Best Buy broadens the definition of ‘teacher’ for back-to-school

Best Buy broadens the definition of ‘teacher’ for back-to-school

Best Buy broadens the definition of ‘teacher’ for back-to-school To show the role its tech plays in enriching peoples' lives, the retailer shows how everyone from parents to online content creators help people learn.

The past year was one of adaptation as the pandemic changed everything – including how people learn and what they are learning about.

Best Buy has tapped into that reality with its new campaign for the back-to-school season: a celebration of the many different kinds of teachers in life, whether it’s ones in the classroom, parents who unexpectedly found themselves thrust into the role during the pandemic or those who teach people about passions like music and fitness. It shows the ways they have adapted to meet the challenges of educating during the pandemic, largely using the kinds of technology Best Buy has in store.

The campaign is led by a spot titled “What will tech help us learn this year?” and it builds upon the key pillars that Best Buy has used to set the tone for its brand – namely, that it wants to come across as knowledgeable, inspiring and fun.

“Each of those sentiments need to live in conjunction with the others,” notes James Pelletier, director of marketing for Best Buy.

While developing the spot, dialing in the inspirational and knowledgeable tones was fairly simple. But Best Buy and creative agency Union had to work to incorporate fun in a way that was sensitive to the challenges of the pandemic.

“We wanted to make sure that a fun element was there and it wasn’t a spot that just felt like, ‘Our lives have been so hard.’ We wanted it to have a sense of positivity,” Pelletier explains. “We wanted a nod to the challenges of the year and the hard work that teachers and parents had to do to adapt, but we wanted to keep the tone up.”

Last year, Best Buy’s back-to-school campaign broadened the retailer’s focus to also include people pursuing hobbies or careers they’ve begun during the pandemic, with an assortment-first approach that showed the retailer has the technology people need to be successful in their endeavours. Earlier this year, it began combining that approach with the staff expertise it has previously been well known for, showing how – even when they can’t interact in-store – Best Buy’s “blue shirts” can help people find the technology to pursue their passions, whether it’s setting up a new home theatre or becoming an online content creator.

With so many people pursuing passions like fitness, cooking, beauty and more by passing their expertise on to others, broadening the scope of what makes a “teacher” gives Best Buy another place to show its role in enriching peoples’ lives, Pelletier says.

“This became even more relevant during the pandemic, and we believe technology will continue to play the role as we come out of the pandemic,” he adds.

The campaign is airing until Sept. 12 on TV and online. Media planning and buying was handled by Media Experts and Best Buy Canada’s internal digital team.

Interview: Stemming the rise of fascism

Interview: Stemming the rise of fascism

Former broadcaster Paul Mason on writing at 4am, reading Carlo Rovelli and the danger posed by the new wave of fascism that’s on the rise across the world

By Killian Fox / The Guardian

Paul Mason was born in Lancashire in 1960, the son of a headmistress and a lorry driver. He started his career as a music teacher before becoming a journalist in the early 90s. He joined BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ as a business editor in 2001 and he later worked for Channel 4 News, jobs that took him to China, Gaza and across Bolivia. In 2016, Mason quit broadcasting to pursue writing full time. His latest book, ‘How to Stop Fascism’, draws from his own anti-fascist activism in the 1970s and 80s and explores how a new wave of fascism in the 21st century can be prevented from rising.

Killian Fox: What prompted you to write the book at this particular moment?

Paul Mason: In September 2019, I was on a peaceful pro-remain rally in Whitehall that got surrounded by quite violent Brexit supporters, who turned out to be Tommy Robinson fans. They were shouting: “Paul Mason, you’re a Marxist… you’re a traitor to our country.” Ten years ago, such people would have been talking about migrants taking our jobs, and now they’re worried about Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. I realized something had changed: rightwing populism has been given intellectual coherence by the thought architecture of fascism. As someone who’s been involved in anti-fascism on and off for four decades, it made me think, I need to go back and relearn what fascism is.

How to Stop Fascism, by Paul Mason

KF: Do you have a concise definition?

PM: We need to be careful, because definitions are not explanations. And when you’re facing a phenomenon like the far right, that mutates quickly, definitions aren’t that useful. But for me, a definitive statement would be that fascism is the mobilization of people’s fear of freedom after they’ve seen a glimpse of freedom — of the possibility that technological modernity and education and universal rights could actually free us. They’re not just afraid of other people becoming free. Deep down, they fear their own freedom, too.

KF: Looking around the world, do you see fascism still as a sort of closet phenomenon, an incipient threat? Or has it realized itself anywhere?

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in May 2015, just after winning the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat in the British parliament. Author Paul Mason says modern fascism’s “interests are being represented in government by rightwing populists and authoritarians such as Duterte, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro and, I’m sorry to say, Johnson.” Photo: AP

PM: There is no fascist state in the world. But modern fascism doesn’t want that, it’s happy for now. Its interests are being represented in government by rightwing populists and authoritarians such as Duterte, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro and, I’m sorry to say, Johnson. Fascists are quite happy to see these leaders scour the insides of democracy and push narratives that undermine truth, the authority of judges, of academic institutions, because it’s in that space that the fascists do what they do, which is to prepare.

KF: Who do you mean, exactly, when you talk about modern fascism?

PM: I’m talking about fascist or far-right groups such as the Proud Boys in America and the online networks of white supremacists. In the UK, the far-right groups are small but their online influence is large. Who is the proxy for them? Well, they had the Brexit party, they had Ukip, and now they’ve got parts of the Tory party. Rightwing populism is no longer functioning as a kind of firewall that protects us from fascism. It’s functioning as an accelerator.

Demonstrators on Jan. 6 carry a cross to the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Photo: Bloomberg

KF: Is there clear evidence that these groups are on the rise?

PM: There’s no better evidence than the fact that they managed to storm the legislature of the oldest democracy in the world. The evidence in Germany is the double-digit growth for the Alternative fur Deutschland, and in Spain the 3 million votes for the Vox party. We can’t obsess about membership figures because, in a networked society, membership figures aren’t the issue. It’s who’s retweeting, who’s posting 10 times a day on a secret Facebook group, and it’s a lot more than a few thousand people.

KF: Do you feel we are underestimating the fascist threat?

PM: Pentti Linkola, the late Finnish ecofascist, basically said the Earth can sustainably support about half a billion people, and the other six and a half billion ought not to exist. When it comes to choosing who to cull, the implication for modern ecofascism is: those whose future economic development is detrimental to the Earth — in other words, the peoples of the global south. Linkola said this has to happen, if necessary, through war and genocide. Hitler thought in millions. Modern fascism is thinking in billions. And if you believe there’s even a 5 percent chance that these guys will one day find their path to power, we should be doing far more to debunk and pre-bunk their ideas.

KF: What else should we be doing to stop fascism?

PM: Hannah Arendt described fascism as the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob, and the only thing that ever defeated that was the temporary alliance of the center and the left — and that’s what we need. We need a better institutional response, meaning anti-fascist laws of the kind that Germany has, including official state surveillance of non-violent groups that are headed towards fascism. But deeper than all of that, we need to create and hold on to an anti-fascist ethos. There is now an overt and legitimized hostility to anti-fascism, because Trump has redefined what it is, by stirring up fear of antifa.

KF: You quit broadcasting in early 2016, just before Brexit, Trump and all that followed. Do you regret missing the opportunity to cover those things as a news journalist?

PM: No, I quit in order to be able to have an opinion for them. I found that the truth I was able to tell in a documentary produced outside Channel 4 was closer to the truth than the truth I was telling for Channel 4. Not because Channel 4 News is in any way bad. It’s probably the greatest place I’ve ever worked. But the constraints of public service broadcasting, I think, were getting in the way of the truth. For them the first thing is impartiality.

KF: Which British politicians do you rate?

PM: Above all Clive Lewis, who understands the need for a central-left alliance, and for it to be based on an ethical anti-fascism. I think Caroline Lucas also gets it, and so does Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne mayor. Nadia Whittome is a young MP who speaks for her generation. But that’s about it really.

KF: What books are on your bedside table?

PM: I’m not a huge reader of modern fiction, though I did enjoy Arkady by Patrick Langley. I’m reading a lot about thermodynamics at the moment and I’ve got a textbook by the Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine, and the lovely book Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli. I am a huge fan of Thomas Pynchon, I reread his big books every year. I am also a huge fan of Virginia Woolf — both her fiction and nonfiction.

KF: Which nonfiction writers working today do you particularly admire?

PM: Well, Rovelli is one. Adam Tooze is another. Natasha Lennard, Richard Seymour and Laurie Penny — everything they produce I consume and find value in.

KF: What kind of reader were you as a child, and which books and authors have stayed with you since childhood?

PM: The big lightbulb moment for me was reading Frank Herbert’s Dune when I was 12. I was bought it for my birthday and I literally lay on the floor and read the entire thing in a day. The central concept is something that informs my politics: that the things that are done to the most oppressed people on Earth make it possible for them to defeat the biggest evils on Earth. That was the lesson I took away from Herbert. And I remain of the belief that those to whom bad things are done can find the moral courage to fight back successfully.

KF: What’s your writing routine?

PM: I write quite early. My partner is legendarily frustrated by the fact that I’m sometimes up at 4am. I love the darkness of the early morning.

What does ‘sex positivity’ mean?

Lately, it seems like anything and anyone can mention sex and earn the label ‘sex positive’: social-media apps, celebrities and ‘girl bosses’, brands selling intimacy products. But when applied in such a variety of contexts, the idea of sex positivity seems to almost lose its meaning – or at least, its definition gets muddied.

Just as businesses and brands liberally use terms like ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ to appeal to ethically conscientious consumers, “the same thing is happening with either individuals, celebrities, endorsements, organisations or companies saying that they’re more sex positive”, says Emily Prior, executive director of California-based NGO Center for Positive Sexuality. While some “definitely are”, she adds, others “use it as a buzzword to get people in the door”.

But how can you tell the difference, when there’s no single, agreed-upon definition for sex positivity? While sex educators, academics, sex workers and pornography directors all tend to agree that the liberal use of the term indicates both taking advantage of a buzzword and a true embrace of its ethos, based on the context, they all have slightly different interpretations of what it means and where it came from. Depending on whom you ask, sex positivity encompasses everything from anti-racism to male nudity in the movies.

Across the board, however, those who talk about sex positivity note that at its core, the term is about openness to a variety of sexual orientations, interests (or lack thereof), identities and expressions. They find that the term has evolved to become both more popular and more nuanced over time, and that its influence extends well beyond the realm of sexuality into society at large.

The (many) origins of sex positivity

While many credit the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich with coining the term ‘sex positivity’ in the mid-1900s, as part of his discourse on sex as a healthy aspect of humanity, other groups embraced a sex-positive ethos well before he did.

“In the 1920s, there were already communities like ballroom culture in Harlem, New York, and feminists of the Village who were part of sex positive and queer communities,” says Swedish erotic filmmaker Erika Lust. Their experiences have just “often been left out of discussions”, she says.