MURKETING

Earphone Identity

In Consumed: Emotibuds: The compulsion to personalize inanimate objects goes to your head.

Remember when white earbuds had status? Jonathan Hall does. But these days, as he and his fellow rail commuters in the tristate area know, the iPod’s once-cutting-edge headphones confer as much distinction as a gray-flannel suit. A couple of years ago, Hall and his wife, Kate, decided that there must be a way to capitalize on this shift. IPod add-ons, including cases and “skins,” had become big business by then — but those items decorated only the main device, which was usually stuffed in a pocket, out of sight.

Today, the Halls, who are both 29, have sold tens of thousands of pairs of flexible rubber charms called Emotibuds, which clip onto earbuds, almost like earrings. Each pair (they sell for $12 for a set of three pairs) features a blocky little face that incorporates an emoticon into a cute cartoon visage. There are a variety of faces, each set against a bright color and corresponding with a mood, like “starry-eyed” or “frisky.” Recently, Emotibuds were part of the online design store FredFlare.com’s Next Big Thing contest, and while they didn’t win, the store has had to reorder them at least four times to meet demand….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Product of the day

In addition to cups and plates and other useful things, Circa Ceramics sells a number of these small (about 2 5/8 inches by 1 7/8 inch) “tabs.” They are actually not useful, but rather are “cute little bits-o-art.” Oddly appealing. The creators are interviewed at Crafty Synergy.

@, in Chicago

Seeing this on Wooster this morning made me realize it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen any new street art, by somebody new (to me), that I found really different and interesting. The artist is identified as “@.” Nice piece, in my opinion.

More thanks

The above items are scores resulting from my little Where Were You? zine. Kate Bingaman-Burt won a free copy in a Murketing (Journal of) email newsletter giveaway thing, but generously reciprocated anyway, with two issues of her zine, What Did You Buy Today?

Not only that: Reader Russell F. of Analogue Books in Edinburgh/UK, despite having forked over the full $1+$1 shipping, kindly sent me a copy of Sheds, by Nigel Peake. It’s a lovely 32-page book of his drawings. (Here is Peake’s site.)

Pretty good! I figured the least I could do was thank these fine people in a public, and linky, way. Thanks!

Sadly, the 2006 edition of Where Were You? is sold out, but partly in light of the above, I’m pretty sure there will be a 2007 edition. If you want to know when it’s available, sign up here.

Via: Dada Mail

The Product Is You, No. 8

[The Product Is You is an occasional Murketing series collecting advertising that is aimed at advertisers: Magazines or television networks packaging up their consumers — that is, you, the potential ad target — in ways designed to attract advertisers. Previous installments here.]

Comedy Central’s 2005 appeal to advertisers who seek to sell things to women … or chicks. Claims of increased viewership among women in various age groups suggest the network is “red hot with women.”

Best SL story ever

This Wall Street Journal story today is the best thing I’ve ever read about Second Life, and I’ve read a lot. Maybe I’ll say more about this later, but for now, here, from the story, is the quote of the week, from a woman whose husband spends hours a day “in world,” where his avatar recently married someone else:

“You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink,” she laments, “and they’ll be having sex with a cartoon.”

Yet more green thoughts

Listening to a pilot episode of a new NPR show currently referred to as The Bryant Park Project, I caught part of an interview with Sharon Begley, Newsweek‘s science writer and author of its cover story about global warming denial and the “machine” perpetuating the idea that it’s no big deal or that scientists aren’t sure about it, etc. She mentioned a couple of poll stats that made me go to the story. Here’s one:

39 percent of those asked say there is “a lot of disagreement among climate scientists” on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.

The good news, I suppose, is that the influence of the “denial machine” is waning, in that polls taken just last year found that those who think there’s a lot of disagreement was 64 percent. So that view has gone from a majority view, to a minority one. The article also says that “38 percent of those surveyed identified climate change as the nation’s gravest environmental threat, three times the number in 2000.”

It does seem troubling that significant swaths of people seem unsure about the link between human behavior and activities and global warming. But presumably it explains this:

Look for the next round of debate to center on what Americans are willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings.

“Traditional” vs. “Consumer-supported” media: What does it mean?

This Associated Press story says: “U.S. consumers are increasingly shifting their attention away from traditional, advertising-supported media in favor of entertainment such as the Internet, video games and cable TV, which consumers pay for.” It cites a study from Veronis Suhler Stevenson. That private equity firm’s site says:

Consumers are … migrating away from advertising-supported media, such as broadcast TV and newspapers, to consumer-supported platforms, such as cable TV and videogames. Time spent with consumer-supported media grew at a compound annual growth rate of 19.8 percent from 2001 to 2006, while time spent with ad-supported media declined 6.3 percent in the period.

Here’s what I don’t get. Why is cable, for example, not considered an ad-supported medium? Yes, you pay for cable, but you also pay for the newspaper. Both have a lot of ads, and business models that rely on having a lot of ads. Maybe you could make an argument here by breaking out viewership of premium channels and ad-free video-on-demand services. But I don’t think the typical TV viewer (and a majority of American households have cable TV) really makes the implied distinction between, say, Bravo and NBC. When I watch either one, they both look pretty ad-supported to me. And both certainly feel significantly less “consumer supported,” if that is supposed to mean actively spending money, than buying a newspaper does.

What about the AP including the Internet in the not-ad-supported column? Again, yeah, you pay for Internet access, but from everything I’ve read (about what people think will happen at the NYT and WSJ sites, for instance) the movement right now is away from paid-for content and toward content that’s free to the reader — and supported by advertising.

And why aren’t movies and music mentioned at all? Aren’t those relevant to the theory that our entertainment choices are moving away from ad-supported media to things we pay for directly? (But which might of course still include paid product placements — just as many videogames do.) Maybe that stuff is in the full VSS study.

I don’t doubt that media and entertainment consumption patterns are changing, but every report or study I see on the matter seems to have some the data cut some weird way that has nothing to do with how people (as opposed to media companies, I guess) actually consume media and entertainment.

Am I missing something?

Dealers & rappers

Pretty interesting interview on Freakonomics today with a guy who studies gangs. Here’s one bit I thought was good:

Q: A lot of rappers, particularly Jay-Z and 50 Cent, claim to have been successful crack dealers. Any thoughts on this? Were they just low-level dealers barely making a profit, or did they really have something to pay for their future studio time? Did any of the gang members you knew claim to be on the dealer-to-rapper fast track program?

A: In all my years of studying gangs, I have met only a handful of individuals who have actually participated in the dealer-to-rapper fast track program. Alas, they end up going to jail before they get successful, and most of the ones I’ve seen can’t sing worth a lick. I’m deeply skeptical about rappers who proclaim experience with drug sales. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part I would be very careful about the claims that are made in songs. Many rappers are highly trained musicians who have spent little time on the streets, as it were — think of Mos Def.

Brand power update

I’m sure you’ve seen this, but if you haven’t, you should. The AP says:

Anything made by McDonald’s tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.

In comparing identical McDonald’s foods in name-brand and plain wrappers, the unmarked foods always lost.

Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches….

Reader demographics

The commercial success of anti-religion books has gotten a bit of attention (here’s a Freakonomics post for instance), and here is a piece in The Weekly Standard offering up its explanation. The part that made me pause is this passing comment:

We know from behavioral studies that, to the embarrassment of atheists, believers, or at least churchgoers, are better citizens–more active and law-abiding–than those who spend Sunday morning reading the New York Times.

Is reading the Sunday Times a proxy for atheism?

“Mad Men” Musings

“Honesty — it’s a good angle.”

This line, by one of the ad agency guys in the early scene in the most recent episode of “Mad Men” when Don and his colleagues are talking about the famous VW “Lemon” ad — which came out around 1960, when the series is set — was easily the episode’s highlight moment. (If you’ve never seen the “Lemon” magazine ad, here it is.) In its time, the VW campaign that this ad was part of was different because it did not engage in overt hyperbole. In fact, it subtly mocked the overt hyperbole of, you know, every other ad in the world. Various other print pieces poked fun at the empty planned-obsolescence style “advances” touted by most car ads, for example.

That’s the honesty part. The angle part is that the campaign gave a new image to a car that, as Mary Wells summarized in her memoir, had previous been seen as “small,” “ugly,” and “a Nazi car, too soon after the war.” This is alluded to in Mad Men; one character mentions that last time he’d seen a VW, he was throwing a grenade into it. (This remark is made at a suburban house party, where the general idea that honesty is just another angle hovers over the somewhat predictable proceeds: We learn, for the umpteenth time, that shiny suburban facades conceal assorted grubby secrets, etc. But as always, I’m less interested in the plot than in the passing mentions of advertising history. So back to that.)
Thomas Frank, in The Conquest of Cool, observes: “That by the end of the decade the [VW] was more hip than Nazi must be regarded as one of the great triumphs of American marketing.” Particularly so given that its “hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass sociaety against which hip declared itself most vehemently ad odds.” Frank argues that the agency that made the campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach, “invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism — perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age — to consumerism itself.”

Sound familiar? Sure it does. It’s a point of view that’s now so thoroughly built into contemporary marketing, we pretty much expect it. The most scabrous critiques of the culture of marketing, are produced by marketing professionals, on behalf of whoever their paying client happens to be. Transparency, the consumer-in-control, co-creation, etc.: All today’s most progressive-sounding marketing tactics are all about honesty. It’s still a great angle.

Buzz Marketing

In Consumed: The Bodygroom: The electric-razor technology wasn’t very edgy, but the the marketing was.

About a year ago, Philips Norelco began the push to sell a device called the Bodygroom as a product to help men shave areas of the body other than the face. At the time, according to Jim Olstrom, director of the home division of the retail-data collection firm NPD Group, the idea of a product specifically made for below-the-neck shaving barely existed. Today, the Bodygroom is one of at least four products in what’s seen as a distinct and fast-growing category; nearly 250,000 body-hair trimmers have been bought in the United States in the last year, according to NPD data (which does not count Wal-Mart). “Nobody was talking about this category,” Olstrom says. “Now it’s completely out in the open.” …

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.

Other product of the day

Finally, a pan for making repulsively huge cupcakes. Via Popgadget.

Product of the day

Finally, cozies for your 40-ouncers and tallboys. Via Urban Outfitters blog.