As Miss Teen South Carolina reminded us so memorably in 2007, "Some people in our nation don't have maps. . . ." So true. But you can't blame the National Geographic Society. For more than a century, the House That Grosvenor Built has been one of the world's most ambitious educational and scientific organizations. These are the people who brought us unforgettable documentary films about Jacques Cousteau and Robert Ballard, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. The society's flagship publication, National Geographic magazine, remains the platinum standard of glossy-book journalism: lucidly written, beautifully photographed and humanely informed, a study in elegance.
It feels almost sacrilegious to think of National Geographic as something so pecuniary as a brand, yet it certainly is. And to prove it, National Geographic Channel this month unveiled a slick but empty global branding spot that plays like one of those Scientology ads with a script by Rod McKuen. The commercial also debuts the NGC's new, grammatically challenged tagline: "Live Curious."
OK, I'm curious. What is this spot about? The piece consists of a series of quick-cut portraits: A Chinese man practices tai chi; a Jamaican child plays in a junked pickup truck; a Japanese man with yakuza tattoos stares enigmatically into the camera; an Australian man free dives with a whale shark, etc. Over a soft, hammer-style guitar riff, the voice-over is a series of linked couplets, "If you are, you breathe, if you breathe, you talk, if you talk, you ask, if you think, you search, if you search, you experience. . . ." Ay-yi-yi. It's a veritable flea circus of profundity.
The spot -- produced by Mercurio Cinematografica and directed by South African Bryan Little -- sports some powerful visuals, deploying all the tricks of arty videography: high-def slow-mo, vignetting, projector-like flickering, whisper-thin fields of focus. And the sheer diversity of ethnicity on display reinforces a worthy theme: Common humanity transcends skin color. We are all strange, lovely inhabitants of someplace called Earth.
To decode the spot it helps to know that NGC is seen in 166 countries, and this effort heralds the network's big push to create more global programming, and that means de-emphasizing NGC's American provenance. Perhaps they should consider lowercasing the "N" in National.
