Selamat berbuka!

Ramadan is that time of the year when most Muslims seek to do good deeds. Now, have you seen the new Go-Pay billboards? Designed testimonial-style, I saw the billboard last night on my way home and Kak Mar brought it up today. After spending millions of dollars with seemingly endless promos, now they ask users to use Go-Pay because “it helps Go-Jek drivers buy uniform for their kids.” This is an example of a rhetorical device, appeal to pity, in which a person/a brand attempt to sway and manipulate their target by inducing pity. Is this ethical? Will this work? Nothing is absolute in the world of advertising, and appeal to pity is an effective device for charity or other non-profit entities, but seen from a rhetorical and logical point of view, it definitely is manipulative, something that our brand is against. It is also problematic because Go-Pay is a business and yet it uses an image of 'poor old driver' to gain profit (no, our Go-Pay top up isn’t a ’sedekah’ that goes directly to the drivers; it will mostly go to the pockets of Go-Pay investors and bosses). Look for more examples of rhetorical devices and logical fallacies in this beautifully illustrated page https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetological-fallacies/

Every year on the first week of May, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City holds a fundraising party that invite A-list celebrities. The fundraising party, Met Gala, usually marks the opening of a fashion exhibition and the exhibition informs the party’s theme.This year’s Met Gala (and the concurrent exhibition) theme was Camp, and suddenly we see celebrities wearing ridiculous costumes that scream ELEGANZA EXTRAVAGANZA! What is ‘camp’? It’s hard to explain, but here’s an illustration of how something becomes camp:

a dangdut singer wants to look glamorous
she wears a dress made of gold sequins with gold dusted all over her hair
the main audience, people outside big cities with limited access to global entertainment, thinks its glamorous, the rest thinks that it’s not glamorous at all, it’s ‘norak’ yet they don’t hate it, they are mesmerized by how the dress look, but in a weird way, neither negatively, nor positively
the dangdut singer owns the fact that it doesn’t look glamorous for all audience, and still own the look
the dangdut singer look becomes camp now :D

Think of (again) Go-Jek’s Bunga Papan billboards (most middle class people don't think Bunga Papans are beautiful, they’re ’norak’, the colors are over-the-top, the design and typeface are awful, yet they accept it, and sometimes, send it for both serious and humorous purpose anyway) or Bukalapak’s Harga Cincay campaign. Sometimes, brand borrows from Camp aesthetics for the laugh (Bukalapak) or for the relevancy (Go-Jek).
Too often, brands think of themselves and portray themselves as this ‘elite, exclusive world’ and becomes unreachable, too high up there, and eventualy, irrelevant for its intended users. Sometimes, embracing and borrowing Camp is a great strategy to make brands feel human.
This explains why Tayo campaign gets three types of responses among Indonesians:

it felt relevant and worked among Bus users who actually consume ‘norak’ visuals on daily basis (receh contents, sinetrons, dangdut shows),
those who have access to better quality contents see Tayo as ’norak’ and irrelevant, while for
those who have critical thinking/visual intelligence/rich references or exposed to cultural studies see Tayo as ‘Camp’, funny, fresh, ironic, love.

The key to understand Camp is that it always comes form the eyes of the beholder: it’s not something that creator/brand intentionally go for, UNLESS you’re a drag queen, or you want to achieve a sense of humor or irony.

Phew, that’s pretty complicated isn’t it? If you want to know more, I got a book by Susan Sontag, the first philosopher who study Camp seriously, that you can borrow :D

Sejauh Mata Memandang is a prominent local brand that elevates traditional cloth-printing methods and appropriates traditional patterns into modern ready-to-wear garments and textiles. They also consistently showcased their new collection in beautiful, immersive public installations for free. After s bit of a letdown last year with an installation that's shockingly too similar to what COS (the more premium sister brand of H&M) has done (this is how Sejauh installation looks like https://www.instagram.com/p/BsXJlfBnNjc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link and this is how COS’ looks like https://www.designboom.com/art/cos-snarkitecture-milan-design-week-immersive-translucent-cave-04-15-2015/ lesson: NEVER COPY YOUR REFERENCES!), Sejauh returns with an important message through a beautiful eye-opening presentation: plastic are harmful to the ocean! Catch their exhibition at Senayan City, they run til June.

Speaking of installations, the past two years were crowded with 'installation-exhibitions' where the audience were asked to pay some money to access several installations that can be used as a backdrop for their selfies. It seems like these installation-exhibitions are lucrative since they keep opening up new ones! The last one, motomoto, engaged with pretty prominent young artists and designers to work on these aesthetically pleasing backdrops. I personally think these exhibitions diminish the value of real artworks and promotes narcissistic behavior, but that’s just me! What do you think?

Brand Creative Digest vol. 04