Latest news with #Sunlight
Otago Daily Times
13 hours ago
- General
- Otago Daily Times
New life for British youths
Young British men gather with New Zealand high commissioner Sir James Allen (centre) at Waterloo Station, London before their emigration to New Zealand. — Otago Witness, 2.6.1925 Some 320 assisted settlers are travelling to New Zealand by the SS James Allen was among those who saw them off at Waterloo Station. Thirty boys selected under the terms of the Sheepowners' Fund, fifty boys under the auspices of the Salvation Army, and thirty-six domestic servants are included in the number. The High Commissioner spoke to a good many of the boy settlers and wished them every success in their new home. Numbers of high officials of the Salvation Army were on the platform to give an official farewell to their section of the young travellers. Before the train left the platform there were many hearty cheers. Greyhounds chase live hares The June meeting of the Dunedin Coursing Club was commenced at Forbury Park yesterday afternoon, the coursing being witnessed by a fair number of those interested in the sport. The plumton was in good order, and the hares ran well. Very few kills were recorded; the game, in almost all cases, being given plenty of grace before the dogs were slipped. Among the dogs competing were several from Canterbury and Southland. The judge was Mr R. Prebble, Mr J. Ronald acting as slipper. Two rounds of the Boyle Memorial Stake were run off. Relief funds strong to save The executive of the Shipwreck Relief Society of New Zealand, in its annual report, state that the past year was free from any shipping disaster involving loss of life. During the year the sum of £20 1 shilling was expended in relief for the crew of the launch Sunlight, and £230 in relief to the crew of the steamer Ngahere, wrecked at Greymouth. To the Union Steam Ship Co the executive is again deeply indebted for its handsome contribution to the funds during the year, the sum of £206 11s 4d having been received from entertainments hold on board the company's steamers. The causes of crime Is it possible to find any root cause of crime that can be dealt with practically? The investigation undertaken by Professor W.S. Athearn, Dean of the Boston University School of Religious Education and Social Service concluded that the cause of crime is the failure of society to teach virtue, and that the crime wave will last until society builds a system of moral and religious schools to match the public schools of the land. The implied suggestion is that the churches have too long devoted almost all their resources to preaching to the mature, and that the time has come when they must accept as their primary work the teaching of the young. Obviously the more they can agree to work in unison the more effective will their work be. A survey of the facts of juvenile crime and of the provision of moral teaching in the dominion would provide a fitting basis for drawing attention to the urgency of the problem and to the need of some whole-hearted effort to abolish the spiritual illiteracy of the child which, according to Dr Athearn, is at the basis of all crime and moral delinquency. — editorial — ODT, 6.6.1925 Compiled by Peter Dowden
New York Times
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Sunlight' Review: A Man Wakes Up in a Camper, Monkey at the Wheel
When it comes to monkey costumes, you can keep your 'Better Man' biopic C.G.I. Nina Conti's 'Sunlight' brings its own bizarro, handmade appeal: A gnarly love story that starts with a guy waking up in an RV driven by a simian-suited stranger. It's a movie within the indie subgenre of comic encounters between lost outsiders, but powered by its own fringe logic of attraction and rebellion. The stranger in the toylike disguise turns out to be a woman (Conti) fleeing her manipulative stepfather, who took over her mother's motel. That's where she found Roy (Shenoah Allen) after a failed suicide attempt in his room. Her name, we eventually learn, is Jane. The RV actually belongs to Roy, a mild-mannered radio host burdened by a hectoring mom and tough memories of his deceased father. Not exactly a meet-cute, but their cracked road trip never loses its warmth under the New Mexico sun. The big question looms: Just who is Jane, and why the blank-eyed monkey suit? But we also wonder how Roy got to his wit's end. 'Sunlight' essentially follows two people helping each other extract and preserve what's left of their sanity and will to live. Conti bases Jane's furry alter-ego on her monkey ventriloquist act, part of her career in British TV and theater. A little of 'Sunlight,' which she directs and co-wrote with Allen, goes a long way. But there's still something to seeing a performer go for broke, purging a character's shame and despair through a screwy, confessional sense of humor. SunlightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.
Scroll.in
20-05-2025
- Business
- Scroll.in
A new book examines how Unilever used single-use plastic sachets to boost sales
Consumer goods companies in the West had occasionally used sachets to entice consumers to try new shampoos and laundry detergents. But it was in emerging markets like India that companies realised the full potential of the plastic sachet. As a mainstream, everyday package, the sachet unlocked enormous multi-billion-dollar markets that had long been out of reach, promising a rush of new growth, courtesy of some of the world's poorest people, just as sales in developed markets started to slow. Indian shopkeepers had long found their own ways to make products like soap and laundry detergent affordable for the hundreds of millions of Indians – particularly in the country's villages – who couldn't afford a full bar or bag. They opened up 1kg bags of washing detergent powder and sold 100 grams at a time for 1 rupee, dispensed into people's own containers. They cut bars of soap into smaller pieces, selling these individually. By the late 1980s, Unilever's India subsidiary – Hindustan Lever – had begun packaging its shampoo brands Sunsilk and Clinic in sachets that held just enough for a single wash. 'There was a realisation in Unilever decades ago that people on daily wages also have the same aspiration as people on monthly wages,' says Vindi Banga, former chairman of Hindustan Lever. 'That is the genesis of the single-use pack.' Unilever had been selling its products in India since 1888, when crates prominently printed with the words 'Made in England' landed at Calcutta's harbour. The crates carried Sunlight soap. More products followed and, by 1931, Unilever had set up its first Indian subsidiary, making vanaspati, a low-cost substitute for ghee. Over the years, Hindustan Lever's in-house army of psychologists and market researchers had worked to more fully understand the motivations fuelling the Indian housewives who were its main customers. They visited the women's homes and brought groups of them together for tea, spending a long time getting them to relax so they'd talk freely. Among the valuable insights this time-consuming method of market research yielded was that the company's relatively pricey soaps were often bought by poor women. 'It is not necessarily the rich woman who buys Sunlight,' explained Hindustan Lever's chairman SH Turner at the company's annual shareholder meeting in 1958. 'It may be the poor woman who values its lather and the ease with which she can do her washing with it; the rich woman whose washing is done for her by servants often feels that they are so wasteful to [sic] soap anyway that it is best to buy for them the cheapest brand on the market.' Hindustan Lever's researchers also found that there was little knowledge of the company's brands, particularly in rural India. Farmers spent the most on food, tube wells, fertilisers, seeds and farming equipment. Weddings were a high priority too – these needed to be opulent in order to raise the family's standing. Next came consumer durables like bicycles, sewing machines and radios. At the very bottom were the kind of packaged goods Hindustan Lever sold, like soap and vanaspati. To convince Indians they needed products they had long done without – like liquid shampoo and powdered laundry detergent – Hindustan Lever deployed its multi-million-dollar marketing machine. 'All consumer goods manufacturers must spend a lot of money on advertising – particularly in India,' said Turner in his 1958 speech. Advertising, he explained, 'may often be required to introduce the product as one which is a necessary part of a higher standard of living'. Decades later, in 2014, Unilever's Southeast Asia head would once again describe the industry's approach to demand creation, outlining for investors how Unilever was creating a market for dishwashing soap. 'You can actually clean dishes with ash and salt. It works,' he said. 'But my task is to convince consumers that there is a better, more hygienic, faster, less residual solution. You need to convince consumers that their proxy is not good enough anymore.' To create new markets in rural India, Unilever employed a totally different model to the one it relied on in the West. Back in the 1960s, most Indian villages were 'media dark'. Hardly anyone had a TV and most people were illiterate. Hindustan Lever found ways to advertise to them anyway. It had a fleet of 12 vans that drove around villages showing Bollywood and local language films, either on TVs played from the backs of the vans or on roll-down screens. People happily sat through dozens of Hindustan Lever advertisements in exchange for the entertainment. Another seven vans drove around doing demonstrations: Hindustan Lever's marketers showed people how to use its soaps and detergents by physically washing clothes and half-clothed bodies in public. They performed skits and puppet shows. They travelled around the country painting advertisements for Unilever's brands on the walls of village compounds. Operating and maintaining the vans across enormous distances on bumpy rural roads was expensive. The cost of marketing to each viewer of Unilever's rural cinemas was 25 paise, a whopping 125 times higher than the 0.2 paise it cost to similarly reach an urban consumer. The efforts didn't justify the paltry sales of low-cost soaps and cooking oil they drummed up. But Unilever stayed the course. Its polling showed that once workers received regular pay, their interest in buying packaged food and soap rose. Unilever's executives saw the potential to turn millions of Indians into consumers by stirring what the company claimed were their nascent desires. The key to making money from low-priced (and hence inevitably low-margin) products was driving enormous sales volumes – selling billions upon billions of products. 'Economies come largely from mass production and mass selling of standardised lines,' Turner told Hindustan Lever's shareholders in his 1958 speech. 'We must have products which are acceptable alike to the rich and the poor.' The single-use multilayer plastic sachet, which Unilever would only successfully roll out some three decades later, enabled the kind of mass selling that Turner knew was needed to turn a fat profit in a poor country. Sachets would become Unilever's primary way to level the playing field in India, offering the same products to rich and poor. In time, they'd catch on widely, with thousands of different consumer goods brands opting to use the tiny plastic packs. 'In India, everything is sold single. You can buy one banana, one cigarette, one egg and – whether it's pickle, hair oil or salt – you can buy it in a sachet form,' says Anand Kripalu, who worked at Unilever for more than two decades before leaving in 2005 to become Cadbury's south Asia head. 'The best example of how sachets exploded a category is shampoo,' he adds. 'They put shampoo within reach of hundreds of millions of people overnight.'
The Irish Sun
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
‘The best', cry fans as beloved Westlife star returns for plum RTE Eurovision role 9 years after he was ‘robbed'
A BELOVED Westlife star is set to return to Eurovision nine years after he was "robbed". Dublin man Ireland in Stockholm, Advertisement 2 Nicky Byrne represented Ireland at Eurovision 2016 2 Nicky performed his own original tune titled Sunlight Unfortunately, Nicky's tune did not qualify for that year's Grand Final, only earning 46 points. The Irish star managed to secure a 15th-place finish in the first semi-final. At the time, Nicky expressed major disappointment in "There's no formula to winning." Advertisement READ MORE IN WESTLIFE The 46-year-old is set to make his comeback to the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend, but it won't be for his singing. Byrne has been announced as the host to present the Irish jury's votes during the Grand Final of Eurovision 2025. In a throwback clip posted to Nicky looked incredible as he bounced around the stage belting out the chorus to Sunlight. Advertisement MOST READ IN THE IRISH SUN The then, 35-year-old donned a cool red leather jacket, black skinny jeans and leather boots . He also had his blonde hair slicked back and added a set of bangles to his wrist. Samantha Mumba opens up stardom Nicky hit every note as he interacted with screaming fans in the audience. The star pointed at the camera and gave a smouldering look as he sang out the rest of the song. Advertisement The pop star finished off the tune with a dramatic final pose before giving a big smile to the adorning crowd. Fans all raced to the comment section to react to Nicky's old Eurovision moment. 'UNDERRATED' July wrote: "He set the stage on fire and the lighting was just amazing." Amy remarked: "This was so underrated omg!" Advertisement Fiona added: "It was such a good song he was robbed." Sally said: "You should have won that year. You were magnificent." And Molly gushed: "The best ever!!" Sunlight was Nicky's first ever debut single as a solo artist. Advertisement According to Byrne, Sunlight is "essentially a love song and its message is one of positivity. Tomorrow is a new day and the sunlight shining on your face at the start of any new day should make you smile be fresh and to begin again."
Extra.ie
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Revealed: Nicky Byrne to return to Eurovision
Nicky Byrne is set to make a return to RTE this week as he delivers the nation's vote for Eurovision. Westlife singer Nicky is a Eurovision fan and he even previously represented Ireland at the competition in Stockholm in 2016 with his song Sunlight. While Nicky didn't qualify for the final and only scored 46 points with his self-penned track, his affection for the annual song fest certainly hasn't dimmed. Pic: Luis Marin/Eyepix Group/Shutterstock For the past couple of years, Nicky has taken on the all-important role of announcing the Irish jury's votes to the watching public during the Grand Final. The Westlife man first took on the role of Ireland's Eurovision spokesperson in 2013 and continued in 2014, and 2015. Pic:Following his participation as a contestant, Byrne returned to his vote deliverer role with great aplomb in 2017 and has continued for the past few years. He is set to return to viewers' screens again on Saturday night to announce Ireland's all-important scores. Emmy. Pic: Corinne Cumming/EBU Ireland's Eurovision act Emmy takes to the semi-final stage on Thursday night hoping to reignite the nation's former Eurovision glory.
