This may be news you can use, if your station’s audience takes pride in their own level of cool. A poll that considered the opinions of some 30,000 individuals in 15 different nations selected the United States of America as the coolest nation in the world. Our neighbors to the north didn’t fare quite so well, but for Canada, it still could have been worse.
The poll results might be instantly tossable had they originated in the US alone, but the international survey pool, and the fact that the results originated in the UK, not the US, bestow at least some viability to the results – which nevertheless are not to be taken too too seriously. It came from internation social website Badoo.com, so the results are a measure of the opinions of Badoo fans, not the world population as a whole.
That said, the US beat out Brazil, Spain, Italy and France, in that order, when it comes to being cool. The least cool nation is deemed to be Belgium, and down in the uncool cellar with it, in order of uncoolness, are Poland and Turkey (tied for second-uncool honors), Canada and Germany.
The home-town constituency, the Brits, were said to rank #6 on the cool chart.
Badoo provided a list of cool Americans:
Steve Jobs
Jay-Z
Lady Gaga
Barack Obama
Johnny Depp
Quentin Tarantino
Marlon Brando
Quentin Tarantino
Steve McQueen
Michael Jackson
…as well as a list of Cool icons, or coolicons, to use the Badoo spelling:
Apple (iPod, iPhone, iPad)
Jazz
Blues
Surfing
Ray-Bans
Harley Davidson
Levi’s
Converse
Facebook
Sundance Film Festival
The Wire
RBR-TVBR observation: Interesting that cool American icons include two styles of music that may perhaps be found in much of the music heard on American radio, but are rarely found in their pure form. There is also, of course, much on these lists that is a matter of opinion.
We must say one thing about the uncool rankings: We have an old friend who is well-known to her inner circle as an avid sun-worshipper going back to early childhood days – her life-journey has taken her to a particular nation, seemingly to her own astonishment. That nation, as she described it to the best of our memory, is gray, rainy, dreary Belgium. Perhaps her vote was recorded in this poll.
However, if your station wishes to applaud its own coolness, along with the coolness of some of the American companies noted in the poll, and those companies can be brought along for the ride in the form of a paid advertisement, that’s a possible combination of on-air items worth taking into consideration.
