"Avoid the Exhibition Grounds, the fortune teller warned me..."
(duped Czech consumer)
I think this song written for the ‘Czech Dream’ ad campaign sums it up well:
“What is happiness like?
What makes a dream full?
How can anything be bright when the day is so dull?
You see what you want.
No need to idealize.
Life lasts but a second
So want truth, not lies.
Try to see as a child.
Many things will seem wild.
The world’s yours so take it.
All you need is to want it.
(Horns, Strings & Harmony)
It will be a nice big bash
And if you got no cash
Get a loan and scream
I want to fulfill my dream!”
Get a loan and scream. And do we ever. I like that this film lets no one off the hook. Not the filmmakers , not the advertisers, and not the consumers. We are all in cahoots.
“I think people like to be persuaded. I mean, people need solid footing and ads provide that for them.” ( Martin Prikryl of BBDO Advertising)
I agree with the young VERY hip Mr. Prikryl that we do seek this solid footing. The ads, the longing they instill and the purchaces we then make do give us a quick fix . An aquired addiction. And like any addiction , by consuming endlessly we are consumed. The question is, through what channels can we truly find a solid footing? Perhaps by accepting the fact that there is no such thing. That the rug will constantly be pulled out from under us and that this is acceptable. We must all find our own way to peace and my guess is it ain't through a credit card.
June 14, 2009
Discussion of "Czech Dream" Has Begun!
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19 comments:
INteresting, the DVD cover calls this a comedy but I don't think it was. It actually was a pretty serious documentary , especially the look into the behind the scenes of advertising. WWW.NWIE.
Really? I thought it was hilarious.The scenes when everyone (not a big turnout in my opinion) shows up and starts reacting to the non-existent store and crossing through the field? How the hell did they think they were going to carry back their TVS?
I'll add my two cents here. Jimmy and Craft, I thought it was both funny AND a serious documentary. LEM.
I also caught a few of the films from the last discussion by Alan Clarke and am looking forward to watching them all. The discussion was FAH, I always love to read Oldman and am wondering where Cherry and Breather went? They added a lot and I hope they are still with us.
Lee, in your post you mention that it didn't appear to you to be a big turnout. It looked like a few hundred people at most which considering the level of advertising is close to nothing. I'm surprised that this fact isn't adressed in the film because ultimately the ad campaign was a near failure. Doesn't that change the whole point of the film? Anybody?
Fun film. I did find the last scene to be quite comedic. True, overall the campaign was a failure if judged by the low turnout on opening day.I enjoyed the dialogue with the Ad firm. The packaging they created for the fake product line was beautiful. I'd be tempted to buy their milk!!
The song was unbelievable. The power of music to manipulate is fascinating. The words were absurd! I wish the movie had included interviews with a variety of people who had come across the ad campaign not knowing it was a hoax and what their responses were to the song, the adverts etc. That is the point afterall, insn't it?
Hey Jimmy, agreed, it wasn't a comedy but I also found it to be pretty funny.
Craft, David and I asked the exact same question, "How the hell did they think they were going to carry back all their stuff?"
Steve, thanks for joining in. I don't know where Breather and Cherry are. Are you guys still out there???? We miss you!
NYAJ, great point you bring up. If so few people came out, didn't the campaign actually fail? And surely this should have been adressed in the film.
ChuckieD, we were quite taken by the packaging too. The people working at the Ad agency were a talented bunch.
Buffer Nutter, glad to hear from you again. And thrilled that you picked up on the absurdity of the song. Some interviews with the consumers (not the ones who showed up) would have added a whole new and important dimension to the film. When you think about it that is the whole point of the movie (the reaction of consumers to this particular ad campaign)and it really was not adressed adequately .(sp?)
First reactions, Czech Dreams pt. 1
Just watched Czech Dream. Came away with somewhat mixed feelings, not necessarily a bad reaction for a film of this kind. Considered postponing commentary till I'd had a chance to digest it more thoroughly, but finally decided "why bother!" All that thinking would just hurt my head, and besides, first impressions do have their own sort of validity. Anyway, here goes.... In readng over all the earlier posts one thing which I found immediately puzzling was the claim -- repeated by several writers -- that only a relatively small number of people -- a few hundred at best -- showed up for the grand opening of Czech Dream, thus proving the ad campaign a failure. To my eyes the crowd seemed far larger than that, and indeed, a quick internet search showed contemporary news reports numbering the crowd gathered by the 10AM opening at three thousand with four thousand eventually arriving that day before news of the hoax became widespread. Given that this opening did not take place on a weekend, during a holiday, near Christmas or the Czech shopping equivalent to the day after Thanksgiving, but mid morning on an ordinary weekday, a time when most Czechs -- like most of us -- are working, I believe this has to be judged a remarkably large gathering. This wasn't, after all, a concert or other event that would be over in two hours, but simply the first time a new store opened its doors, a store potential shoppers assumed would be open from then on all day every day. To my mind this proved the ingenious, at times brilliant, ad campaign a huge success. Where the comedy vs serious documentary issue is concerned, I have to agree with Craft, steve and Lee: why can't it be both? While I suspect the film would have been funnier in the original Czech, or at least with subtitles written by someone who actually spoke English -- nonetheless I found parts of Czech Dream hysterically funny, particularly the scenes with the ad and publicity people and the song/recording scene with the 50-schoolgirl choir. I also have a feeling this movie would have been both funnier and more serious were we not only Czech speakers, but Czechs. Beyond the language barrier we simply did not grow up standing in line for hours just to buy a couple pounds of bananas, nor can we really even imagine what that is like. We may not have always had WalMart, but we've had shopping malls for better than fifty years and before that Wards and Sears with its (formerly) ubiquitous Sears Catalogs for more than a century to feed our dreams. Now, of course, we have the internet which is even better/worse at stoking those fires of consumerist desire. Even more important, of course, is the politics that formed the backdrop to this situation. Since the war Czechs had lived under a monopolistic dictatorship that denounced capitalism all the while making Czech Dream promises it could not keep any more than Filip and Vit. Barely a decade removed from the so-called Velvet Revolution is it any wonder the Czech people were eager to embrace those things most of their neighbors in Europe had long taken for granted? And then too, there is the issue of the EU vote which was looming at the time of filming. While mentioned frequently in Czech Dreams I think it may be a measure of our difficulty in fully appreciating this film that no one here has so far brought it up. Here we had a hugely expensive government ad campaign fundamentally very similar to Remunda and Klusak's, if not in approach then certainly in intent, that like our film makers' efforts was also hugely successful. In fact, the Czech nation's entrance into the EU took place less than a month prior to the actual release of our movie. No wonder the parallel was noted by so many of those disappointed shoppers in Czech Dreams! Clearly they recognized the rhetoric of the government's ad campaign for what it was: empty Czech dreams.
First reactions, Czech Dreams pt. 2
Oh, did I like the film? Yes, definitely, though not necessarily comfortably. After all, who doesn't have a problem with our consumerist culture? And yet which of us isn't on some level a card carrying member of that culture? In the scene where the teenage girl who'd been whining about being forced to go along on a family nature walk compares that to a cloudy day with the subsequent trip to the hypermarket being equivalent to the sun coming out I wanted to slap that little bitch upside the head! Well, really, it was her parents I wanted to knock some sense into, but are they any different than most of the people I know here in Wisconsin, parents old enough to know better who put up with their grade school childrens' whining about the brand names of their clothes and complaints about the number of minutes on their mobile plans or restrictions on their texting? I mean, do 10-year olds really need designer label apparel, much less cell phones? Actually I found many of the interviews with the "typical" hypermarket shoppers to be quite poignant. It was also here that most of the really squeamish moments occurred, where the no-it-all college student attitudes of the film makers was most apparent. Still, in the end -- and it really is the end when it all comes together with the candid and amazingly divergent comments of the would be shoppers and Remunda and Klusak's attempts at self-justification -- no one is really let off the hook, and that may be the film's saving grace. One last thought. Did anyone else find themselves imagining what would have happened had this been tried in the good ole USA, the press, the politico's rants and the lawsuits lawsuits lawsuits!!
Oldman makes some good points . The theme of the campaign parallelling what was happening with the EU was something I also picked up on and I felt it was a very deliberate choice on the part of the young filmmakers to confront that subject.
As to the size of the crowd, from only watching the film with no other information I would have guessed it to be about 500. Of course other people probably showed up throughout the day. I found this article that I thought might be of interest:
"Stunt fools hypermarket shoppers
Phony ad campaign for grand opening a film student project
By Petra Pasternak
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
(June 19, 2003)
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
(June 19, 2003)
A TV for 500 Kc ($19). Mineral water for 2.60 Kc. Sounds too good to be true? More than 1,000 people didn't think so. Lured by a massive ad campaign promising a surprise for everyone, they showed up with shopping bags at the grand opening of a new hypermarket, Cesky Sen ("Czech Dream").
It was a sunny Saturday, and the eager shoppers flooded the grassy plain in Letnany, making their way at a gallop toward the store. Except that there was no store. Instead, the shoppers came upon an 8-meter-high (26-foot) by 80-meter-wide scaffolding covered by a banner bearing the logo of the nonexistent hypermarket. The fabric billowed slightly in the wind.
When informed that there was no real hypermarket as promised in the ads, some people laughed; others shook their fists.
And that was the point: How would people react in the moment that their expectations, built up by advertising, collided with reality?
To explore the power of advertising, Film Academy (FAMU) students Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak set out to build the largest spoof ad campaign the country has ever seen. Ad spots were broadcast on Czech Television (CT) and on the radio for Cesky Sen, and the public transportation system displayed posters. Flyers were distributed to unsuspecting passersby.
The campaign is one part of a larger project. Klusak and Remunda are working on their senior thesis, a documentary film called Cesky Sen, starring duped shoppers, real advertisers, journalists and themselves. "There is a lack of media education here," Remunda said. "People don't verify information."
The Culture Ministry's board for the support and development of Czech cinematography approved a 1 million Kc ($38,500) loan for the project in May 2001. The money, said spokesman Jan Bernard, didn't come from taxes but from revenue from the sale of broadcast rights of older Czech films. "Scientific studies of media and advertising effects also enjoy public funding support," Bernard said. "This is support for an artistic inquiry."
FAMU, as co-producers, supported the project with 938,000 Kc in technology and materials. Czech Television, also a co-producer, contributed less than 500,000 Kc, according to CT's documentary and publicity center chief producer Damian Kausitz.
The film students were inspired by a 2002 Incoma Research hypermarket study that reported 30 percent of Czechs shop mainly at hypermarkets, Remunda said. "This isn't a joke," said the 30-year-old. "We're taking this very seriously."
Part 2 of the article (Note the indented separated paragraph regarding the turnout issue that everyone here has been discussing.)
:
The film students even took on the real-life roles of businessmen. Remunda and Klusak negotiated with ad agency Mark/BBDO and with PR agency Protocol Services for advertising and publicity. With the agencies' help, previously nonexistent products came to life, even if only in the form of packaging, sporting the brand name "Cesky Sen." The products included cameras, banana nectar and light and dark beer. The duo consulted attorneys and mob-mentality experts. "If there is a lawsuit, we will be sued," Remunda said, "not someone else. We take full responsibility."
Pavel Brabec, president of the Association of Ad Agencies, estimated the value of the two-week campaign to be somewhere around 10 million Kc. Though difficult to measure, the Czech Republic boasts a fairly sophisticated 50 billion to 80 billion Kc advertising industry. This figure includes unmeasurable below-the-line (BTL) advertising, such as offers of free samples, packaging and direct-marketing communications as opposed to the measurable radio, television, movie theater and billboard ads. Above-the-line communications still make up the vast majority of ads in the country, unlike in the United States, where 60 percent of money flows into BTL activities.
As far as advertising goes, Cesky Sen wasn't a very successful campaign, according to Brabec. If the effect of the fairly large campaign is measured by how many turned up at the opening of the "hypermarket," 1,000 people isn't a lot, he said.
The advertising sector, though slowing down, is a healthy business in the Czech Republic. Powered mainly by mobile-network providers such as T-Mobile and Eurotel, it's been keeping up with, and in some cases surpassing, output in Western Europe, where advertising is in a slump. Despite a decline in consumer spending and weak economic growth, 15.7 billion Kc flowed into media advertising last year, for a 4.2 percent increase over 2001. Television spots attracted more than half this amount. Second to TV was print advertising. ARBOmedia predicts growth in 2003 to further slow to 3.9 percent, except for television spending, which should grow 5.7 percent. Commercial television can be credited for being the fuel behind this trend. The Internet is proving a powerful new draw, expected to attract some 230 million Kc in 2003. The next new hypermarket campaign will be more direct and transparent, said Tereza Urbankova, marketing director at the Flora Plaza shopping mall. "And there will be actual construction," she added, "so I don't believe future hypermarket campaigns will be compromised by Cesky Sen."
The irony of the phantom store's grand-opening day permeated a June 6 Cesky Sen press conference. A theme song, written by actor Tomas Hanak and ad-jingle writer Hynek Schneider, was played, while a staff member put dream products, one by one, out of sight into a covered shopping cart. Like a magic trick, the stack of goods subsequently disappeared. Reporters and other members of the media found themselves a live part of the experiment.
Cesky Sen, the film, is expected to address the questions Remunda and Klusak raised. It is due in movie theaters in February 2004.
Petra Pasternak can be reached at ppasternak@praguepost.com
©Czech Dream 2005 | mail@czech-dream.com | webdesign Czech television
Hi Oldman! Thanks for coming through with such a great analysis ( as we have all come to expect and appreciate!) of Czech Dream. I'm really pleased that it did bring up a lot of mixed emotions and interpretations. It is always a gamble for me when I choose a film, trying to figure out if anyone else out there will give a hoot. But so far so good and it is so rewarding that most of the choices have sparked interest in other movie lovers.
JacKR, I think we should appoint you as our official film 'researcher'. You always come up with unique articles and information that we otherwise would not be privy to. Thanks!
JackR, thanks for the great article. As to precisely how many actually showed up for the Czech Dream grand opening initially, or later in the day, I think the one thing we can agree on is we'll never know for sure. Based on the film footage "a few hundred at best" seemed -- and still seems -- too low to me which is why I did a (very) quick search on the topic. On the other hand, the figure of several thousand I found could well have been inflated for one reason or another. And as to the figure of 1,000 quoted in the article JackR posted, well let's face it, Pavel Brabec who supplied this number had, as president of the Association of Ad Agencies, a pretty obvious vested interest in portraying this particular campaign as atypical and a failure. Bottom line is, it really doesn't matter that much. While I got a kick out of the clever negative campaign: Don't Spend, Don't Rush etc., ultimately this had as much to do with the agency's CYOA approach to this project as anything, and clearly a more straightforward, less mysterious campaign would undoubtedly have lured more shoppers. The point is, however, that no matter what is said in JackR's article, advertising per se was not really the primary focus of this film Remember, the author of the article had never seen the movie; it hadn't even been completed or released at that point. While this was indeed what the article was about, and while the smarmy ad folk certainly supplied much of the comedy of the film, and were unquestionably one of Czech Dream's targets, issues of Globalism, Consumerism and Capitalism were, I felt, the larger themes being addressed, as well as being topics of more immediate import within the filmmakers' own country. While the selling of their scam certainly provided some of Czech Dream's most entertaining moments, if I were looking for a film about advertising I'd turn to the west which has had a far longer history of living with the uses and abuses of this industry. A few off the top of my head? Putney Swope, It Should Happen To You, Crazy People, How to Get Ahead in Advertising , Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Charlie Chaplin's immortal A King in New York, and on and on.
I loved this! Two Czech film students, using government money, proved some things that we in the west have known for years:
1.People will buy a turd covered with yellow foil if you advertise it correctly.
2.Advertising agencies, like prostitutes and lawyers, will say or do anything (within their field) if they are paid enough. They will “merely follow orders,” if you catch my drift.
3.People turn off their BS detector if you offer them a cheap digital camera or have kids sing a song about dreams.
It was good to see that there are "Ugly Czechs" as well as "Ugly Americans." The teenager that so enraged oldman is a carbon copy of American teenagers.
The woman who worked for the advertising research company proved that people are the same all over: “There are ads we wouldn’t do if we had the power, as we don’t believe in them.” A classic hypocrite: throw out a line of baloney, and then shut things down when your hypocrisy is displayed before the camera.
Thanks oldman for opening my eyes to the larger issues brought up by this film. I don’t know about the issues surrounding the Czech Republic’s entrance into the EU. I wonder at what point the filmmakers decided to add this angle into the film.
Welcome back Breather...thought we lost you!
Hey. This discussion is FAH.
Almost better than the movie. Which I did like a lot. One of my favorite parts was watching the 'researcher' that was referred to by breather squirm as she tried to rationalize her belief system . If she had just said "yeah, we do this, and I'm fine with it, it's our business pure and simple".
"Ugly Czechs" , funny I thought about that too. How often we are referred to as "Ugly Americans" as if we are any different. I suppose maybe we once were but our overeating consumeristic attitudes have spread their seed and now we are just "Ugly Humans" for the most part.
Of course there are exceptions still but my bet would be that the entire planet would take up the seed and bloom with cholesterol and Ad inserts given half a chance!
As to all our debating whether the campaign was a success or a failure, I agreee with oldman that this is not the main point of the movie.
Though I can't actually say for myself WHAT the main point is. My best guess is that there is no one theme in particular the film grad guys were trying to make. Most likely:
We need a project for graduation. I have an idea,
Let's see what would happen if we got funding to create a kick-ass ad campaign based on a fictitious product/store whatever.
And so it began....
(STill wondering about carrying those TVS.)
H[ EVERYONE.
GREAT DISCUSSION .
NOT SURE THOUGH THAT THE FILM WARRANTS
SUCH A DISCUSSION.
I DID ENJOY IT,BUT SAW IT AS JUST A GREAT IDEA BY\2 YOUNG FILMMAKERS
WITH YOU ON THAT ONE CRAFT.
DID GET A KICK OUT OF THE ADVERTISING AGENCY SAYING
THEY DO NOT LIE.
AS FAR AS THOSE TVS I IMAGINE THEY EXPECTED TO HAVE SHOPPIN CARTS
TO CARRY THEM BACK.
ALSO WISH THE BOYS HAD THOUGHT OF GOLF CARTS OR
SOMETHING FOR THE ELDERLY AND INFIRM.
AS TO WHY PEOPLE WOULD EVEN SHOW UP,I HAVE BEEN TO
PRAGUE (WHICH IS EXTRORDINARILLY BEAUTIFUL) AND TRUST
ME,OUTSIDE OF THE CITY THERE REALLY ISNT ANYTHING ELSE TO DO.
I DID NOT SEE THE PEOPLE AS "UGLY".
MY REACTION WAS THAT THEIR REACTION WAS PRETTY COOL.
TO OLDMANS QUESTION ABOUT HOW AMERICANS WOULD HAVE
REACTED------I WOULD SAY WE PROBABLY WOULD HAVE KILLED THEM ON SITE.
ANYWAY ,EVERY HAVE A GREAT SUMMER(?)
SILVER
P.S. CATCH RACHEL GETTING MARRIED.
A SURPRISINGLY GOOD MOVIE ABOUT FAMILY
Silver, I'm on your side with this one. Why wouldn't people show up to something local for the entertainment value. Doesn't mean they were all duped. If there was a clam bake and there wasn't much else happening that day why not head over?
Overall, the film was really entertaining and funny and I'm glad they made it.
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