2007 is the Year of the Pig
Although the Chinese calendar doesn’t mesh perfectly with ours, 2007 is the Year of the Pig. Interestingly, there is an extreme difference in the semiotic connotation of the pig from the North American culture to the Chinese. To us, “being a pig” or “acting like a pig” might call to mind gluttony or lasciviousness. Yet in the Chinese Zodiac, the pig (or, perhaps more aptly, the boar) is celebrated for its honesty, its straightforwardness, and its congeniality. According to Wikipedia, people born in a Year of the Pig are said to be tolerant and always willing to allow others their freedom of expression.
Well, if you’ve been following this blog and if you know anything about iPerceptions, you know that liberating (or freeing) the voice of the customer is what we are all about.
In that vein, I will relate a quick anecdote. In recent years, avid sports fans such as myself (and mostly anyone else with a television) who reside in Canada have been deprived of the chance to watch the new commercials that run during the Super Bowl because of Canada’s elaborate simultaneous substitution rules, which essentially allows a Canadian broadcaster to hijack a US feed and protect our innocent Canadian eyes from American marketing. Despite noisy protests from just about everybody (imagine! people begging to watch commercials), this situation has persisted unchecked for as long as I can remember. What’s more, the Canadian network actually begins the process of “simsub” at the outset of the NFL playoffs, so by the time Super Sunday comes around, the viewer has seen the same tired, uninspired ads about 10,000 times.
Well, your faithful blogger was watching the NFL playoffs this past weekend and, sure enough, right about kickoff time, the satellite feed jumped and the logo of the Canadian network appeared prominently in the bottom right-hand portion of the screen. The hijacking had occurred! Let the lame ads begin. Inured to the disappointment by years of playoff watching, I just grumbled and rolled my eyes. But several seconds later, the channel feed jumped again, the network’s logo was gone, and the original transmission was restored! It was almost as if some great censor in the sky had heard the pleas of tens of thousands of Canadian NFL fans and had taken pity on us by allowing us to watch the unadulterated, non “simsub,” broadcast. Now, I doubt if my luck will run long enough to allow me to watch the American feed on Super Sunday, but for this one afternoon, I had freedom, glorious freedom, to watch the ads I wanted to watch. I felt that in some high, remote location, way above the crowd, my voice had been heard.
