Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 54

D6 BUSINESS HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2005 Humor can help make reputation bankable again 4 I M-: mm 9 ing she "will impress a lot of people with her natural beauty, acting skills, great comic timing and her ability to poke fun at herself." Protecting a celebrity with a drug problem is familiar territory for Branson: In 1986, the British singer known as Boy George retreated to Branson's country house after British newspapers exposed his heroin addiction. (Boy George, whose real name is George O'Dowd, was under contract with Virgin Records at the time.) The commercial may also lay the foundation for more work for Moss. "Before a big fashion house is going to bank a lot of money on her as a star, this is a little test market," said Allen Adamson, the managing director of Lan-dor, a brand consultant in New York that is part of the WPP Group. "To use her in a fashion sense is more of a commitment, usually with a multiyear contract. This is a great rehabilitation because she can do a one-off.

That, plus time, can set her up to be ripe to get back in the fashion game." One thing in her favor is that the nocturnal activities of a hard-partying model are not drastically different from the image her employers in the fashion world want to project, said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "Nobody signed on Kate Moss because they were looking for a character spokesman here," he said. "Her brand is built on celebrity and image and glamour and night life. And yes, cocaine is bad, but it's almost like her brand image got pushed too far." For its part, Virgin Mobile was happy to put a positive post-rehab spin on Moss's recent troubles. "She confronted an issue and owned up to it and took a lot of flak, and there was a lot of flak to take," said James Kydd, the brand director for Virgin Mobile.

By Julie Bosman New York Times NEW YORK It's a familiar pattern: A celebrity is caught in a compromising position, is humiliated, suffers career damage and lies low for a while then returns to the public arena to revamp a tarnished Image. Joining the likes of Paris Hilton and Hugh Grant, the British model Kate Moss is set to take a big step in her image rehabilitation this week. Moss, 31, who was photographed while apparently using cocaine in a London recording studio in September, will try to revive her career in a self-deprecating commercial for Virgin Mobile, the cell phone company owned by Richard Branson. In the 40-second spot, to start being shown this weekend, Moss is relaxing at home, making tea, when she receives a cell phone call from her agent, excitedly saying he has found a perfect contract for her. As it turns out, the agent is calling from a Virgin Mobile store and is talking about a cell phone contract, not a modeling job.

A voice intones: "Virgin Mobile. One contract worth keeping." The ad, created by Ralney Kelly Campbell in London, is to be shown on several television channels In Britain during the holiday week, as well as on a Web site, www.katemosscontract.com. Before the cocaine incident, Moss' earnings were estimated at $9 million a year. Since then, she has lost most of her major modeling contracts, including ones for the high-end retailers Burberry and Chanel, and the European clothing chain While Moss has appeared on magazine covers in recent months, most of the pictures for those covers were shot before the cocaine furor. Vanity Fair's December issue featured Moss, with a headline reading, "The Inside Story of the Cocaine, the Boyfriend, the Shattered Career Can She Come Back?" Moss also Kate Moss arrives at the CFDA Fashion Awards In New York in June In this file photo, left.

Moss will appear in an advertisement for Virgin Mobile, in an irreverent spot seen as part of a comeback from a drug scandal that threatened her career. The ad campaign includes a Web site, above, that includes downloadable videos of the ads. The spots poke fun at the modeling contracts that Moss lost after she was photographed apparently using cocaine. "This is a great rehabilitation, because she can do a one-off." Allen Adamson Brand consultant appeared on the cover of the November issue of magazine and French Vogue's December issue. The Virgin Mobile commercial isn't her first job, post-sCandal: She recently shot an advertising campaign for the Italian designer Roberto Cavalli and a 2006 Pirelli calendar by the photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.

So far, Moss' comeback has gone unusually smoothly, image consultants say. In the United States, the first stop for shamefaced celebrities emerging from hiding is often the "Saturday Night Live" stage. That is where Paris Hilton surfaced after a grainy video of her engaging in intimate activities with her boyfriend at the time was leaked cently introduced the steroids-in-baseball scandal into its "Got Milk?" campaign, drawing the ire of Major League Baseball. "In the past, advertising campaigns have been planned long in advance," said Lucian James, the president of Agenda, a branding agency in San Francisco. "But now advertising has become increasingly responsive to pop culture, so the campaigns can rest on something that's surprisingly recent." Distributors use 'Geisha' miscues to sell movie in Japan mumimw iiiuiiiiii ii 'WriyfYVTiMijsi'Wnil i in nun mmm ASSOCIATED PRESS James, who is British, said that since the Virgin brand had historically been built on its irreverence and pop currency, the company faces minimal risk aligning itself with Moss, who first shot to fame in the 1980s when Calvin Klein featured the waifish model irrad campaigns.

"What Richard Branson seems to have done is look beyond the hype and do a genuine endorsement of his relationship with Kate Moss, and that seems like a very authentic thing to do," James said. "And it shows that she has a sense of humor." Branson's 18-year friendship with Moss may have played a role in his decision to hire her for the commercial. Branson declined to discuss Moss, but in a statement he defended her, say- November premier in Tokyo, a star-studded event held at Japan's main sumo stadium. Many Japanese viewers were amused by the film's inaccuracies. Akiko Hayashi, coming out of a recent evening showing of the film, says she noticed a character in one scene with her kimono crossed right over left the way Japanese clothe their dead.

Still, she noted that a scene of sumo wrestling seemed authentic, especially since she recognized one of the athletes as an actual former wrestler. Hayashi, a university administrator, says she didn't mind that Chinese actresses got the best parts. Like many Japanese viewers, she was more excited about the fact that the movie which has a few famous Japanese actors, such as Ken Watanabe as the male lead gave her a chance to judge their English skills. Youki Kudoh, who plays a geisha who is a companion of the main character, was the most impressive, Hayashi concluded. "That's because she lives in LA." Not everyone here has been so understanding about the movie's gaffes particularly, Japan's geisha themselves.

Juzo Yamashita, the spokesman for a 116-member geisha union in the Gion district of Kyoto, says that just seeing the movie's preview, which he noted showed'im-properly worn kimonos and un-geisha-like hair was enough for his group to decide that it didn't like it. "We are concerned that people may think what is in the movie is true," he says. The movie plays up something called the "mizu-age," a ritual in which men bid for the virginity of a geisha-to-be. In the past, geisha were considered a kind of high-class prostitute, although today they shun such associations, describing themselves as highly-trained practitioners of traditional Japanese dance and music as well as skilled conversationalists. Rie Tokura, an official with the Kyoto Tourist Bureau, says mizu-age no longer is a part of geisha culture.

Her office, in an effort show Americans what real geisha are like, plans to send one, along with two geisha-in-trainlng, called "maiko," to perform in New York in February. to the Web. When Ashlee Simpson was caught lip-syncing as a guest performer on "Saturday Night Live," she returned to the show months later to demonstrate musical bona fides. But using advertising for image rehabilitation is proving popular as well. Agencies are increasingly playing on events in the news for ad campaigns.

For instance, Goodby, Silverstein Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group, re Japanese company could bungle a depiction of Japanese culture, Sony the parent of Sony Pictures, actually had little to do with how the movie turned out. Typically, moviemaking decisions are left to Sony Pictures, which is based in the U.S., and are "not something in which the parent company based, in Japan will intervene," says Sony Corp. spokesman Kei Sakaguchi. Plenty of moviegoers say they like seeing their culture displayed in such a dazzling fashion, with romanticized scenes of the tile roofs and pagodas of old Kyoto and sweeping shots of the green mountains of Japan. "As foreigners, they really captured Japan's beauty well," says Toyosaka Moriizumi, a Tokyo university professor, after seeing the movie.

"Japanese need to be reminded of this beauty." Viewers are having fun picking apart the film's inaccuracies, but for many Japanese, curiosity on how others see them wins the day. "I'd like to see how foreigners view geisha," says Mutsumi Ogawa, a' 47-year-old employee at an auto-parts maker, who is planning to see the movie. Ogawa has seen both "The Last Samurai" and "Pearl Harbor." A scene from "Memoirs of a Geisha." The movie's Japanese distributors knew their audiences would notice Its inaccuracies, but were able to turn that to their advantage. Ads reach for 'reality' as agencies skip the glitz By Suzanne Vranica Wall Street Journal Glitzy television advertising, long the mainstay of marketing, fell out of vogue this year on Madison Avenue. In its place: frill-free commercials.

Reflecting the proliferation of reality television, agencies embraced ads that used real people or looked like home videos. Typical of the trend was an ad for Vonage Holdings the Internet phone service provider, which used a home movie of a skier leaping off a roof onto a pickup truck. A Toyota Motor) porp. spot was filmed to look like a home movie shot by two slacker dudes partying in the desert when a meteor hits their Tacoma truck. Anheuser-Busch Cos: has lately been running Bud Light ads shot documentary-style, which feature a fictional character named Ted Ferguson who performs daredevil stunts and rewards himself with beer.

The rougher-looking ads are a far cry from the polished commercials of the past that hinged on costly special effects and glamorous celebrities. Ad gurus say consumers are more accustomed to seeing raw footage these days because of the enormous amount of amateur video1 and unfiltered content available on the Web. "People are tired of commercials that look like commercials," says Ann Hayden, an executive creative director at Publicis Groupe SA's Saatchi Saatchi. "People are looking for things that are real." The shift comes as traditional formats, such as TV commercials and print ads, are under intense scrutiny by major marketers who worry that customers are increasingly able to ignore their supplications. By Ginny Parker Woods and Miho Inada Wall Street Journal TOKYO In bringing the movie "Memoirs of a Geisha" to Japan, distributor Buena Vista International faced a quandary: How do you market an exotic Hollywood fantasy about geisha to a country that knows all about the real thing? Buena Vista's answer: Flaunt the fantasy.

Kimonos wrapped wrong? Hair too windblown? Actresses the wrong nationality? Well, the movie ads trumpet, this is a "Japan that the Japanese will envy," playing up the Western printing "Japan" in the Roman alphabet rather than the country's traditional characters. The idea, says Taro Yurikusa, a producer with Buena Vista International's Tokyo office, is to pique Japanese curiosity about how America and in particular Hollywood interprets Japan. "We're saying, please come and see the Japan that Hollywood shot," he says. "There are things that are not true in the movie, and people may feel puzzled about them. But they can appreciate the beautiful pictures, the story and the drama of the movie, and feel satisfied in the end." To be sure, Buena Vista, a division of Walt Disney is giving a nod to Japanese sensibilities.

It has to contend with the delicate topic of geisha, a subject many Japanese see as something Westerners misunderstand either by assuming that they are engaged solely in prostitution, something modern-day geisha say isn't part of their business, or that geisha somehow represent all Japanese women. The movie is the story of a Kyoto geisha a woman trained in traditional Japanese arts to make her a refined companion and her unrequited love for a wealthy businessman. In Japan, movie posters don't use the same sultry photo that they use in the U.S., featuring Chinese star Zhang Ziyi with hair whipping around her face. That is too un-geisha-like: The Japanese photos show Zhang In her slightly Westernized version of the geisha's traditional dress. COLUMBIA PICTURES "Memoirs of a Geishai" the best-selling novel by Arthur Golden, on which the movie is based, also had sparked controversy in Japan.

Mineko Iwasaki, the retired geisha who inspired Mr. Golden's book, sued him for using her story and damaging her reputation. The fuss didn't hurt sales of the translated book in Japan, where its two volumes have sold around 170,000 copies each good for such a book, according to the publisher. The movie made waves in Japan well before its release, when the filmmakers announced they had chosen Chinese actresses to'play the movie's lead and another major role. On both sides of the Pacific, people took issue with the choice, which the moviemakers defended by saying that equally talented Japanese actresses with strong enough English skills hadn't been available.

"I think this has been blown out of all proportion," says executive producer Gary Barber. Zhang, he adds, was just nominated for a Golden Globe award for her performance and "is incredibly popular in Japan. You hire the best actress for the role." The criticism had largely died in Japan by the movie's Buena Vista, which had an even touchier job when it marketed the blockbuster war movie "Pearl Harbor" here in 2001, says it didn't make any changes to the movie itself. For "Pearl Harbor," a movie about Japan's attack on the U.S. in World War II, Buena Vista toned down potentially offensive bits of dialogue.

A Buena Vista representative in Japan says the company expects the movie to gross two billion yen to 2.5 billion yen ($16.8 million to $21 million), which is modest for Japan one of the biggest markets for Hollywood movies outside North America. Other Hollywood movies about Japan have done well here, including "The Last Samurai," which came out in 2003 and grossed 13.7 billion yen. "Pearl Harbor" grossed seven billion yen. So far, Buena Vista's strategy of marketing "Memoirs" as an outsider's view of Japanese culture has worked out pretty well. "Sayuri" as the Sony Pictures Entertainment movie is called here ranked a respectable No.

4 among all movies playing here during its opening week of Dec. 10. Reviews have been generally favorable, lauding it as escapist entertainment. Though some may wonder how a movie from a studio owned by a.