Under pressure
Modern marketing is preoccupied by ‘viral' campaigns, in which a piece of content has sufficient appeal to the average person that they forward it to all their mates and before long: jackpot. But going viral isn't always a good thing, as Sony has found out.
You see it used to support an organisation called 10:10, which says it's "a global campaign to cut carbon emissions by ten percent per year starting in 2010." All very laudable, you might think, but as is often the case with apparently well-meaning initiatives, it's zeal to recruit more individuals to its cause has backfired spectacularly with the release of a video entitled No Pressure.
We happen to know a blogger who has been following this story - Hugh Bicheno. His surname is not a coincidence and if you're into no-holds-barred political and social commentary you can read his blog here. We asked him for a bit of background.
"The campaign was the brain-child of 38-year old Franny Armstrong, a documentary film maker whose views have remained unchanged since she titled her university thesis "Is the human species suicidal?" said Bicheno. "10:10 was formally launched on 1 September 2009 in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, with a special G2 supplement devoted to it by the Guardian.
"The global warming bubble has been deflating ever since damning emails to and from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a crucial player, were made public. Consequently the stridency of the true believers has been rising. Armstrong's No Pressure vid, written by Richard Curtis, has gone viral, but see also previous efforts like The North Pole is Melting, Damien-style American Kid, and Baby Drowning from Greenpeace."
And the consequences? "I think it's symptomatic of the general trend," said Bicheno. "I have highlighted that the Royal Society has jumped off the band-wagon and predicted that as the trend accelerates, we can expect the cognitive dissonance of the true believers to drive them into ever more extreme positions.
"As myself a concerned environmentalist, I saw how the movement was highjacked in the early 1990s by a political agenda driven by then US Vice-President Gore, and have been bitterly opposed from the beginning to the Gadarene rush into global warming dead end. Now that it has hit the buffers, I can only pray that the baby of decent, science-based environmentalism is not thrown out with the hate-polluted, pseudo-scientific bathwater of climate catastrophism."