During my boyhood, after the jolly free-spending oil boom days were over, the recession hit sweet T and T, “Boop!” like a big stone hit us on the chest. How life had changed for us. People left, right and centre were being sent home. Flying to Miami for the weekend just to shop was now a thing of the past. It was a rough time for the country, yet I saw it as a great time as this was when the government of the day launched the “Buy Local” campaign, urging the populace to look within itself for material needed for nutrition, construction and art. From a different point of view, this was a wonderful time, as once a people tap into their intrinsic culture, a greater sense of identity is achieved and indeed, there was an intangible “Trinidadianess” that existed then. In this regard, I feel that creative T and T could do with a recession right now so that we could “Think Local.”
Seriously. What is our problem? Why do we always try to follow the foreign people when we do anything, especially in the “artistic” area. For his video Jumbie, Machel Montano chose to copy Michael Jackson’s Thriller when there are so many jumbies to tap on in the Caribbean. Bmobile, Digicel, Synergy and Gayelle Television, like a bunch of crab in bucket, presented to the local television viewing public an unfortunate concoction of reality shows and talent competitions photo copied from Up North which left many of us reaching for the barf bag. Why can’t the money spent on making these replications instead be paid to local thinkers to conceptualise more relevant local content? The popular local theatre companies stage the sex farces which are purchased from a foreign catalogue of plays. With a sprinkling of local parlance and a touch of bacchanal the “localised” shows are presented. You would swear that we do not have any local writers who could write about sex. The Soca…is that still Soca? What about that radio ad when we staged the FIFA Girls Under 19 World Cup finals. They chose a foreign based player whose accent was foreign based too. And then there is advertising where clients and the “creative” people in the field continually look at what is being done on cable and emulate that. This is all such a sad tapestry. I believe that if we believe in digging deep into our culture, we would create work beyond belief.
I remember a story I heard at an advertising seminar some years ago. It was about a local restaurant in Japan, or one of those countries in the east, which was threatened when a big named American chain opened in the territory. Business went down dramatically as customers migrated toward the Western taste. The owners contemplated two options – change their menu to mirror that of the Americans and fight them head on or simply throw in the towel. Fortunately, someone had an epiphany. It was suggested that they research their peoples’ metaphysics – their folk, and use that as the theme for the restaurant. This was done and reverse migration happened. In fact, they were doing much better business than before. The reason? Like a moth to the flame, people cannot resist what is inherent, once it is presented at a quality standard.
It is a common statement from the general public that local advertising (on TV in particular) sucks. I believe that if clients and people of the advertising agencies stop fashioning creative work from what is seen on cable and we instead focus on our rhythms, our style, our psyche, and presenting the finished material at an international standard, then we will bombard the media with work that reflects us, is magnetic and memorable. One insurance company got it right some time ago. Who could forget after all these years, that woman in the kitchen chatting on the phone like any one of us, saying, “Tatil. Where people are people.”
