"
. With AntiFriday: Bono-hating; Converse murketing; etc.
Well it’s AntiFriday again, and time for a rundown of the latest in dissent, backlashing, critiques, and like that.
1. On The Point website, someone has started a campaign titled: “Bono — Retire from public life and we’ll donate a ton of money to fight AIDS.” Partly it’s an anti-Product Red effort, but really it’s about hating Bono. The “Pitch,” in part:
Bono’s philanthropy efforts are self-righteous, ineffective, & counter-productive….
The grassroots leaders of the global fight against AIDS didn’t ask for Bono to be their frontman. Its time for Bono to step down. We’ll all pledge donations to the Global Fund, but no pledges are collected until Bono retires from public life…
As I type, $1,108 have been pledged.
This item via WFMU’s Beware of The Blog, where Bono was previously assaulted here.
2. The Oregonian reports that a Converse effort to put up street-art-style ads on some buildings on Portland’s North Alberta Street has ended poorly. Somebody called the cops, but that’s not really the bad part.
The vacant building’s owner, developer Rambo Halpern, said he wouldn’t have granted permission to Nike-owned Converse to post the ads had he been asked. Alberta Street, he noted, is known as an art district and alternative business hub.
“They’re a little bit anti-corporate, anti-chain,” Halpern said. “Providing free advertising to a corporation making billions of dollars a year is not high on my list of priorities.”
Ouch! Not exactly the reaction Converse wants, I’d say. (Actually, I did say it, to reporter Brent Hunsberger. I’m quoted in this article. Just so you know.)
Related, on Public Ad Campaign blog: Converse subway ad subverted in NYC.
3. Steve Powers offers this:
Enamel on aluminum; $1,999; here.
If you missed Powers’ most recent project, here’s a Times article by Ariel Kaminer, about the “Waterboard Thrill Ride.”
More AntiFriday after the jump.
4. PSFK: “User-generated review site Yelp is getting a bit of negative feedback of its own, as of late. According to CBS News, some business owners who have received less-than-glowing yelps on the 10 million-user strong site are unhappy about the company’s faux-open platform. Some point to their ‘Sponsorship Program,’ a way for poorly-reviewed businesses to improve their presence on the site, as an example of Yelp’s unfair treatment of shop owners who can’t fork up the extra money to keep their Yelp profiles positive. According to one business owner, Selena Kellinger of Razzberry Lips (a makeover party planning company), the site responded to her dismay over her company’s negative reviews by asking her join the Sponsorship Program.”
5. A neighborhood business association in Montreal helped arrange a “summer-long festival” that included no cars on a stretch of Ste Catherine street, to create a more pedestrian-friendly atmosphere for shopping, strolling, and dining. The deal also included a $100,000 sponsorship arrangement with Bud Light, which in Canada is owned by Labatt. If I understand this Globe & Mail story on the subject correctly, the deal also entailed basically forcing restaurants on the street to sell Bud Light.
Predictably, some restaurant owners aren’t happy about that. And:
Christopher DeWolf, a writer for Spacing Montreal, an urban affairs website affiliated with the Toronto magazine Spacing, questions how corporate interests were allowed to take over a public street.
“The closure to cars has created a destination, it creates an ambience that is impossible with cars,” Mr. DeWolf said. “But here you have a product foisted on merchants and their customers. It raises the question of how far we should allow private interests to have such control over our public spaces. I think it’s a burden on merchants and it restricts public choice.”
Thx: Braulio.
6. Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen says there is one blog he won’t read, and it’s written by “the most obnoxious blogger in the world,” but (as of this writing) won’t say who that is. I assume it’s Murketing.com, right?
7. Speaking of Murketing.com, Butts In The Seats expresses dislike of the term “murketing,” adds some cautiously positive thoughts about aspects of this site, and then says: “I have to acknowledge that the site’s sort of anti-guru vibe might actually be calculated, per murketing, to cater to my skepticism.”
Murketing.com — calculated? Is there no end to the cynicism out there?
.
.
Kim Fellner's book 
.
A
Reader Comments
So what you are saying, Rob is that murketing isn’t meant to be a trojan horse meme to get us all used to the idea of non-traditional marketing. That you aren’t the funded by the Secret Cartel of Corporate Marketing Bigwigs? Well, dang, I was hoping to wrangle a ticket to their next soiree.
Wait a minute, how do you know about the SCCMB?
I don’t know if I am reading Butts in the Seats incorrectly myself, but it sounds like he is slamming the idea of “murketing” as the hot new marketing fad, which puzzled me. Isn’t that kind of an incorrect reading of your book? Or has “murketing” as a term been co-opted by the very people you are criticizing and I am just not aware of it?
Ingrid, just realized I never responded to your comment.
I think he’s pretty clear that he’s picking up “murketing” in a second-hand way, not from the book. I’m not quite sure whether his comments amount to a slam, per se, but he does seem to be coming at it from the point of view that I dreamed it up to drive a trend, as opposed to explain a phenomenon. Lots of people have indeed interpreted it that way, but I don’t have a problem with that — part of the deal is that if you put something out there, people are always going to have their own interpretations. It’s impossible to control, and there’s not much reason to try, really. I try to remind myself there are people who understand what I’m doing, and stick with that thought!
Actually, my problem is with the recent trend of portmanteau words and buzz words in general that create the impression that if you aren’t up on the latest craze, you will be left behind. I think I make it pretty clear in my entry that one must be cognizant that changing times require changing your approach. That said, it isn’t necessarily prudent for everyone to go out and adopt every new approach to marketing or every new technology. But you don’t know that until you evaluate it.
I’ll grant you that “Re-evaluate Marketing” doesn’t grab your attention as you walk down the aisle in Barnes and Noble the way “Murketing” does.
The official Yelp policy is that businesses who have purchased a Business Owner Account are allowed to remove one review of their choice for every 6 consecutive months of Business Owner Account membership.