MURKETING

Murketing Arts: The page

Yesterday’s Q&A with Jen Bekman finally prodded me to put together a new page on this site that I’d been planning for a while: The Murketing Arts. Like the Subculture Inc., International Review of Wine Packagaing and Aesthetics, and Unconsumption pages, The Murketing Arts groups thematically related items from this site into a single and, really, quite convenient, page.

The image above is “I Bought These,” by Kate Bingaman-Burt, “soon to be part of a 20X200 edition,” according to Jen Bekman’s post, linking to this site’s interview with her, which of course also links back to her site. So if you’re very careful, you can click back and forth between the two sites for up to an hour.

Hats off: A little too much street cred for New Era in Cleveland

The Plain Dealer reports that New Era has withdrawn certain baseball caps from the market in Cleveland. Why? Because these particular caps are decorated with “logos associated with local gangs.”

Activists said the baseball caps bore the names of neighborhoods as well as local gangs such as “Da Valley,” for Garden Valley housing project; “10-5,” short for the 105th Street gang called Waste-5; and “HVD,” referring to the street gang on Harvard Avenue.

A New Era spokesperson named Dana Marciniak basically has the company pleading ignorance and promising to be “more vigilant” in the future.

Marciniak said the company was unaware the neighborhood names were affiliated with gangs and removed the hats once they were alerted. She estimated 100 hats were made. A clerk at the Richmond mall Finish Line store said they were taken off shelves on Saturday.

“We make a lot of hats for different colleges, neighborhoods and groups,” Marciniak said, citing a popular Bronx hat as an example. “We get designs from different areas. We assumed some of the Cleveland groups were a reflection of the neighborhood.”

Leaving aside the amusing reference to “Cleveland groups” (“Gangs? We thought they were groups!”), the comparison to the Bronx doesn’t really cut it, since the Bronx isn’t a neighborhood, it’s a borough with a population well over a million. More to the point, nobody has to do any research to figure out that the Bronx is resonant geography.

I can’t find any images of the caps, and the story isn’t totally clear on this, but if New Era figured out that a particular housing project in Cleveland might be a good thing to tout on a hat, and that this housing project was locally known as “Da Valley” — well, it requires some effort to learn such things. And the whole point of a project like this is to make sure it’s done in a way that has some kind of deep local street cred, basically to communicate the idea that: Damn, New Era knows.

So it would be interesting to know a bit more about how the company gathered that information. Maybe it hired a Cleveland cool-guy, who neglected to mention the relevant geography/gang connections. Maybe a company rep just talked to hip-looking kids in the park or at the mall. Or maybe they just had an intern gather the information by cruising around MySpace or something.

Obviously not every expression of geographic pride signifies gang affiliation, but you don’t exactly have to be an expert on this topic to know that geography-gang connections are pretty routine. So while it’s possible that New Era’s research was incomplete, I suspect it’s also possible that, somewhere in the company’s street-cred supply chain, somebody simply decided the risk was worth it.

It might be easier to judge by the hats themselves, so if you see one, let me know. Perhaps they’ll be popping up on eBay soon?

P.S.: For a quick primer on New Era and its (fairly impressive, to date) street cred or authentic reputation or however you want to put it, see this earlier Consumed column.

Jen Bekman 20X200: The Q&A

Murketing noted with interest the recent announcement by Jen Bekman, founder of the jen bekman gallery, that she was planning a new project called 20X200 — “prints in limited editions of 200, for $20 each.” The concept raised some interesting questions, about the value of art, the boundary between the inclusive and the exclusive, the state of cultural expertise these days, and the possibility that as products become more like art, art is becoming more like products.

So, I posed these questions to Ms. Bekman, who graciously answered them.

Q: I noticed in the comments to your announcement somebody said something like, “This is great, an alternative to Target/Ikea blahness.” Is this project a more exclusive alternative to mass-ness, or a more inclusive alternative to the rarified high art world?

A: It’s both really, which is why it’s so exciting to me. It’s radically different than typical artworld fare because the work is so inexpensive and the editions are big by normal standards, but how can an edition of 200 of anything be mass market? 20×200 is bigger in scale than most fine art editions, but I’m not selling posters at the Met.

You mention TinyShowcase as inspiration — how is this different?

It’s very similar, really. Our aesthetics are slightly different, although I am consistently impressed with the TS choices and there’s definitely overlap. (Amy Ross, the painter who just had a solo show with me, recently did a TS edition that sold out in three minutes, literally.)

The biggest differences:

* I’m doing photo editions in addition to mixed-media and print editions, which is a natural for me since my photography program is strong.

* They’re artists, I’m a gallerist. We’re all curators, but there are some fundamental differences in how we approach things.

One of the things that’s so cool about TS is their whole DIY approach, artists doing something cool with other artists, with no pretense and a very laid-back style. My style is different, by virtue of my background as a business person and the fact that I own a gallery. I’m certainly not uptight, but I’m definitely trying to figure out how to make a business out of this — I see 20×200 as something that supports my gallery’s program and will definitely use it, in part, to market shows and existing inventory. Read more

iSelfPromote

Business Week’s marketing blog says there is already a “variety of user-generated ads” on YouTube for the iPhone. The lesson extracted from this is that: “the power of YouTube is amazing” and “every brand must wake up to this.” Given how many times I’ve read that exact same epiphany, I’m surprised there are brands that haven’t, but anything is possible.

Anyway, I’d like to point out what’s actually interesting about user-generated ads for a product that isn’t on the market yet. This is the issue of motivation. Is this brand evangelism, or some other expression of product fandom? If so, that’s pretty weird, given that the grass-roots ad makers haven’t tried the iPhone, and know nothing more about its quality than what Steve Jobs has asserted. The idea that people would not only scramble to buy the new new thing without hearing any unbiased opinions from trusted friends (isn’t that what’s driving the big word of mouth revolution? that we trust our friends, not companies or traditional authority figures?), but actually create promotional content on behalf of that thing, would seem to be evidence that consumer manipulation has reached a new level — gullibility 2.0, perhaps.

The more likely explanation, I suspect, is co-promotion. A year ago, in Consumed, I wrote about Firefox’s user-generated ad contest, in the context of the popular marketing concept of “co-creation,” which refers to ways that companies and brands “allow” consumers to collaborate with them. As noted there, the winners of Firefox’s contest both happened to be people eyeing a career in the making of ads and films, and who pretty obviously saw enterting the contest as a way to promote themselves by skillfully promoting Firefox. Thus: co-promotion.

Indeed, it looks some, and maybe a lot, of the “user-generated” ads for the iPhone are connected to a similar contest from a company called ViralMedium — “your chance to show the world you’ve got the vision to write a script, cast your actors, and throw in some mind-blowing effects for the most revolutionary product to come along in decades, the Apple iPhone.”

It’s not clear whether ViralMedium was hired by Apple to do this, or is simply jumping onto the iPhone bandwagon to promote itself. In any case, I suspect that anybody taking the time to make a home-brew iPhone ad basically recognizes that the product is going to be a big deal, swathed in hype and attention — and they want in on that. It’s a way to participate in what will probably qualify as at least a low-grade cultural phenomenon, so that when people get around to searching for all things related to the iPhone, these grass-roots ads will be among those things. If one of them is good, it’ll get forwarded around, and the creator will become Internet-famous at the very least. My guess, in other words, is that this is not about evangelizing for Apple’s brand. It’s about leeching off of Apple’s brand.

Which is both more interesting than the mere fact of yet more unsanctioned ads on YouTube, and also (I can only assume) more important for brand managers to understand.

Neighborhood codes

Having just written that item the other day about QR codes, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this sticker in the Lower East Side. Mild investigation indicates that the relevant project, Semapedia, is guided by the idea of sticking code chunks like this in various physical spaces, where you can scan them with your (tech-appropriate) phone, and get information from Wikipedia. Directions for creating Semapedia tags, and thus a fuller explanation, are here.

So in this case you’d get the Wikipedia entry on Loisaida. Or maybe just material taken from that entry. Here’s what the URL on that sticker delivers, and I assume it’s what you’d get on your phone: link.

I think this also caught my eye because I’ve always been interested in the fading of the term Loisaida, which to me had a kind of socio-political undertone to it, in favor of the more hipster-friendly and trend-ready shorthand, LES. Maybe ABC No Rio is the last vestige of Loisaida and Alife Rivington Club, practically next door, is, for better or worse, the epicenter of LES. Anyway, I can’t remember ever hearing anyone under, say, 30, refer to the Lower East Side as Loisaida. And at the moment I first saw this sticker, I was on my way to dinner at one of the new “boutique” hotels that are part of the 21st century LES experience. Now that I think about it, once the boutique-hotel aesthetic takes over completely (and even brand-underground pioneers like Alife get run out in favor of, I don’t know, Marc Jacobs or whatever), it will be safe to trot out Loisaida again, as a kind of retro-authenticity signifier. Maybe there will even be a hotel with that very name.

On the other hand, the reason that my snapshot here is so terrible is that this sticker happened to be on the edge of a small, vacant lot that was teeming with rats. So some piece of the pre-boutique Lower East Side still exists.

Here is the Semapedia Flickr pool, and here are all Flickr photos with a Semapedia tag.

Cleaning Up

In Consumed: Lifebuoy: A brand shows its social responsibility to the poor — by selling to them.

“Corporate social responsibility” often means leveraging the concern (or guilt) of the affluent on behalf of those less fortunate: Sell to first-world consumers and redistribute some of the profits to address third-world problems. But a case has been made for a different strategy that involves selling to the poor themselves. In a speech last month, for instance, Harish Manwani, the chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited, pointed to his firm’s marketing Lifebuoy soap to India’s sprawling underclass as an example of its efforts to bring “social responsibility to the heart of our business.” Read more

Not cheese. Cheez.

The NYT obit page brings news of the passing of Edwin Traisman, who “helped invent iconic foods.” Should food be “invented”? Today, we might say no, but he worked in a different era, and I’m not here to judge. Anyway, the obit mostly focuses on Traisman’s contributions to McDonald’s fry uniformity, but this is what I’d like to know more about:

While he was at Kraft, from 1949 to 1957, Mr. Traisman led the team that combined cheese, emulsifiers and other ingredients into the bright yellow sauce called Cheez Whiz.

Imagine the excitement of being in on the Cheez Whiz team. It must have been the Manhattan Project of bright yellow sauce invention.

The opposite of Twitter

Posting will probably be light this week, because I’m not in the home office. Where I am is, obviously, none of your business.

links for 2007-06-05

• Why Do Teens Act That Way? They Have No Choice!
  “where does the stereotype of the moody, sullen, sexually irresponsible and financially incompetent adolescent come from? Dr. Epstein says most adults would behave that way, too, if they had no responsibilities, no rights, and money to spend.”
  (tags: Youth)

links for 2007-06-04

• NPR : Brother Ali: Hip-Hop from a Unique Perspective
  “Brother Ali is a minority, but not in the ways you might expect. First, he’s a white rapper in a genre filled with mostly black artists. Second, Brother Ali is an albino.”
  (tags: music)
• Sure, You Read Me, But Who’ll Friend Me?
  Howard Kurtz puzzles over social networking: “It almost seems like the point is to collect a long list of names rather than establish relationships outside your immediate circle.” No shit.
  (tags: socialmedia)

Vintage trend

In Consumed: Wine chains: Turning a purchase requiring specialized knowledge into something for Everyman — everywhere.

Consumer sophistication is on the rise. Just look at what we drink. Not coffee from a can or mass-market beer, but complex lattes and fine pinot noir. When there is a great enough thirst for sophistication (or anything else), something becomes inevitable: a chain of relevant franchises. Or in the case of wine, a couple of them: one recent list of fast-growing franchises included both Vino 100 (with about 60 locations open) and WineStyles (about 110 locations)….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

links for 2007-06-02

• Fops and Dandies: Rebellion (Lies)
  More skepticism regarding recent Consumed subject Credit Covers: “If we really wanted to throw off our consumer shackles, we certainly wouldn’t be embracing these embarrassing designs.”
  (tags: updates)
• Dutch TV Kidney-Giveaway Show a Hoax. (Probably. Sort Of.)
  Freakonomics observes: “If your goal is to call attention to a serious issue that people are deeply conflicted about on moral, medical, and legal grounds, I’m thinking that a theatrical hoax is kind of a suboptimal way to accomplish it.”
  (tags: entertainment)

Messaging

A while back, I was on the thesis committee of a RISD grad student who was working with QR codes. I had never hever heard of them at the time, but was definitely intrigued, both by the technology and his work with it. I’m not sure what ever came of his projects, but I was pretty interested in seeing another take on using such codes in the context of consumer objects: A Parsons student named Julia Vallera converted chunks of her diary into the code, and printed it on a T-shirt. If you have, say, a mobile phone with the right technology, you can use it

to scan the barcode on the shirt. The scan will translate the barcode to reveal the profile of the person wearing the shirt. You can see the person’s age, name, interests, or whatever they chose as their profile.

All the QR codes used in this project are excerpts from my diary. I printed them on tee shirts and bags knowing they would be seen by hundreds of people. The idea of presenting something as private as a diary to the public in a code that requires specific technology to read is a contradiction. The message here is still private to a certain level, but presented in a very public way.

That’s from her explanation of the project, here. (She points to QR code generators here and here, and mentions this company, I guess in Milan, that does something similar, but I found their site too annoying to deal with.) According to her site, she’ll make you a QR code shirt, based your 250-word-max entry, for $20.

Personally, what interests me about this project (and that RISD student’s exploration of these codes) is that I think it kind of neatly encapsulates a lot of things about contemporary consumption in general these days. In an era of underground brands and so on, a lot of logos are becoming less like conspicuous symbols, and more like secret codes — exactly the kind of secret codes that the consumer wants to be asked about, in fact. Public/private, if you see what I mean. Using actual QR codes just makes the process more explicit.
Anyway, this was part of a Parsons class dealing with mobile phones and identity. Via Textually.

Personal outsourcing

Pretty interesting story today in the WSJ about what I feel obliged to call the democratization of outsourcing. Don’t want to edit your own wedding video? Find someone in a lower-wage economy to do it for you.

Some early adopters are figuring out how to tap overseas workers for personal tasks. They’re turning to a vast talent pool in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere for jobs ranging from landscape architecture to kitchen remodeling and math tutoring. They’re also outsourcing some surprisingly small jobs, including getting a dress designed, creating address labels for wedding invitations or finding a good deal on a hotel room, for example.

Will Lou Dobbs haul some of the early adopters onto his show to lash them for behaving like soulless multinational citizens robbing Americans of good jobs? Will the trend industry become radicalized when someone notices that some of these bargain-priced workers are designers?

Here’s the story.

Icon Team-Up

Barbie, Hello Kitty.