February 16, 2009
ckBerry
Take all that friction between the White House and Karzai, add in the buzz surrounding Obama’s Blackberry and the fact the guy in this ad looks like a youngish black executive type (the “enterprise server”) kicking back in lovely weather, then factor in the circumstances of U.S. point man, enforcer and super(man)-envoy Richard Holbrooke hitting Kabul to tell Karzai how it is (a day after the Taliban attacked the Justice Ministry and the Prisons Department), and voilá, you’ve got the springboard — between the guy overhead and the representative Afghani slogging it out on the bike through this snowstorm — to explain all kinds of fissures and 1st world/3rd world resentments.
(image: Paula Bronstein – Kabul, Afghanistan, February 13, 2009)
6 Comments Leave a comment
Alan said:
The same sort of disparity between the world of illusion employed by advertisers and the real world can be found in this country, too. It can be found anywhere advertising images are a part of the landscape. Advertising as it is practiced today (and maybe it always has been; I don’t know) is about promising a better existence in return for buying a product. In short, it’s a lie. The image above shows the gap between the real person on the bicycle, living in the real word-a-day world, and the make believe person in the much more comfortable, happy make believe world of consumer satisfaction. It doesn’t really matter all that much that the advertisement is Western and the scene is Afghanistan. It could just as well be Chicago, New York, or Detroit. Advertising is not concerned very much with political boundaries. The lie works everywhere.
Sergei Andropov said:
Very interesting company. According to their website, they have three million customers.
ratfood said:
Seems a tad odd that the billboard text is almost entirely in English.
lytom said:
ckBerry looking for trade with Afghanistan seems to have missed the economic reality, or is it just a pretense to make it an aspiration to something that smells of dependence and corruption? How many Afghanese can afford this berry?
stevelaudig said:
“youngish black executive” I might call him a “youngish, blackish executive” as he doesn’t jump off the billboard as black. the billboard could be faded though
yg said:
holbrooke was on newshour and denied any friction with karzai. (shrug)
the scene above reminds me of a review of “confessions of an economic hitman”:
During my own 30 years as a development worker in Africa, Latin America and Asia, I came to realize that the institutions of the aid system and the global economy persistently serve the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor.