MURKETING

A trove of video for Wal Mart detractors

I guess this Wall Street Journal article is available to subscribers only, and that’s too bad, because it’s amazing. [Update: Try this link. Thanks Lisa!]

Apparently Wal-Mart for almost 30 years employed a video-production company called Flagler to film a variety of meetings and management activities and other stuff. Some of this material was used at shareholder meetings and sales meetings and so on. It was all intended for internal use.

In 2006, Wal-Mart stopped using Flagler, a blow for the firm, which claims the Wal-Mart work was 90% of its revenue. So Flagler offered to sell Wal-Mart the whole trove for “several million dollars.” Wal-Mart offered $500,000, “arguing the footage wouldn’t be of interest elsewhere.”

Wrong! Now Flagler sells access to the material to business historians, plaintiffs lawyers, and I guess anybody else who wants to pay for it. So, the WSJ says, this means clips of Wal-Mart people joking about the safety flaws of a product, or talking about union-busting, or calling Hillary Clinton “one of us,” are making their way into the public sphere.

Wal-Mart is “reviewing its legal options.”

If I find (or you tell me about) a better link than the one above, one that anyone can access, or links to any of the actual videos, I’ll update this post with that info.

Lettering Sketchbook pages: Pleasing

Lettering Sketchbook, originally uploaded by Linzie Hunter.

Linzie Hunter is the illustrator I wrote about in Consumed whose pieces based on spam subject lines became a bit of an online sensation (12/2/07 installment). Lately she’s posted a really appealing set on Flickr, of her “Lettering Sketchbook.” Two samples here. Fun to look at.

Lettering Sketchbook, originally uploaded by Linzie Hunter.

Water fight

Pretty interesting piece in Business Week about  the battle in a Northern California town over whether or not to let Nestlé (“the largest bottled water company in America and purveyor of the Perrier, Poland Spring, and S. Pellegrino brands”) build a huge spring-water-bottling plant there.

A few interesting bits:

Nestlé employs 11 water hunters around the U.S. Besides monitoring water supplies, they search for new sources, typically in remote, pristine places like McCloud. A big part of their job is building relationships with locals, few of whom have dealt with a multinational.

And:

A pall of aggrievement hangs over Nestlé Waters’ headquarters. There’s an attitude that essentially asks: Why us? CEO Jeffery has been in bottled water since the late 1970s. He worked at Perrier until Nestlé bought it in 1992 and put him in charge of Nestlé’s North American water business. And he has long seen his product as a healthy alternative to soda in a nation that is increasingly obese.

For several years now, Jeffery says, he has watched other companies win green cred for what he deems smoke-and-mirrors publicity stunts. A couple of years ago he recalls not being able to sleep, getting up and heading to his Greenwich study to write down the 10 things Nestlé was doing to reduce its carbon footprint. One of those things was designing the lightest-weight water bottle currently on the market. Jeffery also notes, correctly, that water bottlers use less H2O than makers of soda or beer. …
But soda and beer makers typically don’t mine pristine springs; they use tap water. So, for that matter, do Nestlé Waters’ main rivals, Coca-Cola’s Dasani and PepsiCo’s Aquafina. It’s instructive that Nestlé Waters was the only company asked to attend Congress’s first-ever hearings on the bottled water industry in December.

Great moments in student outreach

NYT recounts problems with an attempt to promote 2D barcode marketing concept to college students. Best is this:

Then there was the presentation by the chief executive of Mobile Discovery, David H. Miller, whose slide show in Professor Wnek’s class devolved into sexist banter after he showed an image of a topless woman, back to the camera, who had a bar code on the back of her blue jeans.

The photo evoked a few titters, but then a student bantered with Mr. Miller about the technology’s use in meeting girls.

“So I take a picture of a broad, you know, a good-looking girl, and her name and phone number are loaded in my phone — I’d pay five bucks a month for that,” a male student commented, according to the university’s recording of the class in February.

Mr. Miller replied that it might work as a marketing technique to post a woman’s picture with a bar code underneath that said, “sign up to a service to get more girls like that.”

Turns out not everybody was so into this exchange. One student later wrote an article for the campus paper comparing it to “slapping bar codes on women as if they were six-packs of Budweiser from the local grocery store.”

Global Crocism

I get the impression that maybe the Crocs thing (Consumed 7/15/07) has peaked — but on the other hand I keep seeing them on the feet of otherwise respectable-looking people at the grocery store and whatnot. And now Adverblog points out a Japanese site that gathers of Crocs photos — “My Crocs Contest.” Not clear to me how new or old this is, but it seems like bad news for Crocs-haters. Popularity in Japan would, I can only assume, break down the American consumer segment that has most ferociously resisted Crocs — the cool-taste-trend-hunter-spotter-setters.

Periodic update: New links

Those of you who read via RSS probably don’t even know about the huge and moderately awesome list of links in the “blogroll” at right. Well you should. You should look it over immediately! (Also you should tell me if any links are broken.)

And you should be aware that hugeness and moderate awesomeness aside, this link list is an eternal work in progress (I still need to add a DIY/Handmade 2.0 category) and I’m adding a few new ones right now. It’s occurred to me I ought to say something when I do this, or you’ll never know.

To the Artists section: Justin Gignac (mentioned in this earlier post); Chris Held (mentioned in this earlier post).

To the Bigshots section: Dan Ariely’s “Predictaby Irrational.”

To the Hard To Categorize section: Delicious Ghost. Actually I added this a couple weeks ago.

To the Various Other Friends section: I Love Beer, a blog by Lee Nichols (thanks for the heads-up, Lance)

While adding these links, I also removed a few. But somehow telling what I’ve removed just seems like bad form.

Niche of the week: Toyota’s prisoner brand

Reading Virginia Heffernan’s column just now, this week on the subject of an Internet discussion board called Prison Talk — which she writes serves “family and friends of the incarcerated” — I was a little surprised by passing mention of one of the advertisers there: There’s a book of tips for people headed to prison, and there’s Western Union, and then there’s … the Toyota Matrix? (Apparently the car’s slogan is: “Get in touch with your dark side.”)

I wonder what positioning strategy it is that led the planner to do a buy on Prison Talk?

Absolut international incident?

Strange Maps, via The Plank:

This map, used in a Mexican ad campaign, shows what the US-Mexican border would look like in an ‘absolut’ (i.e. perfect) world: a large part of the US’s west is annexed to Mexico.

Needless to say this map made its way to ‘El Norte’, annoying and upsetting many Americans – even leading to calls for a boycott of the Swedish-made vodka. What must be particularly annoying is that this map has some basis in fact.

The Plank also points to the reaction of someone named Michelle Malkin:

The advertising firm that created the Absolut Reconquista ad is Teran/TBWA. Teran is based in Mexico City. The company’s website boasts a pretentious statement of philosophy advocating “disruption” as a “tool for change” and “agent of growth.” (Scroll your mouse over the little buttons in the upper-right margin.) The firm advocates “overturning assumptions and prejudices that get in the way of imagining new possibilities and visionary ideas that help create a larger share of the future.”

Translation: The company advocates overturning borders that get in the way of imagining new maps of North America that help Mexico create a larger share of the continent.

Well. Two things.

First: An ad agency with a pretentious mission statement full of doublespeak clichés about change and disruption? No way! Say it isn’t so! That’s never happened before!

Second: Like every other agency, what these marketing pros “advocate” is getting paid by their clients. The way they get paid by their clients is to get their clients talked about and noticed. And that was Absolut-ly the goal here. Ad agencies don’t have a political motive. They have a profit motive.

In The New York Times Magazine: To The Fallen Records

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.

Welcome..! (But why, exactly?)

Welcome Marketplace listeners!

That’s right, I had a commentary run on the widely broadcast public radio show Marketplace tonight. I’m pretty pleased about that (even though I haven’t actually listened to it yet; I only know it ran tonight because I just got email from a detractor about it), because I’m a longtime listener to the show.

Anyway, if you look at blogs often, and I’m sure you do, you’ve probably had occasion to encounter a “Welcome!” post, like this one. This occurs when a blog is, say, mentioned in The Times, or on some other superblog (BoingBoing), or the blog’s author has been on television. So the post will say something like: “Welcome New York Times readers!” and the premise is that there are a flood of newcomers showing up as a result of the outside attention, and they need to be greeted in some way.

This isn’t something I’d thought about a whole lot, since this particular site tends not to have to deal with a lot of attention from media outlets or superbloggers. But now that Murketing is — or might be — getting some outside attention, it’s made me wonder: What are those “Welcome!” posts really about? Do these new readers need a welcome? Is a welcome likely to rope them in as regulars?

Possibly. But I think the real function of the “Welcome!” post is status signaling, in the economics sense. That is, it’s meant to signal the importance of the blog by making public mention of the attention it has received from some authority or other.

Again I haven’t listened to the show yet, so the truth is I don’t even know if they mentioned this site. But I know what I said, and it was about the death of conspicuous consumption and the rise of “the invisible badge,” concepts more thoroughly explored in Buying In.

But still: Welcome new readers (if there are any), I think with this post you now have a very good sense of I how I look at the world.

And as for you regulars: Now you know that — or maybe I’ve just tricked you into believing — others are interested, too!

Imaginary brand as actual sponsor

I’m really not much of a convention guy, but I have to admit a certain curiosity about ROFLCon, the gathering of living memes and “brainy academics” who go on about them. (Details here.)

Somehow I had missed the fact that the event’s “partners” include Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. This is the combination energy drink and crop irrigation product featured in the dark comedy cult favorite Idiocracy. In other words, it’s an imaginary brand — one that has crossed over into reality. (Here is a review.) So it’s a pretty great choice for a co-sponsor.

I was interested to note on the Brawndo site, up in the upper-right corner, the logo for Omni Consumer Products, a fictional entity from Robocop. (You can show your support of non-existent OCP by sporting a T-shirt from Last Exit To Nowhere, subject of a November 18, 2007 Consumed.) I’m assuming the implication is that somehow Brawndo and OCP are linked — a particularly meta suggestion, connecting imaginary brands from two different fictional worlds.

I don’t recognize that other logo up in there corner, though. Do you? This is answered in the comments now. Thanks!

Anyway, I unfortunately have other plans during the April 25-26 time frame, so no ROFLCon for me. But if you go, pick up a Brawndo, and let me know what you think.

To Do in Portland: “Overstock”

Opening tomorrow night at Jáce Gáce, 2045 SE Belmont, Portland, OR: Overstock. To create this installation, the artist maxed a number of credit cards. He plans on returning everything for a refund after the show comes down.

Selected details:

In the installation, Overstock, Chris Held unites the messages of product marketing and religious practice by creating a monolithic shrine to the modern commodity. Masses of stacked goods ascend skyward towards a peak….

Behind the scenes, Overstock is powered by credit cards and box-store return policies. By taking advantage of offerings such as 0%APR on purchases to obtain goods he’s intent on returning, Held preys on a system of consumer seduction….

Through April 25. Reception April 4, 6 p.m.-Midnight.

More 2D barcode examples

The newfangled barcodes I wrote about in Consumed the other day come up in another variation in this interesting NPR piece. The main focus is a firm called Scanbuy.

In San Francisco … hundreds of restaurants and businesses already sport the little black and white boxes outside their doors [even though] most people aren’t currently equipped to scan them.

And the latest Trendwatching roundup includes Dutch brand Wickd: “Wickd combines clothing and 2D barcodes technology to allow wearers of Wickd shirts, longsleeves or jackets to take their favorite websites with them. “

Nothing says true love like a year’s supply of deodorant

Definitely the promotional contest of the week:

GroomGroove.com and Gillette Clinical Strength, made by Procter & Gamble, are searching for the best marriage proposal.

Contestants can enter the “She Said Yes” contest at the site through April 21 by submitting a 30-to-350-word story. One winner will receive a year’s supply of the new antiperspirant and $1,000 in cash.

Among other things, I’m amused at the linkage of “clinical strength antiperspirant” with weddings. Certainly it’s true that an overly sweaty groom is usually a bad sign.

Via Promo Magazine.

Things that look like other things: continued

Timbuk2 has apparently just unveiled a MacBook Air Sleeve that looks like an envelope.

In February, Core77 noted two examples of designers creating MacBook Air sleeves that look like an envelope.