- Consumers And Self-designed Products: Study: “Consumers enjoy intentionally competing against professionals” in designing stuff.
- Tale of successful non-designer product development: Non-pro inventor “wanted a neat and simple way to transport deviled eggs to get-togethers,” and got her product idea turned into a product, “subsequently featured on QVC.” Okay, but a deviled egg transporter?
- Spinning Lego minifig anatomy GIF reveals all: Enjoyable.
- Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why: This is interesting! “From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.”
- Doctors cling to white coats: “It’s as much sociology as medicine. I’m the doctor. I have status. I have the uniform. That makes me official.”
- A Manifesto for Slow Communication: “In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.”
These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.
Posted Under:
Non-Daily Linkpile by Rob Walker on August 25, 2009
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Flickr Artifacts by Rob Walker on August 24, 2009
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Non-Daily Linkpile by Rob Walker on August 24, 2009
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From the inbox:
Hello!
I am working at a marketing firm, and we are doing an on line campaign for one of our clients that has an on line printing company. I found your site! Bravo the content and pictures are truly inspiring, it makes me want to go home and get crafty! I thought that perhaps your site would be a great place to get a link to my clients site on Murketing.
I know it may not be something that you have done or considered in that past; using your site for advertising but I think that this would benefit both my client and yourself. I will be offering you monetary compensation to host a link. I hope that we can work something out! I can answer any questions you may have. Let me know what you think. Thanks in advance!
Cheers, [redacted]
You’re welcome!
Posted Under:
Flickr Artifacts by Rob Walker on August 22, 2009
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John Seabrook’s interesting New Yorker story about the concert business (abstract here; no full text online I guess), included an assertion that I found hard to swallow. Seabrook at one point wonders to Irving Azoff about the prospects of the concert business when the current crop of aging mega acts leaves the road.
Azoff: “Taylor Swift — and she’s not even my client! — or the Kings of Leon. These are career artists that are going to be around for a long time.”
Okay, but, Seabrook writes: “Would they fill stadiums and arenas forty years into their careers, as the Eagles do?”
Azoff: “Absolutely.”
Now, Azoff has obvious bias on this matter, so maybe I shouldn’t even be thinking about it. But I find the assertion dubious. What do you think?
Posted Under:
Non-Daily Linkpile by Rob Walker on August 21, 2009
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I mentioned this the other day. Somebody bought it! I don’t know who, and I’m not certain I’d want to know why. But maybe I would.
In any case, I was weirdly pleased to learn that it had sold.
BustedTypewriter is still selling other hollowed-out books to hold/hide devices or objects, here.
At this point I think the only interesting thing about Mad Men (to me) is the disconnect between the amount of attention it gets from the media and marketing crowd, and the number of people who actually watch it.
Did you know, to cite a random example, that a recent rerun of Two And A Half Men got nearly triple the audience of the Mad Men season premiere (which apparently was the latter show’s largest audience ever)?
I offer you this without comment (and certainly without endorsement):
Dear Rob –
Based on your May 14 “Consumed” column – “Brother, Can You Spare a Loan?” – we thought you might be interested in the following:
As of this morning, Internet Pawn (www.internetpawn.com) has officially launched the first Web-based pawnshop in the United States. The new company provides consumers with a unique opportunity to discreetly leverage the equity they have in their own personal valuables to solve immediate cash flow needs from the privacy of their home or office. Recently, the Consumer Federation of America found that more than 50 percent of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and with today’s tough economy, that percentage is sure to increase. As you well know, now more than ever, a large segment of the population is unable to access credit – and for those people – InternetPawn.com can be a smart, consumer-friendly solution.
The related press release is pasted below. I will follow up with you in the coming days to see if you would like more information. You can also learn more about Internet Pawn through our online press room: http://www.internetpawn.com/about/press_room.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Best,
Posted Under:
Non-Daily Linkpile by Rob Walker on August 18, 2009
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Non-Daily Linkpile by Rob Walker on August 17, 2009
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[The Product Is You is an occasional Murketing series collecting advertising that is aimed at advertisers: Magazines or television networks packaging up their consumers — that is, you, the potential ad target — in ways designed to attract advertisers.
Been quite a while since I posted one of these, but I had a chance recently to clear out my office and in the process discovered some examples I’d set aside. Here’s one. It’s an ad targeting potential advertisers on the History Channel.
“There is a type of consumer that advertisers crave,” this History Channel promotion tells members of the marketing profession. “He’s hard to find, but not if you know where to look.”
The idea is that you will find them watching the History Channel, and that’s where you should tell your corporate clients to buy ad time. Here are some attributes of the “consumer that advertisers crave”: Please continue…
Posted Under:
The Product Is You by Rob Walker on August 17, 2009
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[NOTE: There is no Consumed column today, or next week. I’ve been on vacation (or my version of a vacation, anyway). The column returns August 30.]
- Reified design: “Designy-ness is an ideological sheen on consumerism, redeeming commodification while furthering it, permitting mass-distributed designy-ness to supplant genuine heterogeneity.” I would really like to see the design blogs pick up on this and respond to it.
- Denim sales still going strong: “Sales of premium brand jeans grew 17% during 2008 and 2.3% from December to February 2009, according to market research firm NPD Group.”
- Blowin’ in the Phone: Studio 360 piece. “The blockbuster iPhone app called Ocarina lets you play music by blowing into the phone. Its inventor, Ge Wang, thinks that the more people playing music, the better; but even he is a little nervous about the impact of technology on people’s lives.”
- Michael Eisner: Interview transcript: “Eventually there will be something on the Internet that is a cultural phenomenon that’s not available anywhere else, that’s not available on television broadcasts, that’s not on cable, it’s only on some Web site.” Well, there are plenty of cultural phenomena that happen on the Internet, cross over in the form of news reports about the phenomena, or follow-on media products. LOLcats, for instance. Or Twitter, for that matter. So I don’t really get what Eisner is talking about. Does he just mean a TV show that’s on a Web site?
- Wall Street fears U.S. consumers won’t spend: “What was a surprise was the record number of consumers who said their personal incomes have worsened.” Really? Why is that a surprise? Unemployment is at like 9.5%. What did they expect? And isn’t it fairly obvious that consumer spending is going to lag while big chunks of the population are jobless, or have taken pay cuts or forced furloughs, or are afraid they’ll be in those situations soon?
These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.
Posted Under:
Non-Daily Linkpile by Rob Walker on August 16, 2009
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I mentioned a while back that I was cataloging all my collected images of counterfunctional watches in one place. That’s just about done. See: Counterfunctionality: A Gallery. I’ll add new ones as they come along, but I’m pretty sure this is everything I’d stockpiled. It’s pretty impressive if you ask me. (But if you ask me, what would you expect me to say?)
I’m still not sure if I should expand the Gallery to include non-watch examples of counterfunctionality, or just stick to the one product category. This was all inspired, you may recall, by this Consumed.
And meanwhile, Things That Look Like Other Things will continue to be updated daily, for a good while at least. I still haven’t worked off my inventory on that one, and new examples seem to pop up every day.
This too is a spinoff of an earlier Consumed column.
That is all. Have a nice weekend.
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