DIARY: Rant

Never have I seen anything as cold-hearted, ill-conceived and brutal as the Hong Kong Cable TV subscription ad, which appeared in the business section of the South China Morning Post on September 13, just two days after religious fanatics rammed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. It amazes me that at this very sad time, some companies see fit to profit at the expense of the suffering of others. Imagine the callousness of showing the two burning towers - despite knowing that thousands perished when both superstructures collapsed in on themselves - and a headline which read: "Cable News. Watch it as it happens!". It's appalling. The speed at which Cable TV's marketers managed to get this ad out into the public domain showed up two things about what the company staff probably thought about themselves: that they are marketing geniuses and that everyone else with half a brain would feel the same. Unfortunately, the following few days revealed that the industry actually has quite a sizeable number of people who think with half a brain or less. And they don't just live in Hong Kong. From Singapore, I received this email titled "Weekly Newsflash from Channel News Asia". The first paragraph went like this: "As America reeled under the terrorist attacks on Tuesday 11 Sep on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, some 800,000 people in Singapore tuned into Channel NewsAsia ... Compared to the week before, this is a three-fold increase of viewers aged 15 years and above." Did they honestly think advertisers were going to go ga-ga over such viewership levels? Whoever you are, and whatever you want to get off your chest, send your rants to rant@media.com.hk, and we'll print them anonymously.

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