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A Late Elections Post: Be Free, Be Free
I meant to post this much earlier—the elections ended at 2 p.m. today—but problems with internet access have greatly reduced my blog posting that I have been keeping up with. These are a few examples of an election campaign that caught my attention, as well as that of others.
The Union of Freedom (US) party launched its "It's legal" campaign a few months back. In the first stage of the campaign, posters looked like anarchist symbols. All the posters carried a URL with a .us address. Later, small stickers began appearing on lamp posts and on bus stops that carried slogans like, "It's legal to be a lesbian" or "It's legal to be write," "It's legal to make money," or "It's legal to die." It was clear that they were related since they featured a consistent purple color scheme and the same mysterious slogans.
Not until mid-April was the campaign revealed to be from the Union of Freedom. Their new posters claimed, "Life is Legal: Union of Freedom."
Most recently some of their posters carried a new slogan: "Terrorism is the Bird Flu of Capitalism."
The campaign was the subject of attention and rumination by other English-language bloggers. The way that initial ads were presented with no context, presumably to prompt interest on the part of viewers, was similar to the "Red Hand" campaign that Vodafone sponsored in January to draw attention to their takeover of the Czech mobile phone provider Oskar. In that series, posters of a red hand-print appeared all over trams and bus stops until, a few weeks later, it was linked to the new Vodafone company (their color is usually red so far).
(Dear Oskar, Rest In Peace. We miss you! Vodafone CZ has no personality, unless you prefer corporately smoothed-over ad campaigns, and now whenever I hear "Volejte osm set a šest sedmíček" it sounds like a dirge.)
Tags: Czech, elections, advertising
The Union of Freedom (US) party launched its "It's legal" campaign a few months back. In the first stage of the campaign, posters looked like anarchist symbols. All the posters carried a URL with a .us address. Later, small stickers began appearing on lamp posts and on bus stops that carried slogans like, "It's legal to be a lesbian" or "It's legal to be write," "It's legal to make money," or "It's legal to die." It was clear that they were related since they featured a consistent purple color scheme and the same mysterious slogans.
Not until mid-April was the campaign revealed to be from the Union of Freedom. Their new posters claimed, "Life is Legal: Union of Freedom."
Most recently some of their posters carried a new slogan: "Terrorism is the Bird Flu of Capitalism."
The campaign was the subject of attention and rumination by other English-language bloggers. The way that initial ads were presented with no context, presumably to prompt interest on the part of viewers, was similar to the "Red Hand" campaign that Vodafone sponsored in January to draw attention to their takeover of the Czech mobile phone provider Oskar. In that series, posters of a red hand-print appeared all over trams and bus stops until, a few weeks later, it was linked to the new Vodafone company (their color is usually red so far).
(Dear Oskar, Rest In Peace. We miss you! Vodafone CZ has no personality, unless you prefer corporately smoothed-over ad campaigns, and now whenever I hear "Volejte osm set a šest sedmíček" it sounds like a dirge.)
Tags: Czech, elections, advertising
Posted 03 June 2006 at 15:23.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
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