There was some anger, but nothing of the scale that the organisers expected. The Army had advised them that it would be chaos. Of course the Czech government's approach to any gathering is crack heads and find out who's at fault later.
Most telling to me, wasn't the pensioners and others who attacked the directors for being mean-spirited, or who attacked themselves for being gullable, but those who came, saw and then said, "Well, we were tricked to go for a walk in the country, how refreshing."
That kind of response seems to say more than anything, that Czechs are pretty happy with their lives. So they didn't get to buy stuff. They did find a way to enjoy an otherwise beautiful day. And while I won't ever be happy about the hypermarket revolution, I can salute this country for its amazing adaptability in the face of all kinds of changes.
Rented Cesky Sen, in English, Czech Dream, and didn't regret it.
I remember hearing about the Czech Dream scandal some time after I returned to Prague in 2004. In Czech Dream, two FAMU film students, Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda, stage an elaborate prank on the citizens of Prague. The pair manage to persuade one of the country's biggest, most prestigious advertising agencies and other media agencies, including an image consultancy and a lightboard/billboard company to donate time and materials to create a massive media campaign for Czech Dream: a fictitious new hypermarket -- the 127th to come to the country in a mere five years.
Over the past decade I've watched Prague fall victim to the shopping malls, which have mushroomed around the city. My own Prague 5 is home to Novy Smichov, a perpetually busy mall filled with florescent lighting, bored housewives, pensioners and shops brimming with not-so-cheap crap from China.
Yes, as a decadent Westerner, I can look down my noses at these monuments to capitalism (and usually also bad taste). The shops are all the same; the quality is crap, the prices inflated and there's just too much out there to choose from. I just don't need to choose from 647 kinds of breakfast cereal!
Which is exactly why the Czechs love their hypermarkets. The film (part documentary, part mockumentary, part reality TV show) ask Czechs why they have so wholeheartedly opened their hearts to the hypermarket concept. It's unanamous: Everything is in one place. There is variety, there is abundance. There is something for everyone
The big banana queue
At the beginning of the film, clips from the 70s tell a tale -- of lines. Lines for the butcher, for the druggist, for the bread, and definitely lines for bananas. In Czech Dream, a man tells his story about standing in lines for hours for 1 kilo of bananas. You didn't have an option to buy 3 kilos or 10 kilos, he says. You got 1 kilo, if you were lucky and they didn't run out by the time you inched your way to the front.
I got my first banana story by way of a letter. It was 1990 or '91. I was living in Kansas, still hadn't decided to come to Prague yet. My friend described being in her office one afternoon -- she worked in a big international consultancy -- when someone announced they had seen bananas at the local shop. That was followed by a mad stampede for the door.
Another friend told me her banana story. It was Christmas, around 1998 or so. Her brother was presenting his son with a banana for Christmas. He tries to explain to the boy that, when he was a little boy, such a gift under the tree was treasured and often took great pains to acquire. His son listened for 5 seconds and they went to find his latest computer game under the tree.
How quickly the young learn. But the old don't forget, and they prefer their new world of endless choice as opposed to the old one of endless lines.
The Kozeny connection
The film touches on a number of issues -- do ad men lie to sell? (They claim they don't.) In fact, the creative team, appropriately bleached and pierced as a testament to their creativity, were offended when pushed to acknowledge that what the were doing was in fact lying.
That said, in one of the outtakes on the DVD, the creative team leader, exclaims during a brainstorming session: "Although I'm not yet 18 I would still buy the coupon," a comment that prompted a remark to "Best not turn over that stone" from a colleague.
The comment, of course, could only refer to the country's greatest scammer, Viktor Kozeny and his Harvard Fund coupon privatision scam that bilked billions of crowns off people in the early '90s. Using the same kind of savvy – and after watching this I was truly amazed at the level of advertising / marketing talent in this country – Kozeny managed to convince the entire country to give him money for a dream of riches, and little else factually or materially, although I hear his Harvard Fund promotional T-shirt today fetches a fine price on eBay.
And what about the media?
Afer one year of work, the filmmakers had TV spots, radio spots, a jingle (with such great lines as: It will be a big bash/If you don't have the cash/ Get a loan and scream/ I want to fulfil my dream."), 200,000 flyers featuring private-label Cesky Sen-branded products at communism-era-level prices, billboards, light boards and tram ads adorned with a cartoon thought balloon that told them "don't come", "don't spend" (Czechs are contrary creatures, even more so than most.)
Two weeks before the "grand opening" to the dream, the ad campaign finally announced the location of the nonexistant store--near Letnany exposition center--literally, a field with a crappy parkinglot. In the middle of the field, some 300 meters away was what looked like a large brightly colored building. In reality, it was no more than scafolding, with a printed drop cloth. The directors made no attempt to hide the construction of the scaffolding, and at any time prior to the opening, any journalist could drive by and blow the whole prank.
But it never happened.
The media happily continued to print whatever press release Mark/BBDO sent them. After all it was Mark/BBDO.
The footage filmed on the day of the grand opening was priceless. The directors chose May 30, 2003, a day of a partial solar eclipse. Shoppers, armed with plastic bags and trollies came as much as three hours early. By the time of the ribbon cutting, there were more than a thousand people, running across the field to be the first into the new store.
There was some anger, but nothing of the scale that the organisers expected. The Army had advised them that it would be chaos. Of course the Czech government's approach to any gathering is crack heads and find out who's at fault later.
Most telling to me, wasn't the pensioners and others who attacked the directors for being mean-spirited, or who attacked themselves for being gullable, but those who came, saw and then said, "Well, we were tricked to go for a walk in the country, how refreshing."
That kind of response seems to say more than anything, that Czechs are pretty happy with their lives. So they didn't get to buy stuff. They did find a way to enjoy an otherwise beautiful day. And while I won't ever be happy about the hypermarket revolution, I can salute this country for its amazing adaptability in the face of all kinds of changes.
# posted by VMH @ 4:04 PM 
