Maverick Indonesia

KPI Award: Rewards for Best TV Programs

The Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) announced the winners of the first KPI Award last Tuesday (19/03). The 2007 KPI Award was established to reward TV stations and producers that have provided the best programs for the public. The Award consists of five categories, namely children’s program, documentary, soap opera (sinetron), investigative news and talk show.

Hopefully, the award will spur our TV stations to begin competing to provide the public with more educative and positive entertainment, rather than a mere ratings fight against each other.

As far as I’m concerned, ratings had resulted in programs that focus on criminality, mysticism and pornography for the public. Yes, the public enjoy such programs, but are these kinds of programs in the public’s best interests?

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Andy F. Noya Says Goodbye to the Editor-in-Chief Position

Andy F. Noya is confirmed to leave the Editor-in-Chief position at Metro TV starting May 1st, 2008. However, he is still going to host the highly acclaimed “Kick Andy” talk show and maintain his role as the Corporate Advisor of Media Group.

Bang Andy joined Metro TV in early 2006, replacing Don Bosco Selamun who is now a Commissioner of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI).

Who’s going to lead the wind of change? Well, we also heard rumors that Elman Saragih, another member of the Media Group editorial board, has replaced Bang Andy’s position. Can anybody confirm this?

Click of the Week #35: Captured of Eyes

“Captured of Eyes” is the name of the blog. It is hard for me to digest what these three words really mean as they are not grammatically correct and it will make you ponder on what it is supposed to mean. Perhaps what it tries to say is what the eyes capture.

Despite of the mystery of the name, I think it deserves to be featured as Maverick Click of the Week, because it is probably the first photoblog from a journalist that I come across. It belongs to Wienda Parwitasari a photojournalist from Jurnal Nasional, a paper that has been winning a lot of awards at the AAS Awards.

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Happy New Year 2008!

New Year is a harmless annual event.
Of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks,
and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. (Mark Twain)

Nonetheless, Maverick wishes you Happy New Year 2008!

Ps: Send us your New Year’s resolutions (if you have any) to maverick@maverick.co.id. We’ll keep them for you and we’ll send them back by the end of 2008 just for you to look back before you get drunk in welcoming another year to come.

Closed: National Condom Week 2007

 

The National Condom Week 2007 that closed last week was interesting in that it brought strong views on condom use to the fore.

On one side were the supporters who take the stand that whether you promote condom use or not, people will still bonk. So it would be more efficient to educate bonkers on how to have safe sex through condoms rather than to try to stop people from bonking. It is also important to note that the supporters do not encourage indiscriminate sex and promiscuity. The central message of National Condom Week is that the best prevention for HIV/AIDS is still abstinence and being monogamous.

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National Condom Week 2007

First, some facts:

There are 10,384 people who are registered as living with HIV/AIDS. As many as 2,287 of fellow living with HIV/AIDS have died. And this is only the tip of the iceberg as they are reported cases. The number of unreported people living with HIV/AIDS is estimated to be between 176,000-247,000 people. Some are married, some are planning to get married. - Ministry of Health, Republic of Indonesia

Housewives and babies are living with HIV/AIDS - Dr. Nafsiah Mboi, Secretary of National AIDS Commission (KPA)

Illegal abortion has reached 3 million per year - Dr. Sugiri MPH, Head of National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN).

Bearing these facts in mind, the KPA and BKKBN will hold a National Condom Week 2007 (siaran-pers-pekan-kondom-nasional-2007.pdf) from 1-8 December 2007. Why condom? Well, there are three ways to prevent getting sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS: (A) Abstinence, (B) Be Faithful and (C) Use a Condom. Since promoting Abstinence and Faithfulness is not very sexy, the Condoms have the vote.

Coordinated by DKT Indonesia, a non-profit organization that focuses in social marketing for HIV/AIDS prevention and family planning, National Condom Week aims to reduce any stigma against condom use and provide better understanding that condom can save lives. Also to reduce the misperception that condom use encourages free, promiscuous sex.

For the week, DKT Indonesia will coordinate activities such as condom giveaways along with educational materials, trainings, demonstrations on condom use, musical concert, talk show, and appreciations to those who have been showing commitments to HIV/AIDS in Indonesia. Another agenda would be writing and photo competitions (penghargaan-karya-tulis-dan-foto.pdf) for journalists, photojournalists, and BLOGGERS with the topic “Condom Saves Lives” starting 12 Nov to 5 Dec 2007.

(Disclosure: Maverick works with DKT to help promote National Condom Week 2007).

Happy Ketupat Holiday

It has become a tradition at Maverick to send out a simple e-greeting card each Lebaran with a quiz that involves people identifying hidden objects. These keeps our clients, supplier and partners occupied.

This year we sent out a ketupatgreeting twith smaller ketupat hidden within images of client’s products. Although it looks like there are only four ketupat, as most of you guessed, there are actually five. Why five? Because that is the number of years that maverick has been around.

The winners of this “contest” were the first five recipients of the e-card who got back to us earliest. They are:

1. Mukti Argo Pambudi - Unilever
2. Agus Nugraha - Unilever
3. Evi Nurulita - Spice
4. A. Rovi Setiawan - Pas FM
5. Nandari - Bobo

Congratulations to the five winners. Each of the them are entitled to one beautiful parcel from Maverick. Welcome back to Jakarta and the never ending traffic jams.

Invasion of PR students

We at the Orange House, as we fondly refer to our office, aren’t used to many visitors at one time so it was a bit of a departure from business as usual when 36 Public Relations students from the Diploma Program, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gajah Mada University (UGM) visited us last Tuesday.

It was not the first student visit to Maverick but we were no less enthusiastic because we welcome any opportunity to help people understand PR and sharing our experiences with younger minds. Who knows, we may influence them to make a career decision that could affect the rest of their lives.

The visit started off with Maverick partner Lita Soenardi highlighting Maverick internship opportunities for students. She spoke of the challenges interns would face working in a professional services firm and also the opportunities they would have in learning new things. She also explained to them the rigorous selection process of selecting interns. The students, all coming up to their third year of study that requires them to seek internships in companies, were all ears for this section.

Anyway, next to speak was Associate Hanny who talked about the similarities and differences between PR consultancies and In-house PR. Hanny also explained the advantages and disadvantages of being a practitioner in the two areas. Hanny’s presentation was concluded with what she does best: Marketing PR.

Another associate, Indri, then shared with them her experiences in Corporate Communications as well as Corporate Social Responsibility/Leadership. The session was rounded off by Riri, who’s in charge of our media monitoring department and online media monitoring and PR measurement service called Gauge, provided her insights on the importance of media tracking activities in a PR consultancy.

During the Q & A session, the UGM students seemingly could not get enough answers and kept peppering the Maverick speakers with an endless list of questions. They were most interested in Crisis Management that we had accidentally left out in our talks and peppered all the speakers with a stream of questions, forcing Hanny, Indri and Riri to recount our experiences with crisis-situations for clients, with their names left out when appropriate.

Eventually, the discussion ended up with Mavericks sharing tips on how to get about and around the profession. The students were most curious about day-to-day activities and wanted to know how the theories they had read about in their text books stacked up against reality.

Very interesting questions, especially when most PR text books are written by Westerners about Western situations that have very little to do with reality in Indonesia.