Marring a good argument

There was a disgraceful advertisement on the front page of today's South China Morning Post newspaper. An expensive watch company whose over-priced baubles are supposed to look good on pilots' wrists suggested that "It appears on the bedside table of many stewardesses". Elsewhere there was a picture of a pair of socks with the admonition that these should be removed first. Obviosuly targeting British pilots...Really...the copywriters must have been drunk.

I mention this because there have been a couple of interesting articles (here and here) on China Economic Net in the past two days on the develop of B2B online in China. Yesterday's piece talked about the role of search in e-Commerce.

Today's focuses on collaboration between the likes of Alibaba.com and Zhejiang Netsun. The latter has, apparently, been managing other people's B2B websites for a while and has, since January, produced its own. It quotes David Wei (as we did a few days ago) saying "in the upcoming few months, Alibaba.com.cn would have an all-around and in-depth cooperation with outstanding industry websites to jointly integrate quality and professional business information and provide massive information and professional contents for extensive enterprises with Alibaba.com.cn as the platform. Meanwhile, partner websites would be allowed to share Alibaba.com.cn's tremendous commercial information".

So, what's the connection between that and ill-judged ads for over-priced watches aimed at randy pilots who need to be reminded to remove their socks when swinging into action? Well, for some reason, this otherwise worthy Chinese business web site, has what can only be described as "totty shots" in the top left hand corner of each page. They link through to celebrity articles with titles like "Jeon Ji-hyun changes hairdo for new film". Just what every Chinese economist needs to know I'm sure.

It reminds me of my early days as a shipping journalist in London. We used to be sent an English language shipping and trade newspaper published in Tokyo. It was a worthy, if dull, publication whose editors decided that they would enliven the inside pages by re-running the famous page 3 topless shots from the Dirty Digger's London Sun newspaper. It seems that business editors in Beijing are picking up some bad habits from Tokyo.

P.S. I have rarely been more delighted with both Google and Wikipedia to discover that, if you Google the phrase "Dirty Digger", it links to here.