I am uncertain as to what disturbed me more – the emphatic nature of the blistering neon pronouncement or the fact that it was up chirpy-as-you like on the 1st of November.

Its punchy though – with a sense of movie scale to it – bought to you by the people who bought you Destination Christmas XI – Return of the Killer Heel and Destination Christmas XII – Judgement Day.  

Also, at least its cleared up the answer to the ‘where will it all end?’ question. Whatever binge and flail we get into over the next 45 days or so, at least we know where we’re headed. Thank Christ for that I say. (And I say that as a gesture of precise theological acknowledgement.)

Not that 90% of the people out there flailing and bingeing with us will have any interest in The Christ’s Mass – and would probably view its rendering in two words as a spelling error. But for those who still view Christmas through a more traditional if still commercial lens – as a religious festival with a large meal and a shopping trip attached – its a fair and meaningful target to aim for. 

The other saving grace for many of the indigenous tribe is that, in the increasingly politically correct world of ‘happy holiday’, it is religiously prescriptive.

I must say though that the word Destination carries with it a slightly bleak undertow for me. It suggest to me that, for all the struggle and endurance it took to get through hell, high-water and the last minute Christmas Eve rat-race of throwing women and children behind you to get to that last ‘squeeze and talk’ inflatable i-tablet at inflatable cost, come the 25th it’s all over. BOOM!  After that, if liquidity issues of a financial form, like Bankruptcy, haven’t done for you, liquidity issues in the form of galloping cirrhosis, Carol singer spittle, drunken injury and increasingly inebriated, increasingly irritating in-laws probably will

Destination does though give a fair representation of our insanely commercial and emotionally over-cranked Christmas Surge & Stop and its foreshortening effect on our ability to see beyond the end of our reddening yo-ho-ho noses.

With this tsunami of ‘ding-dong-merrily-on-high madness’ strung all about us, it is not only difficult to picture any life beyond Christmas – it is almost impossible. Everything is rendered with such an all-consuming and finite neon bright absolutism that its proving difficult to even peek past quarter-past-six on Christmas Day eve and see what’s coming.  Boxing Day and New Year’s Day are currently presented as some mutated form of Christmas Afterlife.

If Dante were alive today I sense his Inferno would be replaced by a spiralling, thrashing, gnashing descent through a hellish virtual HD Advent Calendar towards a small stable where the baby Jesus,  illuminated by the celestial touch screen light of an i-pad (parental locks on of course) lies back on an IKEA manger rendered in reclaimed wood, generously upholstered with Liberty scatter-cushions, flanked by Mary, decked in full D&G, on WeChat with the girls post baby-drop and Joseph, a gamer programmer carving IP wonders in binary code where he stands, sporting a Gaultier Clog carved in wholly replenishable pine. The livestock would be provided with total traceability by M&S Food & Wine: and the 3 Wise Men would be sporting both Google sponsorship and Glasses, having not quite deciphered where to head off to post-visit and in need of a little magical guidance: that ‘in need of a Destination’ issue again.

So Destination Christmas XIII. We know you’re here. We can see you, boy can we see you. You could hardly be missed. But frankly, come January 6th 2014, you’ll be more than just ‘not missed’ – you’ll be actively scorned, cursed, pilloried and blamed for the emotional devastation and financial burden you have wrought in the world – and the pressures you have ‘forced upon’ every one of us who foolishly forgot to just be happy with one big pressie, a few small ones and a stocking just for fun. Damn You!

 

 

 

An easy outcome to predict surely? Judging by the response in your average CSR or Responsible Business Jane or Jonny to the merest mention of the potential for working on developing a CSR strategy for a tobacco company predicting the winner looks like a shoe-in.

The sudden onset of both a prostrated writhing fit of conscience and a vertiginous nose-bleed from foot-stamping across the moral high-ground is a bit of a give away.

But mention the same opportunity with an alcohol business and barely a murmur of approbation.

So, cigarettes are CSR Satan. They lose. Booze wins – every time. SmackDown!

But I am curious (and not just because I am a sometime smoker).

Both cigarettes and alcohol cause escalated ill health and death, fuel anti-social behaviour, nurture toxic generational legacies and put pressure on the civic services and health systems of every country in which they thrive. But to be fair, in the sudden death and disorder stakes booze seems to rises majestically above the other in so many ways.

So, why does the Booze business seem to get off lightly relatively speaking in the smack-down world of CSR integrity?

I can only imagine it is a legacy of the ‘great lie’ by the cigarette companies – their wilful and criminal lack of disclosure of what they knew to be true and subsequently their accountability for causing the cancers and critical illness the habit engendered in the millions of people they continued to coerce into a highly addictive and carcinogenic habit in the full knowledge of the deceit they were perpetrating and its possible consequences.

But put the booze businesses under the glass and, bar the ‘big lie’, the rest is right up there.

Some would contend that the booze businesses have a very healthy track record in using aggressive pricing and promotional strategies to drive up harmful levels of consumption and nurturing potentially addictive habits and behaviours in drinkers, especially young ones, in both emerged and emerging markets.

One might also point to a rather convenient blind spot around their seemingly primary role in the creation and escalation of the socio-cultural distemper and degradation undertaken ‘under the influence’.

Anti-social behavior, public disorder, domestic and sexual abuse, escalated violence, underage drinking, critical illness and injury, often leading to fatalities, and the subsequent financial and resource pressure that boozing and boozers bring upon the health and social services are but a few of the things that can popped on their doorstep.

Yes, ok; the Portman Group. I get it. Nice flagship of concern. But I can still find outrageously priced multipacks of low quality booze on most shelves and very little in the way of policing of underage drinking (and I’m talking the ‘8 year old found drunk in public park’ kind of underage drinking – not the ‘whoops the 12 year olds’ dug out the bols advocat from the drinks cabinet and made themselves sick at Christmas’ kind).

It does not help matters that there are a few ‘get out of jail cards bandied about by both parties – those of the “we are just supplying an existing demand in a world populated by consenting adults exercising their own free will” variety – Ole!

And the truly skilled ‘diplomat’ from either side can also muddy the pitch with a casual reference to the complicating factor of the role of ‘pop culture cool’ in driving habits and behaviours.

Pointing to the legendary status ascribed by society to the highly addictive tics and traits of celebrity ‘substance – pick a substance, any substance’ abusers and their central role in inspiring behaviour – The Dorothy Parker meets Charlie Sheen multiplied by Lord Byron and Edina from AbFab to the power of Sherlock Holmes; all to the square root of Oliver Reed Effect – is fair enough.

But really, the disparity in the scale of healthy approbation aimed at one versus the other needs readdressing if we’re going to get any clarity.

If it is simply the ‘great lie’ that demonises the tobacco industry over the Booze industry I think we might need a, well, rethink.

Why? Because I fear that in the absence of any super smart and ‘purpose beyond profit driven’ minds to help tobacco businesses and their hundred’s of thousands of employees and suppliers navigate the journey from toxic shocker to a tobacco based business devoid of cigarettes, the likelihood that there will be any real progress is small.

And all the knee-jerk howling simply serves to give their boardrooms ample excuse to rarely and barely engage in the real root and branch reforms, product innovation and reconciliation that would need to happen to ‘civilise’ the industry.

Until the howling stops and we climb out of the archly worthy teenage debating society when it comes to the cigarettes debate we cannot claim to be taking any high ground – quite the opposite. We are a lynch mob to the thousands and thousands of people who earn their livelihood from the Tobacco Industry.

Throwing bricks from the outside might be fun: but the real courage would be that demonstrated by someone who chose to climb inside the beast and try to effect some real and meaningful change.

Till then, I say lets put on some brightly coloured lycra, bring in the baying mob and get back to that smack-down!

There’s nothing sexy about a Materiality Report. Delicately revealing your intimate water stewardship credentials is unlikely to get any one hot under the collar. And no one at your local is going to leap out of bed for a carbon reduction conversation.

Dream In A Box is a methodology I have been working on for some three years with Peggy Liu of JUCCCE and China Dream fame. It has its own dream: to help people re-imagine a more enduring future-proofed model of prosperity at scale: a prosperity that aligns itself with a populist aspiration – a new aspirational concept of thriving within our own, our communities and our immediate world’s means.

For me that begins and ends with how we frame – how we visualise and speak about – this new model of prosperity. Because at the moment we’re falling at the first hurdle. In fact currently we’re often still doing a fair job of making it as unpalatable, impenetrable and unattractive as possible. 

Dream in a Box uses a relentless 7 stage Convene And Curate methodology – Frame – Voice – Vision – Forge – People – Share – Measure – to mine old wisdoms and new insights and the vernaculars and vision of everyday people, create actionable themes and initiatives and reframe the whole sustainability conversation. The Curation of multiple strands – of everyday language, wisdoms, visualisation and co created ideas, all viewed through the lens of popular culture takes it from the old Glass Half Empty view of the world – looking up through the supply chain and wrapped in the mitigation and reductive mantras of the Environmental Movement – to a Glass Half Full view of the world – looking down through the everyday human insights and desires and wrapped in the aspirational language of a Prosperity Movement.

There is nothing new in the Box – it simply re-purposes the power of storytelling – the old dark arts of hollywood scriptwriters, soap opera creators, comic book culture and Madison Avenue Ad-land creatives – for good; with the sole intention of delivering up richer and richer insights to create the killer brief against which to story tell.

Dream In A Box does not claim to deliver the answer – the continuous curation is designed to enable us to ask the right questions of the right people. Asking someone what their idea of a more sustainable life is in a pub in Macclesfield on a wet Wednesday night is unlikely to garner much joy. It is worth remembering that for most of the everyday people out there – the 80+ % – not living in the bubble of S/CSR world or early adoption, the End of the Month comes before the End of the World – and they’re having enough trouble navigating themselves and their families towards that – so some portentous and highly worthy approach to brighter futures and the end of planetary destruction is hardly going to resonate.

Equally, some flip, trite and usually peripheral “do-the-right-thing” corporate campaign saying ‘look – aren’t we good at responsible sourcing, patting lambs, and treating people really nicely, honest’ simply makes people think ‘good, I won’t bury you in the social networks…this week at least”. 

We need to find the right language and visualisation that gets them out of bed – the keys to unlock their interest in a new form of desire and consumption – one underwritten by sustainability truths, not propped up by unsustainable myths.  

Dream In A Box Curators aim to convene an audacious diversity of people at every stage to just that end. Finding the right culturally attenuated everyday framing is a lot more likely to align with the underlying truths of our human condition.

The reality is that to paint the currently unsustainable culture of consumption as solely driven by voracious satanic consumer corporations hell bent on just selling us shite we don’t need to make stacks of cash is for my mind a convenient simplification.

They have simply taken advantage of our weakness (I’ll cover off corporate predation in another piece) – that is the reflex gene pool imperative driving desire to appropriate and accrue in all of us, however sentient and ‘conscious’ we feel we might be. The more stuff we have – clothes, cars, white goods, furniture, meals, holidays, art, jewellery, technology, experiences, memories – the further up the gene pool consideration list we move – Result! – taking us closer to a superior class of preferred mate and the greater likelihood of an immortalised gene pool – survival of the fittest has mutated into survival of the richest. 

Dream In A Box is not just designed to deliver a ‘co-created culturally shaded re-imagination of prosperity’ – it is also designed to enable brands and organisations to capture value around the Sustainability and CSR investments that they have already made by revealing a better form of storytelling around them – meaningful and relevant to normal people not just the Supply Chain wonk and the COO. It is designed to engender a new paradigm in both consumer and supplier – Survival of The Smartest.

To close, its worth me putting it out there that I have a dream lurking outside the Dream.

To really deliver against this ambition or re-imagining prosperity, I think the sheer scale of galloping self interest and self publicity in a supposedly shared interest world and the multiple organisations and consultancies taking cheap and underhanded pops at each other and each other’s methodologies needs taking in hand.

Cheap is as cheap does – consultants and organisations treating each other with quiet derision and mocking and undermining each other at every opportunity to protect their revenue streams and ‘reputation’ just cheapens us all. If I were a client I would simply sit back and let us all squabble like children over train-sets and sweep up every Jam Tomorrow presentation packed with IP that I could get away with. All in the spirit of ‘co-created’ ‘open-source’ thinking and futures. 

My Dream is based on the the quiet concern that I don’t think we’re really going to get anyone into or out of bed until we sort out our own crap. We are as much the blockage now as the language and the framing – our competitiveness and divisiveness means that one ‘way’ is undermined by another ‘way’ until we simply breed inertia, indecision or both. 

So my Dream is that the various consultancies, agencies, players, movers and shakers out there advising clients and organisations on how to frame S and CSR in more central brand friendly and business smart terms get in a room with brand agencies and PR companies and figure out how to live with each other – the shape of the constellation and how they all fit into it without offering overlap and loss of ‘added value offering’ or IP.  That could be fun. In fact, I sincerely believe that could be revolutionary.

And as the artist, Grayson Perry, pointed out recently, perhaps the most shocking thing we can do these days is to act with sincerity.

 

I’ve a question: should the shiny Sleb Real-Life magazines, with their desperate roller coaster of curves versus skinny versus Size 00 versus new boobs, all multiplied by the flashing needy neon  ‘Am I Sexy?’ sign of narcissism – should they join Nuts et al in being removed from the sight of young girls (and young boys), given that they are both potentially as likely to fuel conflicted and highly troubled concepts of socialised sexuality, self image and what pretends to be normal as each other? 

Having agreed that the hooters approach to Men’s magazines – or Cowards Porn as it’s sometimes known – should not grace a standard magazine rack for casual perusal by children, I’d like to invite those other potentially slippery little silent destroyers and confusers of healthy self image in young women in to the fray.

If we agree that, to protect our small people and their sense of what’s normal in the body image and sexual deportment department, magazines that present the idyll of feminine poise as having pneumatic boobs and an alarming propensity for sartorial incontinence; clothes seemigly dispensed at the drop of a hat (though of course you are free to leave that hat on if a Rourke-Basinger sandwich is your thing) should be covered up, I’d like to offer up my own punt for Room 101.

‘Sleb Real life’ magazines – the “Ashley-ve Me Alone Says Cheryl” PLUS EXCLUSIVE 21st 19 year old Bulimic Kelly Marries Her Dad & 4 Page Pull Out ‘Diets To Die For’ kind – have begun to disturb me for reasons that have taken a while to reveal themselves. At first I felt I understood the standard argument: that mature adults – the women ( and men) that read them – know not to take them seriously and have the emotional intelligence to navigate them in such a way as to mitigate any ability the magazine might have to engender ‘unhealthy’ perceptions of self-interest, sexual attraction and body image in the reader. I have even worked on campaigns for Closer magazine and truly felt I even understood how people might use the real life dystopia and car-crash sleb life stories in some positive way – to self medicate the disappointments in their own lives, finding some form of redemption in the truths played out over page after page – that we are all equal under The Fate’s ability to dump on our eiderdown at any given moment.

Until, in a central London sweet shop, I see my 6 year old daughter, purposefully searching for Sparkle Comic amongst the magazine madness, alight on the Heat cover. She looks at me – and I see a question working its way from her eyes to her mouth – “Daddy, what’s a beach body?” A little wriggling and a few diversionary buckets and spade references later I’m in the clear on the bikini politics and the ‘whose Curves are whose’ conversation and we are distracted by the lure of dough balls.

But suddenly it struck me (the dichotomy that is, not the dough ball), considering that the ladies who grace the covers of heat et al seem to have a similar pneumatic tendency to the Nuts crowd (mostly being the same people) and equally, given that they seem to spend their whole life in a state of undress, how come we do not feel equally censorious?

Agreed, they tend not to have the same brash ‘get it here/look at my ta-tas’ posturing, and there is no direct link to them and a casual entry into porn as has been presented with the Loaded generation, BUT, in regards to being a casual and dysfunctional ‘educator’ of young girls and women in the social politics of body shape and sexuality, I feel they more than make up for it in the relentless visualisation and referencing of what is effectively body dysmorphia: drastic weight loss, physical augmentation, curves versus skinny, and ‘am I sexy sexy sexy?’ narcissism running riot.

In fact, I am now less and less convinced that this lava flow of body fascism, disturbed physicality, self loathing, and the desperate reaching for the unreachable that plays out over those pages leaves anyone unscathed, even the ‘mature’ balanced women who say that its all just a bit of fun. I am less and less convinced that they get out without shadow or stain. In turn I then wonder what a curious nine or ten year old girl must make of it.

I understand that the magazines I am referencing are not necessarily a primary driver in twisting young minds – the social pressures and personal schism and instability, both external and internal, that lead mostly young women towards at worst, the dark corners of anorexia, bulimia, self harm and at best a life of thwarted dieting and quiet self loathing are complex and labyrinthine  and not what I am exploring here.

Perhaps, it is just another falling shadow, the celebrity body edition, of the compare and despair society we are drowning in – “desperately seeking (Your Name Goes Here)” –  everything never quite good enough, never quite enough – the holidays we have, the clothes and shoes we buy, the meals we eat, the schools we send our children to, the kit we’ve got, the communities we inhabit – but ultimately the person we are, the shape we are, the size we are, the age we are.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the question:

Room101: Sleb & Real Life Magazines. In or Out?

 

 

 the Thin Air Factory is committed to creating the kind of rare air from which great things might get plucked: whether it is an aphorism, a creative strategy, a global movement, an Ad, a manifesto, a product innovation, a new model of prosperity, a short film or a quip.

The name fell out of a story: a story about a Magician’s riposte to a lady who, upon seeing the Magician pluck a rabbit from nowhere said ‘Wow you just kinda pulled that out of thin air, honey, it looks so easy? “- to which the magician replied “Believe you me madame, the rabbit is easy, but it has taken years to get that thin air just right”.

I think we spend so much time, especially in the creative industries, concentrating on the ‘it’ – the piece, the moment, the creation, the reveal, that we easily forget how important the context is out of which that ‘it’ is plucked.

So I apply as much of my experience, curiosity, wonder, mischief and creativity to the context as I do to the ‘it’.

So, consider my digital throat cleared.