Experience the Message

BRILLIANT! A CELL PHONE TO SAVE LIVES

This is simply a great idea!

A mobile phone operator in South Korea is offering users a new service that claims to repel mosquitoes.

From Monday, subscribers to SK Telecom Company will be able to download a sound wave that humans cannot hear, but that annoys mosquitoes within a range of one metre (one yard).

For the fee of $2.5, customers can then play the sound by pressing a few keys on their phones.

The mobile phone emits a noise similar to the buzz of a male mosquito, which the blood-sucking females tend to avoid.

Although it uses handset battery power faster, the service is expected to be very popular during Korea's hot, humid summers.

The firm, the country's largest, has 17 million subscribers and controls just over half of the South Korean domestic market.

The biggest explosion in mobile phone sales comes from the Third World. The Third World is still plagued by millions of deaths caused by malaria. Imagine if this "service" comes preloaded on the phones sold in Chad, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Ghana or Cambodia! A cell phone can save millions of lives!!!!

ADS TO ART

Kudos to Adweek in putting up a profile of Steve Lambert, who has launched an anti-ad project called Add Art. Basically, he has worked with Mozilla's (Firefox) free ad blocker add-on to create a project that inserts fine art in place of banner ads and other online advertising when viewing pages on Firefox.

Brilliant. Another example of the growing empowerment of the consumer, and a resounding example of art trying to subvert commerce -- something that is usually done the other way around.

Anyone who knows about the advertising ban in Sao Paulo would quickly equate this project int eh virtual world with the efforts of the Brazilians to clean up their own visual pollution. More of this in the upcoming book....

ANTI-TIVO? BOLLYWOOD!

A recent article in Ad Age points out that:

Much has been made about how to prevent ad zapping, but it looks as if dancing and singing might just do the trick. An Advertising Age survey of media-buyer projections of commercial ratings for the fall season reveals that Fox's "American Idol" and ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" will have the highest "C3" ratings -- those households that will watch the ads within three days of a program's original air date.

This just goes to show what I saw in India how the power of Bollywood -- as content and mindset - could prove to be a seminal influence on entertainment going forward in this country. This topic is covered in my forthcoming book, still untitled, in spring 2009 from Harper Collins.