I’m Fred Raillard, Creative CEO, Co-founder and Creative Chief Officer with Farid Mokart of FRED & FARID, an independent creative boutique network based in New York, Shanghai and Paris. #FredinChina is an essential social media podcast to know and understand the world’s largest economy.
I fell in love with China, and live in Shanghai with my wife and three sons since September 2012. With my teams at the FRED & FARID Shanghai agency we monitor, analyze and decrypt this ultra-connected China with nearly 800 million netizens by sharing what we see, hear and read on Weibo, Zhihu, WeChat, Huaban, Youku. I prepare this column with Zhuomin Qin from FRED & FARID Shanghai.
Thanks to Zhuomin Qin, Feng Huang, Jalila Levesque, Jules Chaffiotte, Radouane Guissi, Yi Zhang, Ying Zhang, Aliou Maro, Tina Liu, Louis Caudevilla, Dushan Karageorgevitch, Jing Qian, Jonathan Roy, Maxime Aubanel and Antoine Robin for their participation to this chronic. Find all #FredinChina podcast on iTunes.
China state TV deflates Nike’s ‘Air’ sole claims
The HotBrand this week is Nike but for two negative reasons. First is a partnership with a young and popular Chinese singer (Wang Junkai) from a band called ‘TF Boys’. Nike has invited him to cooperate in the new Air Max design process in order to seduce millennials, and they also asked him to design the new Air Max sneakers. This announcement was controversial since it was seen as a very opportunistic deal that disappointed Nike fans because the singer had absolutely no legitimacy in sports. Furthermore, he has nothing to do with athletes, and this partnership showed it was purely a marketing deal.
The second problem that took place the same week was about the ‘International day of the protection of consumer rights’ in China. Every year some brands are denounced, and this year Nike was amongst them. Following a commercial with Kobe Bryant and the Hyperdunk 08 FTB, a young Chinese bought these basketball shoes that claimed to have a Nike Zoom Air pillow. He went on to take apart the shoes to show that there was in fact no air pillow that the commercial promised! An inquiry has since been launched, and Nike has replied by stating that they made an error in the product description. If Nike is proved to be guilty, which is looking likely, they would have to pay each consumer in China 3 times the price at which they bought the product.
What happened at China’s biggest annual political gathering “Two Sessions”
The HotTopic this week are two conferences, NPC (National People’s Congress) and CPPCC (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference), which generated more than 3.58 billion media impressions on Sina Weibo. These two conferences are very important, during which the Chinese Government and Ministers explain to the people all the big decisions for the year.
The big talking points this year concern the environment (reinforcing measures against pollution for the steel, coal and other big pollutant companies), counterfeiting (reinforcing laws and regulations against counterfeiting and defective products), reinforcing laws against fraud in telecommunication and Internet, lowering the costs of all long distance phone calls, improve the country’s fiber optic infrastructure, develop certain industries (sharing economy, A.I, 5G, new energies, recyclable energy, Hi-Tech including smart manufacturing), revisiting certain laws (for example there was a crazy law when one helped someone in need, that person would be held responsible if they aggravated the persons situation), reinforcing the protection of virtual property ownership (video game, WeChat and other social network accounts) and protection against business hackers and reinforcing laws against the criminals involved in children sexual abuse cases. Finally, in education they will help the best minds in China who get to PhD level with better grants and subsidies, and change the laws against Internet bullying in order to stop this unsettling phenomenon.
A young netizen successfully denounces food porn in a funny video
The HotPost this week is a video concerning the trend about food porn that generated 12 million views. In advertising, everything that you can eat or drink (soft drinks, sandwiches, burgers etc) is shot in a specific way to create desire that is actually indecent. For example, ingredients are filmed in slow motion with beautiful music increasing the emotional power, such as a burger patty falling on the bun. This is basically food porn, and one is usually extremely disappointed when we see the real product in front of us!
One Internet surfer denounced this trend on food porn by just filming boiling water, using the same rules that we see in commercials (music, slow motions) to make boiling water look extremely desirable!
Follow Fred on Twitter: @FredFarid, or FRED & FARID: @FredFaridGroup
FRED & FARID website: www.fredfarid.com
All #FredinChina podcasts on iTunes.