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. With Remix redux
In light of yesterday’s logo remix entry, I thought I may as well pass along this Staple/Bobbito bit. MLF apparently stands for major league footwork.
Dept. of pleasing logo remixes
I think this is not-at-all new, but I still like it. The relevant link.
It’s really different this time
During the dot-com bubble, you needed $5 million to do stupid ideas. Now you can do stupid ideas for 12 grand.
— Guy Kawasaki, for whom I have newfound respect and admiration after reading this interview.
Further evolution
The Geico cavemen sitcom has been picked up by ABC, and will air Tuesday nights at 8 Eastern. So reports the NYT:
The half-hour series will have a different cast from the seven commercials that have appeared since the campaign was introduced in 2004…. But the premise of the sitcom is the same as the campaign: The cavemen, living in contemporary America, seek to counter what they perceive to be prejudice against them….
ABC hopes that the popularity of the caveman campaign will translate into ratings, [some network guy] said, as part of the network’s plans to reinvigorate the lackluster sitcom genre by “taking real chances” with premises and plot lines. ..
ABC and Geico “may collaborate on some form of integration,” [the guy] said, referring to interweaving references to Geico into story lines.
Search that articles the “previous coverage” links in vain for a reference to this Consumed on the subject.
Also: AdRants has posted that the early word on the sitcom is not good.
Finally: Here is a clip and some hype from ABC’s site.
Event marketing
Having developed an interest in the conference/guru/expertise industry lately, I was not surprised by this, but interested to see it get an airing in public on PSFK:
Apparently payola is a common practice in the conference business — a sponsor pays, a sponsor gets to speak. And we thought the whole conference business was a big scam already. I suppose we were naive to think that conference organizers were curators of the best content available for the attendees. Turns out, that attendees are being charged a lot of money to listen to the speakers who pay the most sponsorship money.
There are many variations on this out there in the conference world. On the other hand, it’s not particularly clear to me what the motives and expectations of conference attendees are. Are they interested in hearing from famous names? Are they interested in hearing things that confirm their existing biases and points of view? Are they interested in things that challenge their existing biases? Are they actually more interested in the other attendees than the presenters?
“Blogola” and other ways of skirting those pesky elites
The WSJ has two interesting articles today on the empowered grass-roots culture that’s replacing those annoying gatekeeper elites we’re all so sick of. The first is available here. It’s about TV networks blowing off critics and newspaper writers and buttering up bloggers — sorry, focusing on “blog outreach.” After all, as the Journal notes, mainstream media writers a often restricted from accepting freebies that might influence their coverage. Happily, the honest and transparent grass roots have no such rules.
Giving away DVDs is a cheap way to curry favor, but some networks are courting bloggers with Hollywood’s true currency: access. Fox News Channel says it recently thought about trying to flatter a New York Times writer with an invitation to an industry dinner hosted by President Bush. Instead, Fox says it sent invites to several New York media blogs — outlets it considered to be of more strategic importance.
Bloggers often return home with pinwheels in their eyes…. Indeed, some blog writers are even happy to let networks play editor. “I hope you like it,” wrote [one blogger who had been invited onto the set of a sitcom] in an email to CBS to flag her “Old Christine” posting. “If there’s anything you’d like me to add, just tell me and I will.” She signed the note, “XOXO.”
The best part? “Network PR experts say blogs are important because they often serve as idea farms for professional reporters.”
And why shouldn’t they, hm?
To all of this I can only add that the same basic practices are, I suspect, extremely common with product and cool-shit blogs. When not busy trumpeting the new transparency, I have a feeling that many such bloggers are positively raking in the free merch. It’s hard for me to say for certain, of course, since they very rarely disclose policies regarding such matters. (Allow me to transparently reiterate that I obviously do not accept freebies.)
Anyway, the other story is about “features like most-viewed, most-popular and most-emailed lists” that theoretically “democratize news and information, advocates say, letting consumers play a role in what’s deemed worthy of others’ attention, taking it out of the hands of an unseen editorial elite.” Not surprisingly, these features can be gamed.
One interesting excerpt:
Online video sites face challenges as well, as people try to game the “view counts” for clips by using automated software to repeatedly click on videos. Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has spotted spyware software that hijacks individuals’ Web browsers and makes them view specific videos on YouTube. Other spyware Mr. Edelman has documented forces users’ computers to visit a clip on YouTube and give it a top five-star rating.
“Our computers are so good at counting that we treat their answers as infallible, but they’re subject to gaming both through ordinary counting errors and through systematic attack,” says Mr. Edelman.
All together — or not
Got 20 minutes to kill? Sure you do.
Check out this 1970s Navy recruiting film, narrated by Lou Rawls, and with a superdope sound track by “Port Authority, the US Navy’s Soul Band.”
Rawls, in his astonishingly authoritative voice, explains how when you sign up, you canlearn electronics, “like these brothers.” You’ll “get threaded out” with a Navy uniform. You’ll learn to swim — “swim man, dig?” And you’ll also experience this epiphany: “When you’re hungry enough, common weeds taste like soul food.”
Getting “threaded out” is a piece of slang that really, really needs to make a comeback.
More seriously, the film is a pretty fascinating document. I became aware of it after hearing an NPR piece the other day about the near-collapse of black enlistment in the armed forces; African-American sentiment has been strongly anti-the-Iraq-war from the start, and apparently black enlistment has fallen fifty percent since it started.
It’s interesting, with this old recruiting film, to sort of listen between the lines, and decide for yourself just how openly it is saying: Look, this is a racist and sexist society, but as an African-American, woman, or both, you’ll have a much better chance of rising on your merits than you will in civilian life.
Or, as Rawlsy soulfully puts it: “The new Navy is together, all together.”
Toy Story
In Consumed: The Vladmaster: How a 3-D children’s toy found a new life as an indie art product.
Media forms come and go, and often this seems like a zero-sum game. New forms of communication pop up and others promptly become obsolete as a result: the killer app leaves a dead-media trail. When a man named William Gruber created what became known as the View-Master in 1938, he had high hopes for it as a media format. After all, it took a place among the wonders of the 1939 World’s Fair. “His original intention for the stereoscopic viewing device — he didn’t even like the name View-Master — is that it would be an educational medium,” says Annie Dubinsky, assistant director of the 3D Center of Art and Photography. Instead, it became a wildly popular children’s toy.
The View-Master is still around and is not radically different from what it was decades ago. Each View-Master reel contains 14 pictures that, to the viewer, appear as seven stereoscopic images. Hold the plastic device up to your eyes and advance through the images by pressing a lever on the side. Many would see this decidedly low-tech artifact as nothing more than a mildly nostalgia-inducing bit of consumer kitsch. But a few years ago, a 29-year-old Portland artist who calls herself Vladimir saw something different: a potentially potent media form….
Continue reading by way of this NYT Magazine link, or this Boston Globe link.
Additional links: Vladmaster; 3D Center of Art and Photography; Toy Hall of Fame View-Master entry.
A totem of a forgotten era
Any of you kids old enough to remember the heyday of Kozmo.com? Here’s a (refresher).
I hadn’t thought about the company in some until reading this post by DL Byron on BikeHugger about somebody “scoring” an old Kozmo bag on eBay:
I’ve seen these treasured bags in Seattle and San Fran. I don’t know more about their history, other than they were used by Kozmo messengers and last forever. I also periodically miss Kozmo and their tragic dotbomb.
Check the post for nostalgic comments about Kozmo etc. Apparently these bags have sold for as much as $280! Pretty amusing.
Will Web 2.0 produce similar artifacts? No way! It’s totally different this time around!
Right?
Phad watch: “Ecosexual”
Somebody used this term, “ecosexual,” in a pitch I got the other day. It’s a “new trend,” of course.
So what’s an ecosexual? Someone who could pass for gay, straight, or a bamboo-cutting-board fetishist?
Or does ecosexuality involve carbon-neutral porn, organic cotton lingerie, sex with the compact flourescent lights on, or sustainable — oh, never mind.
According to Wired an ecosexual is: “A person who’s into hybrid cars, low-energy lightbulbs, and recycling.”
Really, really, disturbingly into those things, I guess.
Fashion corner
The Hater assesses celebrity current-events T-shirts:
Even though topical celebrity joke t-shirts are the lowest, most annoying form of fashion communication, they can also be a useful tool—especially when it comes to figuring out who in a crowd of strangers has a horrible sense of humor. Engaging in conversation in these situations is unnecessary. If someone is wearing a “Free Paris” T-shirt, that person is not funny, and should be avoided at all costs.
The rest of “What Your Jokey Paris Hilton T-Shirt Says About You,” including examples of topical Hilton Ts, is here.
(Thanks Cousin Lymon.)
The view from Murketing HQ earlier this morning
So this is what I woke up to today, around 6 a.m. or so: A fire across the street. No one was hurt, it started upstairs, which was vacant. Some people live downstairs but they’re okay. This was sort of the high point of the fire, when I was getting a little concerned. But the Savannah Fire Dept got it under control pretty quickly.
Defining innovation down
Speaking of the WSJ, Ann Zimmerman (a long-ago colleague of mine in my Dallas Observer days, though I haven’t spoken to her in many years), had an interview with the honchos at Target the the other day. The theme, of course, was how wildly cool and design-forward Target is. Example? One exec offers this:
We share ideas so that a good idea in one part of the company can translate to another. We have the line Simply Shabby Chic, for instance, and we’re able to say well, you know, that has application in pets. Now who’d have thought that you could take print and pattern and what we do in dinnerware and put it on doggy bowls? We’re structured in a way that fosters innovation.
That’s right. A pattern from dinnerware, recycled on a dog bowl = innovation.
We live in a time of wonder.
Factories and branding
Previously noted here: Good questions raised by Notbillable about the “startling fact” highlighted by the pet-food recall that scores of brands were all made by the same manufacturer.
The WSJ has a good story on this today, by Ellen Byron. She got someone from Menu Foods to talk, at least a little, and offers plenty of context and examples of how widespread similar practices are, across many industries.
“The sheer magnitude of how many branded products come from one source erodes the whole basic premise of what branding is in the eyes of the consumer — they feel duped,” says Eli Portnoy, who heads Portnoy Group Inc., a Los Angeles-based brand-strategy firm.
Duped by branding? Say it ain’t so!
An empire of lattes
An NYT dispatch from Riyadh on the “cultural collisions” within Saudi Arabia today, notes in passing that Starbucks cafes “are as ubiquitous here as they are in Manhattan.”
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Kim Fellner's book 
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