Linkpile

• A whopper of an illusion is being shattered by Burger King ads: “During a live webcast Oct. 20, NASCAR star Tony Stewart will be hooked up to a polygraph and asked: Does Tony really love Burger King’s Whopper sandwich? The webcast will be the climax of a monthlong campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky — “The Truth About Tony” — that seeks to demonstrate that Stewart actually, really, truly loves eating Whoppers.” LA Times muses on the celebrity endorsement. Sort of interesting.
• Giftcards galore: GraphicHug also says: “Gift card designs these days are becoming fancier and fancier and I feel like Target has single-handedly reinvented the idea of a gift card.” Another earlier Consumed topic! Some sort of harmonic moment with GraphicHug today.
• Keep Calm and Carry On: GraphicHug says “this is a current image that needs to be questioned.” Consumed readers will recall that the design was not popular when it debuted in WWII, and was never widely used.
• Key To Subliminal Messaging Is To Keep It Negative, Study Shows: “Negative words may have more of a rapid impact.”
• Illustrator Sara Antoinette Martin: Nice stuff. Coolhunting Q&A.
• … with a bullet.: “Americans usually buy about 7 billion rounds of ammunition a year, according to the National Rifle Association. In the past year, that figure has jumped to about 9 billion rounds, said NRA spokeswoman Vickie Cieplak.”
• LVMH in the recession: Doing fairly well, the Economist says. Possibly because more of its customers are actually rich, not pretending to be. “Much of the [lux] industry’s rapid growth in the past decade came from middle-class people, often buying on credit or on the back of rising house prices. According to Luca Solca of Bernstein Research, 60% of the luxury market is now based on demand from “aspirational” customers rather than from the wealthy elite.”
• Are You A New Yorker Who Is Choosing To Buy Less?: Consider taking this survey for Kirsten Firminger, a graduate student in the Social Psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Click for details. “The purpose of my research is to get a better understanding of how people learn to buy less and what barriers and supports people have encountered while trying to voluntarily buying less.”
• Prada Hits Milan Fashion Week Mixing Rich and Poor – WSJ.com: “I wanted to describe the current world,” Ms. Prada said while chatting backstage, wearing her traditional ironic motherly look—a dusty pink pencil skirt under a navy blue sweater and sequined knit tights. “There are the rich and the poor.…There is nostalgia.” Why do people take Ms. Prada seriously? Are these supposed to be the “ideas” that animate high fashion? Because it sort of sounds like a sixth-grade book report to me.
• Jay-Z: A Master Of Occult Wisdom? : NPR: Surprisingly interesting.
• Consumerism: By-product of international finance?: “It may be that international capital flows have driven our consumerist microbehaviors much more than we know; that it wasn’t just personal ignorance, irresponsibility, cupidity, greed and covetousness that drove the housing bubble and the boom in consumer debt; but instead those moral motives came after the fact, after our fate was sealed by the wash of investment coming in from overseas. We didn’t want consumerism, but someone had to sop up all those Chinese exports.”

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