MURKETING

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• Andrew Keen: The Demise of Web 2.0: Entertaining video interview with Keen. I always enjoy this guy. Whether you agree with him or not, he’s a welcome antidote to the rah-rah gurus he opposes. Plus, unlike most of them, he actually has a sense of humor (albeit rough-edged).
• Spending Money: “It’s worth pointing out that the steep decline in American savings rates coincided with lots of financial innovations that make it much easier for us to spend money.” That’s right. And none of them will be rolled back. Worth consideration when talking about thrift etc. trends in the long run.
• Self-serve commercial licensing: Proposal for “a new kind of self-serve, lightweight “commercial commons” that would allow makers to do small-scale commercial manufacturing of goods that remix copyrights and trademarks, with no upfront payments, and a fixed royalty rate that lets the makerverse operate as a giant, well-compensated R&D lab.” While this could have been expressed a lot better, the underlying idea actually sounds pretty clever.
• Peeved at Auto-Warranty Calls, a Web Posse Strikes Back: “Dozens of activists who have peppered the warranty company with messages including elevator music, threats and offers of rude services.” Activists? Is that the right word?
• ‘Youth Magnet’ Cities Hit Midlife Crisis: “Few Jobs in Places Like Portland and Austin, but the Hipsters Just Keep on Coming”
• Mercketing: Pharma giant published its own “scientific” journals.

In the New York Times Magazine: Lending Club

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A LOAN?
As Americans rethink the debt idea, peer-to-peer lending attracts interest

Debt, credit, lending — these are financial matters, to be evaluated empirically and mathematically. But that’s not all they are, especially lately. Value judgments about both personal and corporate borrowing and lending abound in this time of tight credit: who deserves to borrow and on what terms, who abused the idea of debt and why. As Margaret Atwood observes in “Payback,” her fascinating book about the meaning of debt: “Like air, it’s all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply.”

The debt supply was abundant back in 2005, when Renaud Laplanche dreamed up Lending Club, now one of the best known of a batch of companies that have added Web-enabled “peer to peer” lending to the ways that individuals can borrow money….

Read the column in the May 17, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• You Are What You Eat: “Mark Menjivar’s inventive exploration of hunger, “You Are What You Eat,” for which he photographed the contents of strangers’ refrigerators.” Via: www.onthegroundlookingup.com
• MOOF Bicycle: I’m a Worksman loyalist, but this is a nice bike. Plus: “integrated solar powered head and tail lights.” Nice nice nice.
• What’s the best fake brand from film or TV?: A link from AdFreak? I’m starting think people actually look at Murketing.com. Someday I’ll be famous! Anyway more on imaginary brands, including comments from AdFreak readers. Worth a look if you like the topic.
• Trapped in ‘Cyburbia’: Book argues for connection between 1960s counterculture & contemporary Web culture.
• Music piracy is still at a high level: Shocking.
• 100 Obscure and Remarkable CD Covers: According to somebody. Via Coudal.

Flickr Interlude

organization, originally uploaded by Diego Cupolo.

From a set titled Infinite Bushwick: “Green Village Used Furniture and Clothing – Bushwick, Brooklyn.”

To Do: Candela Structures Show

Learn all about these “cool little fiberglass structures out in Queens,” at The Candela Structures: A New York City History Mystery, opening at the City Reliquary this Saturday (opening reception: 7pm); on view at least until June 28th. More about this in The NYT today.

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• An ethical proposal for Firefox’s popular ad-removal tool.: “Firefox’s ad-removal tool is its most popular add-on. Now its creator wants to let you use it ethically.”
• Angry Ads Seek to Channel Consumer Outrage: “Campaigns that seek to channel the outrage, frustration and fear felt by consumers hit hard by what some are calling the Great Recession.” Wait, I thought the downturn was making us all pull together and feel good about what really matters. What happened to that?
• Pod office: Actually putting this in your yard would be stupid. But there’s an art project ready to happen here.
• Software to track our emotional outbursts: “We have come to rely on spell and grammar checkers to pull us up on poorly formed emails and documents. Perhaps we will also become dependent on word processors or email clients to warn you have hit the wrong note in an email complaining about an undelivered eBay purchase, or that a job application doesn’t make you sound intelligent enough.”
• How the Wealthy are Spending Their Money This Year: ‘Very carefully. People are being wary of risk and waiting to buy; they’re even booking vacations closer to the wire to “get a good deal.” Still, a high percentage of respondents agreed — “A few luxuries are important in tough times.”‘
• Banks, Reborn: Pix.
• How the Recession May Change NYC: Evidence is dubious, but: “Could create a more neighborly, civic-minded city.” Basically volunteerism is up and crime is down. The former could simply be explained by free time. The latter doesn’t square easily with the relationship between crime and economically depressed cities. We’ll see.

Is there an app for that?

Actually I don’t care if it’s an app, a site, a widget, a service, whatever, as long as it’s free (or perhaps very, very inexpensive). But:

1. I am a fan of three sports teams: The Houston Astros, The Houston Rockets, and The New Orleans Saints. I would like to know when those teams’ games will be broadcast in my area (which is not Houston, or New Orleans), on whatever channel, on my specific cable setup. That’s all I want to know. I don’t want to comb through the teams’ sites to find out, I don’t want to read the listings on every possible station where a sporting event might be televised. I want regular updates, in advance of the broadcast.

Does this exist?

[UPDATE: I think I actually have an answer for this second one! FeedFlix.com, suggested in the comments, seems to do almost everything I wanted… ] 2. I use Netflix. Sometimes we watch movies quickly, sometimes they sit for weeks on end, gathering dust, next to the DVD player. I want something I can sync to my Netflix account that will tell me how much I am paying per movie — a running tab. I want, in effect, to be prodded: “Do you realize that you have now paid $30 to rent that documentary about The Weather Underground, and you still haven’t watched it?” I also want to be able to find out, easily, how much I’ve paid per rental, during whatever time horizon I choose. (The last month, the last six months, the last year, etc.)

Does this exist?

If so, please tell me!

If not … well, some of you are clever young entrepeneurial techie types — make ’em!

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• Gallery of default anonymity: A work in progress: A link to my own site? Yes. The gallery has grown to 50+ and is awesome. So there.
• The Magic of Mystery: Interesting essay addressing, among other things, the weird hunger for spoilers. “Lately I go to Amoeba Music in Hollywood just to watch people flip through albums. It’s a lost art.”
• Happiness research & policy: Overview.
• What’s Your Story? The Psychological Science of Life History Research: Fascinating overview, via Mind Hacks. “Life stories are based on biographical facts, but they go considerably beyond the facts as people selectively appropriate aspects of their experience and imaginatively construe both past and future to construct stories that make sense to them and to their audiences, that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful.”
• Do professional movie critics evaluate films the same way as the rest of us?: Results seem obvious, but this is “one of the first studies to compare expert and lay opinion on films in a systematic way.”
• It’s cheap — but can you swallow it?: Salon tests fast food “value” meals.
• Quantified Stand-ins for Social Status: Those of you who came by my Blowing up the Brand chat should be interested in this: Interesting thoughts about measurability and social capital from Alice Marwick.
• Thinking man’s filter: “The deeper question has to do with whether the mountains of data now available to us inhibits thought or enables it, or has no particular effect on the quality of thought.”
• Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote: Depressing. “The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.”
• Book about fan-films and the obsessives who make them: “Homemade Hollywood delves into the technique, meaning, and creativity behind fan films, showing how imitation can be original, and how great creative people get their starts copying the things they love. Young also explores the love/hate relationship copyright holders (especially big studios) have with the fans who knock off their goods.”

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• Diesel’s new watch: Style trumps functionality: Yes, another example of counterfunctionality in the watch world, a favorite topic of mine, as you know. “The watch face is perplexingly blank; but two micro-clocks on each side of the casing provide a total of four timetelling indicators.” $365.
• Product Displacement, continued: Follow-up on Eyecube contains other interesting examples.
• Cover versions – a set on Flickr: Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Super! Via Listenerd
• On the electric guitar: “It is the symbol of liberation for the very practical reason that the guitarist can wander around while playing. He can smoke, spit or even sing while he plays. Electric guitarists.. are the dancers among modern musicians. Even Madonna has occasionally adopted a guitar as the necessary pendant of strutting musicianship. It is better to dance a bit with a guitar (Keith Richards) than dance a lot without one (Mick Jagger).” I don’t agree with everything in this essay, but the guy makes some pretty interesting observations.
• 25 logos with hidden messages: Via coudal

Imaginary brands as “product displacement”

As some of you know, I have (https://comfortdentalcareofbrookline.com/order-zithromax-500mg-online/) a particular fascination with imaginary brands — it’s a subject that’s come up in Consumed (here and here), and on this site, and in my Delicious links. So I was extremely interested to learn of this Tumblr blog, curated by Gladys Santiago, documenting what she calls  “product displacement.”

This involves the use of imaginary brands as, in effect, stand-ins for real brands we already know. For instance, above, a bucket of Colonel Likkin’s Southern Fried Chicken. I don’t have to tell you what that stands in for. Apparently it was used on the TV show Pushing Daisies. Other examples: Coffee Bucks on Scrubs, and TitTat candy on My Name Is Earl. (The Product Displacement blog also documents instances of unbranding — as when the logos are removed from cars and so on — but I’m not going to address that here.)

Santiago (who I got to meet, briefly, the other night at the Blowing Up The Brand event) explains the parameters of product displacement here. And here she argues that some product displacements are “arguably more clever and memorable than even some of the most exhaustedly planned brand integration strategies. ”

It requires no stretch of the imagination to recognize “Tit Tat” and “Coffee Bucks” as stand-ins for real brands, but that recognition allows audiences to engage with product placements in a manner that is significantly more encompassing than simply spotting a branded product onscreen.  Referencing these product displacements to their real world counterparts requires audiences to actively draw upon their cultural capital and awareness, therefore they have more resonance than a strategically placed can of Coca-Cola or character mindlessly raving about his/her T-Mobile phone.

Ultimately, product displacements have the opportunity to flatter the intelligence of viewers, especially if they are parodic and satirical in nature.  I particularly like My Name is Earl and Scrubs examples because they provide an allure of audience members being in on a private joke that mocks Kit Kat and Starbucks.

Pretty interesting!

Oh, and Santiago has also created this massive Flickr set of “deliberate and unintentional” examples of product appearances in scripted shows.

UPDATE: Follow-up  posts worth a look on Eyecube, and AdFreak.

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• What Lucha Libre is about: “In the heart of the fight card, a deeper conflict played on the racial tensions and stereotypes of a downtrodden immigrant audience. Among the wrestlers, the vilest of the vile were the members of La Legíon Extranjera, the Foreign Legion, gringos who openly disparaged the spectators, their language and their country. The invasion, in this sense, referred to the chance for the Mexican heroes to drive out the Foreign Legion.”
• As Storefronts Become Vacant, Ads Arrive: “Taking advantage of all the abandoned retail spaces in urban areas, marketers are leasing them at cut-rate prices and filling them with their ads.”
• The Optimist Conspectus: “Simply a survey of optimism; a series of answers to a deceptively-simple question: What are you optimistic about?” Via Swissmiss.
• Shift From Spending to Saving May Be Slump’s Lasting Impact: “This is not because Americans have suddenly become more financially virtuous or have learned the error of their free-spending ways. Instead, these experts say, Americans may have no choice but to continue pinching pennies.”
• Pimp That Snack: Totally disturbing site gives DIY instructions for making immense versions of Twix, Kit Kat, other junk food. Courtesy of Rebecca W. on Consumed’s Facebook page.
• Product Displacement: Fascinating tumblog. More on this later.
• The Surprising Satisfactions of a Home Funeral: Pretty interesting.

Just Looking

The current Giant Robot brings my attention to the work of Masakatsu Sashie, and I like it a lot.

Do I like it enough to reverse my decision to let my GR sub lapse? Well, no. But still. Really good stuff. I’d love to see it in real life. Meanwhile, check the artist’s site.

Linkpile (via Delicious)

• Custom Jewelry Line Celebrates Scars: Company called It’s My Scar renders your scar as a bracelet, ring, earrings or necklace.
• More downturn entertainment: Families compete to avoid financial ruin. And you can watch!
• Retailers play to the faithful: big spenders: “Luxury brands’ exclusive events (and maybe a charitable donation or two) entice elite shoppers more effectively than price-slashing sales.”
• Permanent-change-in-shopping theory questioned.: “Scholarly research has consistently shown that most Americans think their countrymen over-consume, but don’t think they do personally.”
• Mobile Phone Orchestra: I was skeptical. But this actually seems sort of amazing.

In The New York Times Magazine: Cheetos Giant

BIG CHEESE:
Is largeness its own reward?

We think of ourselves as sophisticated creatures, and the many brilliant minds of the consumer-industrial complex often think of us that way, too. But sometimes what we want seems pretty simple. Sometimes, we just want something big.

A case in point, perhaps: giant Cheetos….

Read the column in the May 10, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Thanks…

… to those who came out to the Blowing Up The Brand event last night. Great to see some old pals, meet some new people, and it’s always a highlight to get meet readers I’ve been in touch with only via email etc. (And it’s always a drag that some conversations/meetings are shorter than is ideal.) I owe some of you some correspondence now and will get to that in the next day or two, but I wanted to also thank Melissa Aronczyk and Deveon Powers having me. Good luck with today’s events!

Also since I talked about Twitter, I had to do a quick search this morning to see if any of you were tweeting. And you can guess the answer.

(Thanks also to Mobile Libris — a very fine business that I endorse.)