MURKETING

Synthetic consumers: Illegal?

The Times of London says that in the U.K.:

Hotels, restaurants and online shops that post glowing reviews about themselves under false identities could face criminal prosecution under new rules that come into force next year.

Businesses which write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be from customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”.

Nothing like this is going on the U.S. that I’m aware of, so all you American murketers can carry as normal.

Quotable

One of the reasons Louis Menand is among my favorite writers is that even his parenthetical asideas are a pleasure. For instance, in this entertaining essay about a new book of quotations, he notes that the section drawn from advertisements comes right after “the section for Theodor Adorno, who would have grimly appreciated the irony and probably composed an incomprehensible aphorism about it.”

The Best Sentence I Read All Day, but Tyler Cowen Didn’t.

“Heck the bananas inside could have been boogers.”

— from Sugar Needle #31

[What’s Sugar Needle? Who is Tyler Cowen? To steal a line from Alife: If you don’t know, find out.]

[Tip: Find out about Sugar Needle first.]

Endorsement

I don’t really have a good excuse for saying this, but, whatever, I’m in charge here, and it’s not like you paid to get in. So: I’m a big fan of Eleni Mandell, and here new album, Miracle of Five, on the mighty Zedtone label, is out. (Here’s her site, here’s her MySpace page, where you can hear streams etc.) The standout track for me is “Salt Truck,” but other highlights include “Girls,” “My Twin,” “Make-Out King,” “Somebody Else,” and “Dear Friend.” In other words, most of the album.

Again: I’m a fan.

A few years ago I wrote this piece about Mandell, basically demanding to know why she wasn’t more famous. Predictably, the piece had no discernable impact. More recently, there have been some nice writeups on her in the current issue of Bust (which puts her on “the pedestal of indie goddesses, alongside femme fatales like PJ Harvey and Nico”), and in the Jan-Feb issue of No Depression, where I learned, among other things, that she was the singer in that Carl’s Jr. ad that got so much buzz. (It featured Paris Hilton smearing herself with hamburgers or something. I never saw it.) And, she recorded a for a Crest commercial! But her vocal wasn’t used in the end.

Looking at the article again, I see the perfect phony rationale for bringing all this up: The No Depression writer asks if she “wrestles with demons over getting in bed with Madison Avenue.” Not really, she replies.

And she’s been into sewing and knitting lately. Crafting is so on-trend! What more do you need to know? Buy the album (it’s on iTunes as well), make her famous. You’ll be glad you did.

Dearfoams: The tank helmet connection

I was intrigued by the headline of this obit for Florence Z. Melton, which identifies her as “Creator of Slippers.” Meaning what?

Meaning Melton, and I guess her husband, created Dearfoams. Here’s the story the obit tells. Shortly after World War II, “fashion still had a military look: women wore double-breasted suits with padded shoulders.” Shoulder pads, however, had to be removed when a garment was machine-washed. Melton read about the foam rubber that Firestone had apparently come up with during the war , “as a helmet liner for World War II tank crewmen.” She thought it would be smart to adopt this for use in shoulder pads. Then she thought it would also be smart to adopt it for use in slippers.

And thus: Dearfoams. The obit says the number of such slippers sold by her company and others since 1968 is around 3 billion.

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by maproomsystems

“Abandoned shopping mall, outskirts of Saginaw, Michigan.” In a Flickr pool titled The Abandoned Pool.

Not the same good old boy

The Boston Globe isn’t the very first place I turn to for thoughts on the implications of current trends in country music, but: This editorial argues that “rumblings of discontent within the world of country music” regarding the Iraq war, reflect “how much the nation’s mood has shifted since March 2003.”

It’s telling when country luminary Merle Haggard has an entry on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of top protest songs. Country musicians and their fans tend to hail from conservative states with high enlistment rates.

Then again, the toll of the war on the sons and daughters of these states has been acute.

… the jingoistic swagger of Toby Keith’s [“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”] has given way to more somber songs seeking proper respect for returning service members. Trace Adkins’s “Arlington” describes a soldier who is buried in the famous national cemetery. Even Worley shows a flash of disillusionment: “If I’m not exactly the same good old boy that you ran around with before,” he sings, “I just came back from a war.”

Via The WSJ’s Informed Reader.

The next cute thing?

Somewhere or other I read that this character above, Mashimoro, is supposed to be Korea’s answer to Hello Kitty. Here is a series of Flash movies meant to establish Mashimor’s cutness, for leveraging on a range of fine products.

Cute enough to take on Hello Kitty? I checked in with the world’s reigning expert on these matters: Kyewt.

“Mashimaro is okkkkkkk…..,” Kyewt says. “He’s cute, but he’s no Kitty. It’s like, a different breed of cute. Koreans give it a good go, with Pucca too, but for me it’s too narrative or something. Plus, the merch is usually of lesser quality.

“Knocking it out the box though, is San-X. I like them even better than Sanrio (don’t tell Kitty). Their merchandise is great…the range is huge since it’s a longtime manufacturer of ‘fancy’ goods (tchotchke!). The brand has lots of characters and they get cuter and cuter. My sister’s favorite are the Mamegoma (tiny seals who eat soybeans and fit in the palm of your hand).

I am usually split between Rillakumun (“Relax Bear”) who is always sleeping and loves tissues and pancakes, and Nyan Nyan Nyanko, the cat who morphs into foods.

“With San-X and Sanrio, the characters have identifying personality features and maybe anecdotes (like Sanrio’s Cinnamaroll, the orphan pastry who had good fortune enough to land in a bakery where he is now surrounded by friends) but it’s so Japanese-y in its weirdness and sparseness…

“Whereas, like, Mashimoro uses bathroom humor. WTF? NOOOO. That’s a little bit on the NOT CUTE side of things.”

I expected a lot of Kyewt, but this is way beyond anything I’d imagined. It’s an avalanche of cute.

Unfortunately, the interesting-sounding San-X does not seem to have made much in the way of inroads to the U.S./English-speaking world. I gather that some of its products are available through some retailers here, but the brand doesn’t seem to have an English-language site. Kyewt is a jet-setter and, thus has access to the Japanese marketplace — not helplful to those of who don’t get out much!

Still, a round of applause to Kyewt for this outstanding overview.

Oh, and one last note specific to cuteness and Japan: Apparently, SpongeBob is catching on there. According to the L.A. Times:

SpongeBob SquarePants attracts nearly 1.9 million Japanese households to his TV show daily and is raking in a growing share of the $5 billion in annual retail sales for Nickelodeon, the Viacom Inc. unit behind the show.

And he’s doing it by capturing the hearts of Japan’s young women — not children, his most loyal fans in the U.S.

“I started collecting Bob because I think he’s cute and he stands out,” said Mayu Takahashi, a 21-year-old student who was shopping in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku district holding a SpongeBob tote bag. “Some of my friends say he’s a creepy kind of cute.”

Branding by the slice

In Consumed: Pizza Patrón: How a chain restaurant learned to sell pizza to Hispanics — but not Hispanic pizza.

When a chain of pizza restaurants with locations in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California and Colorado recently announced a promotional stunt that involved accepting pesos, it sparked controversy, national news coverage and even threats. It seems predictable that the peso as an acceptable currency in Denver, say, 700 miles from the Mexican border, would have that effect at a time of emotional disagreements about immigration in America. But behind this hot-button debate is something else worth considering: what the success of a Hispanic-focused pizza chain says about Americanness.

Read more

To Do in Jersey City

WE ARE NATURE / works in black masking tape

Originally uploaded by K8 Balls O’ Fire

If I still lived in JC, I’d go check this out. I remember seeing this person’s work (it’s all done with black masking tape) on view at some local eatery or other. It was cool…

Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not Debbie Boone’s

Earlier in the week, perusing MetaFilter, I couldn’t resist investigating this post promising a YouTube video of “Patti Smith singing ‘You Light Up My Life.’ Seriously.”

It was an appearance Kids Are People, Too, a saccharine affair with a harmless host and an audience of children, who seemed surprisingly excited to get to ask Patti Smith questions. When that part of the segment was over, she said, “I want to sing ‘You Light Up My Life,’ and I know that’s a weird choice from me, but I like that song, ‘cos I think if you really get into the words it’s got a great message.” And then she proceeds to deliver a version of the song that’s respectful, but definitely her own; she doesn’t make a joke of it, but she’s not going through the motions. That is to say, she totally nails it.

Here’s the link.

I loved this. I’m not the world’s biggest Patti Smith fan, but she was responsible for some truly sublime musical moments in her heyday, and I’d have to count this among them. All week I thought there must be something to say about somebody who started her first album by droning “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” unabashedly embracing Debbie Boone’s megahit, and how that relates to the ongoing niche vs. mass debate of recent years. By now it’s clear I’m not going to come up with any profound statements, so I’ll just ask a question: While YouTube is a powerful example of our modern, tech-ennabled, post-mass culture, why is it that the most interesting clips there are invariably at least 25 years old?

Virtual data

Long before the great journalistic pile-on about Second Life (which of course I participated in), there was already longstanding interest in, study of, and journalistic pile-ons related to the spending of real money in other virtual worlds. I participated in that, too: Here’s an October 2005 Consumed pegged to Sony’s capitulation to such economies in the form of a venture called Station Exchange. I bring this up because in a recent report summarized here by CNet:

Sony Online Entertainment has concluded that so-called real-money trades can be good for both gamers and publishers if handled at controlled locations such as Sony’s own Station Exchange, a 1-year-old experiment to make transactions of virtual goods for real money a direct part of EverQuest II rather than an illicit activity.

That sounds like a somewhat self-serving conclusion for Sony, I suppose, but even alpha virtual worlds thinker Edward Castronova seems pleased that the study was done: “We’ve never had reliable data on this phenomenon at all.” CNnet continues:

During the last year, Station Exchange ran on two of more than 30 EverQuest II servers, allowing players to conduct so-called game asset transactions for real money. Sony Online earned $274,083 from its listing fees and commissions on the 51,680 transactions conducted in the first year. While that’s hardly a fortune, it cost Sony Online almost nothing to run the service.

Julian Dibbell, author of Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, is also quoted.

Also: Castronova’s Synthetic World News passes along the Sony press release.

Flickr Interlude

Flickr photo by shadowplay

Just one of many great images in an amazing shadowplay Flickr set titled Doll’s Play.

“Littered with sharp plastic shards”

Consumer Reports looks at really bad packaging, singling out a heavily defended Oral B toothbrush:

A tight fit between the plastic skin and cardboard thwarted scissors. Our tester grabbed a box cutter but hacked up the box as an unavoidable result. After removing the clamshell and opening the box, she had to dislodge parts from a foam case, yank off one plastic bag covering the power cord and another protecting additional components, then pop perforations on smaller clamshells shielding the toothbrush heads. Her work table was littered with sharp plastic shards.

Praised by the magazine: Packaging for a Logitech mouse, a different Oral-B brush, and others.

Via the WSJ’s (recommended!) Informed Reader blog.

Imaginary brands revisited

Anyone among you who remembers this earlier item on imaginary brands may be interested in the recent Brandweek bit on “reverse product placement.”

While traditional product placement refers to integrating a real brand into a fictional environment, an idea that’s gaining traction is to create a fictional brand in a fictional environment and then release it into the real world.

Take 2 Interactive, the videogame company, has several fictional brands in its Grand Theft Auto games, including Sprunk cola and Cluckin’ Bell, a fast-food chicken chain that has its own Web site (cluckinbellhappychicken.com) that includes menu items like the Cluckin’ Huge Meal and the Cluckin’ Little Meal. A Take 2 rep declined to comment on any plans to release those brands in the real world anytime soon, though future games will feature more fictional brands.