THE ART OF POLITICS:
Does pro-Obama creativity say more about the candidate or his fans?
As noted here Friday, this week’s Consumed is about Obama as muse.
Creative types have backed politicians before, but the outpouring of Obama-promoting creativity, free of charge and for the campaign’s benefit, has been remarkable. Does it say more about the candidate — or perhaps about his supporters?
Read the column in the April 13, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ (includes feedback/contact info) is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
BATTLE CRIES:
How one veteran tries to use entertainment to to convey the war experience
If you’ve seen the polls tracking American interest in the war in Iraq, you already know: If the war were a TV show, it would be cancelled.
The war, of course, is not a form of entertainment. And the apparent loss of interest is a source of frustration to current and former military personnel. One man has found a way to convert that frustration into something positive — a form of entertainment: In 2006 he founded To the Fallen Records, which has since released three compilations of songs made mostly by current military personnel or recent veterans.
Read the column in the April 6, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
STYLE DECODER:
How a new variety of bar code became a medium
The real attraction of these codes appears to be not just cracking them but making your own. Two-dimensional codes have “this democratic thing … You can create your own, put hidden messages in it. There’s something playful in it.”
Read the column in the March 30, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine, or here.
Previous Murketing entries on 2-d barcodes here and here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
PHOTO FINISH:
In a curious reversal, an innovation travels from the mainstream to the creative fringe — and disappears.
Traditionally, the role of those in the creative and cultural fringes is to lead: embracing unusual ideas, modes of expression and even products that gradually catch on with the mainstream and the masses. (By which time, of course, the fringe has moved on.) But in a recent reversal of the fringe-to-mass journey, many adventurously creative individuals have lately been in a state of rage, mourning and protest over the disappearance of a treasured tool — one that years ago reached, saturated and then passed out of the mainstream: Polaroid instant film.
Read the Consumed column in the March 16, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
NOTE: There is no Consumed column next Sunday, I took a week off. The column returns in the March 30 issue.
Lexicographical Beneficence:
Time-wasting edification for a cause.
Online entertainment improves on older forms, like television, by way of its activeness. For example, watching a presidential debate on TV is passive. Hunting for, commenting on, remixing and forwarding a YouTube video of someone being Tasered at a political event is active.
Despite the unassailable nature of this popular critique, engagement can be judged in other ways. For example, among the many time-killing activities the World Wide Web makes available is FreeRice.com. While it is surely a diverting time killer, it is more than that: it’s a self-improvement time killer on behalf of a greater good.
Read the Consumed in the March 9, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or right here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
SCARING UP DEMAND
How a food panic can change our habits — for a while, anyway.
Just about a year ago, tainted food killed more than a dozen dogs and cats around the United States, and a massive recall involved more than 100 varieties of edible pet products from a range of big-selling brands. As the crisis snowballed, there was a lot of talk about how the recall had given a boost to the sellers of natural, organic or raw pet foods, as panicked consumers sought safe alternatives.
In fact, such brands reported that sales had doubled or tripled or better, while news accounts said that mainstream brands were scrambling. A fundamental shift in mass-market consumer behavior seemed to be under way.
Was it?
Read the column in the March 2, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
TAG SALE:
A specialty ink with a graffiti past aims for the broader market.
Back in the 1990s, graffiti writer KR invented his own ink. Over time, KR’s ink has become KRINK, a brand of inks and markers (and T-shirts sold at places like Colette and Alife.)
Of course KR, now known as Craig Costello, isn’t positioning KRINK as vandal supplies, but rather as a creative tool. For one thing, the market for the street art aesthetic and influence is a lot bigger than the market of actual street artists.
Read the column in the February 24, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or right here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
Posted Under:
Brand Underground,
Consumed
This post was written by Rob Walker on February 23, 2008
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DRESSING UP
It’s just like paper paper dolls — only digital, global, mercantile and branded.
In Consumed, head of Stardoll.com Mattias Miksche an answer to anyone made uncomfortable by commercialization in this girls’ world. “We have a list of 1,200 brands our users have asked us for,” he says, from aspirational names like Dior to quotidian ones like the Gap to “the most obscure Ukrainian jeans brand.”
Up next: the ability to design their own digital apparel — and, if they like, sell it.
Read the column in the February 17, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or right here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN
Winning consumer votes by catering to political disdain.
In Consumed this week, a look at a business with a rather broad potential audience — but also a built-in expiration date.
Given all the excitement generated by heated contests for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, it’s easy to forget that the current resident of the White House will not be moving out for nearly a year.
Then again, maybe you know precisely when that particular change occurs, since the date — Jan. 20, 2009 — has found its way onto a variety of buttons, bumper stickers, T-shirts and even golf balls and hot sauce. In fact, the rendering of that date as 1.20.09 was trademarked by a small company that sold more than $1 million worth of “Bush’s Last Day” merchandise in 2007.
Read the column in today’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, or here.
The Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The all-new Consumed Facebook page is here.
CLEAN LOOK
How a mass brand’s iconic design fares in a niche-ified world.
In Consumed this week, a look at a brand icon: Tide. The orange-and-yellow circles of its logo have that rare instant-read power that suggests not just Tide but branding in general. But while once there was a thing called Tide, today there are 39 different kinds of Tide. (Not counting Tide To Go, which will be the subject of the brand’s first-ever Super Bowl ad this weekend.)
While this responds to consumer demand for variety, it brings certain challenges to the iconic power that is one of Tide’s marketplace strengths: namely, balancing that recognizable design with the idea of a range of choices.
To assess the Tide logo in the contemporary marketplace, I consulted J. Duncan Berry of Applied Iconology. Berry has a Ph.D. in art history from Brown and for a time taught there and at the Rhode Island School of Design, but these days his specialty is semiotic analysis of package design for consumer-product companies.
Read the column in The New York Times Magazine, or here.
The brand-new Consumed Facebook page is here.
I’m not exactly a power-user of Facebook. I have an account, and I have a little more than 100 “friends” there, and I do check the news feed once a day or so. But I’m not very active.
Even so, when Facebook announced the feature where brands or whatever could set up a page for “fans,” I immediately thought: I’ll make one for Murketing! But every time I pondered it, I couldn’t quite figure out what the point would be — besides naked self-promotion, of course.
But last night, I abruptly created a page for Consumed, my Times Magazine column. Should you be into this sort of thing, you can now declare yourself a “fan” of the column. It’s here.
Beyond that the page is presently rather threadbare, since I knocked it together and alerted most of my Facebook friends to its existence in approximately three minutes. (So far about 50 have declared their fandom.) Yes, I realize it’s sort of stupid to create a Facebook page and then try to come up with an after-the-fact reason for it to exist.
And here’s my primary reason for this post: Now that I have this page, what might I do there? What would be interesting, useful, or valuable to readers? Any ideas?
My secondary reason for this post is to explain — in the interest of “transparency” — why I did this. If anyone’s interested, that’s after the jump. Read more
EXTRA HELPING:
What happens when a philanthropic project becomes so popular it has trouble keeping up with demand?
This week Consumed looks at Kiva.org, which connects developing world entrepreneurs with people in the First World willing to make interest-free microloans. Maybe you’ve heard of Kiva: Its innovative model has been praised by everyone from Bill Clinton to Oprah Winfrey.
In fact, it’s partly because of all the attention that Kiva has had to cap loans at $25, to let more loaners participate. As a spokeswoman says: “We don’t want people coming to the Web site who want to make a loan and there’s no one to loan to.”
Read Consumed in the January 27, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Posted Under:
Consumed
This post was written by Rob Walker on January 26, 2008
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FAMILY VALUES:
How parents and their kids come together around a children’s show — and its collateral merch.
This week in Consumed, I write about Yo Gabba Gabba. Perhaps you’ve heard of this show aimed at the preschool audience and airing on Nickelodeon. It is also said to be Big On The Internet, with grownups forwarding around clips, and forming an audience that might be bigger than the one watching on television.
In part, this trans-generational appeal puts the show in the same category as what Salon once called “kindie rock” — culture for “hipster parents,” as well as their kids. (Billboard just published a related article.)
I was interested to learn that Yo Gabba Gabba is produced by a company that also happens to have an ownership interest in Kid Robot, the “designer toy” boutique/company. This arrangement means that as an entertainment property, Yo Gabba Gabba is particularly well positioned to make the most of its dual audience with its collateral product. As the production company’s president says: “I challenge you to find another preschool show that four months after going on the air is actually selling adult apparel at Barneys.”
Read Consumed in The New York Times Magazine here.
Foliage Handsoaps: How soaps that look like little hands reconcile the contradictory attractions of novelty and familiarity.
Murketing regulars may recall my interest in things that look like other things. Today’s Consumed column in The New York Times Magazine addresses this subject by way of Foliage Handsoap.
The contrast that is embedded in things that look like other things — and its curious appeal — suggests something about one of the great conundrums of consumer behavior, or possibly even of human psychology: our attraction to the novel and our seemingly contradictory attraction to the familiar.
Read the column here.
Returned Goods: How unwanted product flows back into the consumer ecosystem.
This week’s Consumed column in The New York Times Magazine is about how “reverse logistics” processes are changing, to deal more efficiently with the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods consumers return every year — ranging from the defective to the perfectly-good-but unwanted.
Electronics makers are trying to get better at evaluating the “perishable” products that we send back to them to sort the useless from the potentially re-sellable. Some spin this as e-waste-reducing “social responsibility,” but there’s another factor as well: “There’s a huge market” for returned electronics,” one professor says. And indeed, one firm specializing in such re-selling liquidates $3.5 million worth of merchandise every day.
Read the column here.
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