At the moment, my friend J is one of the 500,000 or so people in the air. He’s probably just passing over the North Pole right now.

As circumstance would have it, I landed at Toronto Pearson this morning and was able to catch J before he took off for a six-month stay in Shanghai. We were sitting in front of this irritating window and he cleverly says: “It’s like Kanye Vision!”

I can’t think of a single international airport I’ve been to that doesn’t have HSBC ads plastered everywhere… I LOVE them. A few months ago I wrote about the current ads that feature stunning statistics like the one at the beginning of this post. (For more stats like this, click the link.)

“Communication, in the deeper sense of establishing ways to share one’s hours meaningfully with others, is sooner a matter of faith and risk than of technique and method ” What John Durham Peters is trying to get at (in my perceived opinion) is that in our attempts to communicate, all we have is ‘a matter of faith and risk’- to trust unknowingly that our meaning is acknowledged as we meant it to be, while in reality, our message is being received in a multitude of different ways by different people.  William James, once wrote that there is “one great splitting of the whole universe into two halves made by each of us… ‘me’ and ‘not me,’” we all hold views that are exclusively our own.

HSBC’s last airport campaign played around with varying viewpoints.  “As a brand, we embrace unique perspectives, seeking individual points of view as a positive force for change. ” (HSBC’s Your Point of View, 2009) For a couple years, there were many of these print ads lining the gangways from Auckland to Zurich. Here are some favourites:

Similarly, in 2009, HSBC also did a live version of this campaign from their 5th Avenue location in New York. Well worth a watch:

HSBC “Your Point of View” Live Theatre Windows Campaign:

As for the music today friends, I’m kind of phoning it in. I’ve been traveling and all the Kanye West songs that I know, are the Kanye West songs that you know. But here, I offer a fav; this one always renewed my vigour at work when it came on the radio at 4am.

“Otis” by Kanye West and Jay-Z