You’ve heard of the in-store appearance, the reading, the signing, the party in a bar or nightclub or lounge or retail space or maybe even a park. Here, however, is another venue. A bench — The Bench.
New York streetwear brand Married to the Mob (getting some buzz lately for its latest KAWS collaboration) will be at, or on, The Bench, this weekend. The Bench is on Orchard and Houston. Outside an American Apparel store, although that’s not mentioned and is I assume incidental. It’s not about the store, it’s about The Bench. This is not the first event at The Bench. The Bench, in fact, has a MySpace page, with news about The Bench, and hundreds of MySpace friends.
So, as the invite says: “Come Talk Shit with the Baddest Bitches in Town on the Most Poppin Bench Around!” Saturday night 10 pm. And as the email blast I got clarifies: “PS., it really is a bench!”
Concerned about that whole environment thingy? Looking for more ways your shopping can save the world? Well, Marketplace had a curious report that might interest you. It was about a GE credit card that puts one percent of your spending on that card toward carbon offsets. A GE rep explained:
A typical individual has a carbon output of 10 tons per year. And if you spend $750 per month on our card, you would generate enough rewards to fund carbon offsets which could completely neutralize those 10 tons.
Posted Under:
Consumer Behavior,
Ethics by Rob Walker on July 26, 2007
Comments Off on Shopping to save world, again
I’m pretty sure the first Claw piece I ever really focused on was on a wall in Los Angeles, in 2003. Somebody was driving me around, showing me Shepard Fairey pieces, and there was this big claw symbol next to all of them. The guy I was with didn’t know what the story was. The symbol looked familiar, but I didn’t know the story either, until a little bit later.
The story is that the claw was/is the mark of Claw Money, about whom I kept hearing more and more from various people in the years that followed. Have made a name/mark in NY graffiti, she was doing the same in clothing and products (including, memorably, pillows), in the “streetwear” scene, or the “downtown” scene, or whatever you prefer to call it. She built an underground brand. The recent publication of her book Bombshell, which is about all of the above, and none of the above, seemed like a good excuse to see if she would answer a few Q’s. She said: Okay.
A few things are not covered in the Q&A that follows. One is that according to her recent interview on The Weekly Drop, she’s now making some art on canvas. Another is that her dog, Peepers Marie Saint (that’s PMS, she points out), turns 12 this year. But a lot is covered — graffiti, fashion, the book, her appearance in the documentary Infamy, being the first female artist ever to do a Nike artist series/”Tier 0″ sneaker, and what you might have said to her 15 years ago that would have inspired her to spit in your face.
Here goes.
Q: You’re a well-known graffiti writer, who also has a clothing line. Once upon a time that would’ve sounded strange, but not so much now. I think the essay by DAZE in Bombshell suggests you were into fashion before writing. The way the book is done, the fashion and the graffiti work all run together. Is that how you always thought about it?
I had a passion for fashion long before I got my hands on a can of Rustoleum. I’m an FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) dropout, and it was at that point that I picked up my graffiti habit. It wasn’t the other way around. I started in my 20s, which is late for a graff writer.
To me, graffiti and fashion come from two totally different places, but I’m lucky enough to have eventually merged them. And really, so many graff writers have clothing lines! West FC, one of the graffiti greats, is actually one of the founding fathers of streetwear. The company he started with his high school homeboys Sung Choi, Zulu, Bluster and Brue, is of course the one and only PNB. (Unfortunately this line been recently resurrected without any of the original members and in my opinion is destined to be terrible.)
I don’t consider my collection “graffiti clothing.” My logo is the “throw up” that I painted on walls illegally, but other than that, it’s not meant to evoke graffiti associations. I did it a a joke. Who knew it would be a hit? And as far as my book is concerned, it is not a graffiti book, or a fashion book– it’s the real story of Claw Money: artist, designer, family girl, dog lover and all!
WEST is in the book, too. He remarks on how the claw is “more of a symbol than a throwup.” But you weren’t thinking the claw could have a life beyond walls? Please continue…
I’ve been reading with great interest the various marketing gurus talking about the brilliant campaign preceding the movie version of The Simpsons. I make no predictions about anything, such as whether the film will actually do well. But if it does do well, here are a few secret ingredients that — so far as I know — the experts haven’t mentioned yet. These, in other words, are the “lessons” you can apply to your film or brand. I’m revealing them to you now! Are you ready? Here goes! You heard it here first!
1. Prior to the release of your film, create a successful television program.
2. Do this many years before TiVo, or the widespread availability of 200-channel digital cable packages, or Mosaic (that’s Netscape kids; do people still know what Netscape was?) and all that it begat.
3. Enlist an authentic creative genius to actually invent your show.
4. The creative genius should be a known (and revered) quantity among certain audience members because of his work in something that was called the “alternative press,” which was kind of like the “niche culture” thing that today’s gurus talk about, but back before it had made its way into the marketing lexicon.
5. Make sure the show stays consistently strong — for 18 years.
6. Do this in a way that continues to attract new generations of viewers who have absolutely no idea what pre-Web culture was like — but without alienating those viewers who do.
7. By the time your film/product is released, make sure that the above-mentioned groundwork has woven your TV show deeply into the American pop psyche, so that its various catch phrases and references can be used universally, and without explanation, in almost any situation.
That’s it!
Once you do those seven things, you should be set. Good lessons! Apply them well!
The Consumed column earlier this year about the Geico cavemen mentioned the massive amounts of money that the insurance company spends on advertising. Is it worth it?
An item in Ad Age the other day says yes. Since 2004, Geico has increased its ad spending by 75%, to more than half a billion dollars a year. Citing a study by JD Power, Ad Age says Geico’s market share has grown, it tops rivals in acquiring new customers, and awareness of the brand has risen — “91% of shoppers today say they have seen or heard at least one Geico message in the last 12 months.”
That’s really an amazing figure. I didn’t know it was possible to expose 91% of Americans to anything anymore.
What this really means to other advertisers is hard to say. It does suggest that advertising can still work, etc., but creative aside, that spending level is pretty dizzying.
Posted Under:
Advertising,
Update by Rob Walker on July 25, 2007
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One more note on the Business Week/IDEA design awards. This item is the KEY Bicycle Rack. “Its proportions allow both wheels, typically the most stolen part of a bike, to be locked to the rack, giving cyclists added peace of mind.” Okay. But it looks like you’d need to have two locks to do that. (Or one really long lock, which of course could be used to secure both wheels to a traditional rack.) And unless I’m missing something, in this picture, neither wheel is locked to the rack. Odd.
Nice color, though.
Best Product Design of 2007 list includes The HomeHero Fire Extinguisher. Apparently it’s not actually for sale yet (a surprising number of the picks have no demonstrable track record in the actual marketplace — odd for a business magazine, no?) but will be available at Home Depot later this year. BW says: “A modern, elegant look makes it more likely to be displayed — and accessible in case of fire.”
Oh really? And is that a big problem? Lots of fires burning out of control as a result of all the shamefully ugly extinguishers we’ve been stuck with up to now? Good Design to the rescue!
Whatever. I failed to figure out how much the thing costs, compared to a regular fire extinguisher (another thing that BW surprisingly doesn’t bother to tell us), but while trying to do so I found this Core77 post, in which Don Lehman asked two worthwhile questions:
Is it just me or is every product that you see getting a ton of press lately meant to be proudly displayed on your counter or coffee table instead of being relegated to the closet?
It’s not just you. Instead of building a better mousetrap, someone, somewhere, is designing a more gorgeous mousetrap, the kind of mousetrap you’ll want to leave on your coffee table, even with a dead mouse in it.
And on the subject of breaking away from the traditional red extinguisher form, he asks:
That seems like a kind of a bad thing right? … [T]he traditional red fire extinguisher is a design icon in its own right and a recognizable one at that. I hope in an emergency that someone who isn’t familiar with this new version will know that it is in fact, a fire extinguisher and will think to look on the counter for it instead of in the closet.
That’s actually a really good point!
Besides, red fire extinguishers already look pretty cool, I think. That’s what I want to own: red ones. The classic.
The most enjoyable moment in the debut episode of Mad Men was — of course — the scene in which the advertising agency protagonists meet with their big tobacco-company client. It’s 1960, and becoming clear that tobacco companies aren’t going to be able use the rational-sounding sales pitches about how cigarettes are somehow good for you. Everyone’s has read in Reader’s Digest that the data just don’t back this up. What to do?
The meeting seems to be in a tailspin when Don, the slick-hair, gray-suit, main character of the show, asks the crusty old Southern tobacco magnate how his cigarettes are made. He latches onto a word in the man’s matter-of-fact description: Toasted. He writes it on a chalkboard: Lucky Strikes tobacco — It’s Toasted.
But, the magnate says, every brand is toasted. Then it sinks in. Here is what can replace the rational pitch — the meaningless pitch. Just put the phrase out there, and let the consumer fill in the blanks. Toasted? That sounds good. Must be good. Must be a point of differentiation — and a damn good one — if they mention it in their advertising.
None of this is spelled out, of course. But it’s a fair summation of a broad-brush shift that makes advertising today so different than it was in earlier eras. Please continue…
This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira’s face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort.
So writes Jon Pareles in the NYT today, in an article about the business of Prince. Who, he argues, fits the pattern in some ways, but is different many others. Still, he writes, Prince “doesn’t have to go multiplatinum — he’s multiplatform.”
Well said. What I wonder is how multiplatform models will get built in the future. Prince, U2, Sting, even Shakira and 50 Cent, owe a good chunk of their brand equity to old-style big record company mass market oriented tactics (the kind that resulted in multiplatinum sales) that seem to be increasingly incapable of building new pop stars of similar stature. Maybe the American Idol creations have some of that stature, but it’s not clear to me if it will be lasting, and in any case it’s hardly a pure grass roots thing.
Seems like stars who made their name in the “old days” (that is, anytime up to a few years ago) have a lasting advantage in the multiplatform marketplace.
In Consumed: Domo: How Internet jokes helped a Japanese ad mascot make its way into American malls.
This fall, the cable channel Nicktoons Network will begin showing a series of two-minute stop-motion animation shorts featuring a brown, squarish creature with arms and legs and a mouth permanently thrown wide open to reveal sharp white teeth. Like any other cute character on a kid-friendly TV show, this little fellow, whose name is Domo, is perfect for the crossover into licensed merchandise. What’s unusual about Domo, however, is that he arrived in the U.S. retail marketplace well ahead of his debut on American television. He’s on T-shirts and accessories at Hot Topic, greeting cards at many Barnes & Noble locations and grocery stores and is expected to be sold as a plush doll at F.Y.E. stores. Then again, Domo is a merchandisable star not so much because he has a TV show in the works but because of his track record in what is arguably the most potent entertainment form of our time: clowning around on the Internet….
Continue reading at the NYT site, or at the Boston Globe site.
Additional links: Domo Nation site, includes the original Domo films; Domo on Flickr; Domo on DeviantArt; Domo at Hot Topic; Domo/kitten image referenced in column.
Several months ago, I had to have some tests done at a hospital. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to get distressingly personal.) I was billed $1,875.41. I have health insurance, which I pay for myself, as I am not on staff at The Times or anywhere else, Day Job notwithstanding. Because of some transition issues related to our move from New Jersey to Georgia, there was confusion about pre-existing conditions and all that, so there was a delay in determining whether I was on the hook for that amount, or for the amount that my insurance carrier “negotiated” with the hospital. The latter figure was $937.70.
So that’s not trivial. I would much rather write a check for $937.70, than for $1,875.41. Wouldn’t you?
I jumped through the various hoops. I ignored the bills and urgent letters from the hospital. Eventually, I got word from my insurance company that the lower rate they’d “negotiated” was now in effect. So I waited for the hospital to send me the new paperwork.
Today, I got a phone call. From the hospital. With a sense of dread, I returned the call. I explained the situation and asked the rep what I owed. She said $937.70. I was relieved, and said I was just waiting for the paperwork. According to her, it had been mailed weeks ago — but then she explained the reason the hospital was calling. The reason was this: If I would pay up right now, via phone, using a credit card, debit card, or (somehow) a check, then I would get a 30% discount.
I said: Okay. My cost at that point falls to $659.39. Done.
So. The hospital’s fee was $1,875.41. The insurer-negotiated rate was $937.70. But if I fork over $659.39 right now, we can all call it a day.
Is this hospital on the brink of bankruptcy? What is its business model? What is the true cost of my procedure? Is someone out there paying $1,875.41 for the same thing that cost me $659.39?
How dysfunctional is the health care business?
Browsing recently in the Murketing.com library, I came up on a book called Brand New, by a Harvard Business School professor named Nancy F. Koehn, which came into my possession several years ago for reasons I’ve forgotten. I ended up reading a chapter about Heinz — the man, and the brand. Among other things, it answered for me a question I had wondered about before, which is what that “57 Varieties” promise on Heinz ketchup (and other products) refers to. I’ll get to that in a moment.
It turns out that Henry Heinz was a master of murketing. Sure he used traditional tactics like newspaper ads and streetcar placards and the like, as his company expanded from selling bottled horseradish and pickles to a wide range of processed foods and condiments from 1875 through the turn of the 20th century. But he also distributed lots of souvenirs through exhibits county fairs across the country —
in particular, he gave away thousands and thousands of pickle pins.
“Pickle pins turned men, women and children into walking announcements of the Heinz brand and its most famous product,” Koehn writes. “In the modern language of service management, the Pittsburgh entrepreneur worked to enlist his customers as committed spokespeople or disciples for the company.” Her book is from 2001, so really the even more modern language would call these people consumer evangelists or brand ambassadors, or some such. Heinz himself was more straightforward at the time: Such tactics “let the public blow our horn.”
And the 57 Varieties? Here’s the deal. In 1896, when Heinz was 53, he was riding a train in New York and noticed a sign boasting about 12 shoe styles. His own account:
Counting up how many [products] we had, I counted well beyond 57, but ’57’ kept coming back into my mind. ‘Seven,’ ‘seven’ – there are so many illustrations of the psychological influences of that figure … that ’58 varieties’ or ’59 varieties’ did not appeal at all.
In other words: He made it up! The number 57 refers to nothing in particular, except maybe to Heinz’s hunch that “7” has some kind of “psychological influence” built into it. (See this for more on 7-ism.)
“Within weeks,” Koehn writes, “’57 Varieties’ was appearing everywhere — on billboards and product labels, as well as in major newspapers. Before long, the new slogan had been emblazoned in concrete on prominent hillsides along main rail routes.” Four years later, Heinz put up the first electric sign in Manhattan, a 1,200-bulber at the corner of 23rd and Fifth: “The sign was six stories high, with a forty-foot-long pickle bearing the Heinz name and the ’57 Varieties’ slogan.”
I haven’t seen ads for Miller’s new beer, which is called Chill, but I’m guessing by the variety of venues that the brewing giant’s distribution machine is placing it in that they’re giving it a big push. Curiosity led me to a brief Google search, which landed on the Wikipedia entry. That reads in part:
After blowing through sales and distribution targets in … test markets, Miller announced on April 17, 2007 that Miller Chill will be available nationally. As of July 2007 the product is in full national distribution.
I know that marketers write Wikipedia entries for their clients’ products, but seriously, could this be any more transparently phony? Oh it blew through sales and distribution targets, did it? And how do you know that, you super-impressed Wikipedia contributor, you? Interesting that you would state this with such certainty — and yet not reveal either what those targets were, or what the sales were. Interesting also that the only two cited sources for the entry are both something called Brewblog, “Miller Brewing Company’s official blog.”
Actually there’s a “marketing” section in the entry:
Miller Chill’s marketing taps into the consumer trend of “Latinization” in the United States – the mix of contemporary American and Mexican cultures. This mix of cultural influences is played up throughout the beer’s advertising, created by Young & Rubicam Chicago. This is especially apparent in the playful use of Spanglish in its advertising, which positions the brand as the perfect refreshment for “wherever and whenever things get hot.”
Yeah, great job Y&R! That ad strategy sounds fantastic! You should send your clients this evidence of the grass-roots appreciation for your work!
Update (7/18): The Miller Chill entry on Wikipedia has been edited since this post went up. Thinking ahead, I have screen shots of what it said before some of the quoted material above was toned down. The quotes here were accurate when this was first posted.
I know I had an opinion, when I was a child, about whether Matchbox cars were better than Hot Wheels, or vice versa. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what that opinion was. Certainly I also don’t remember the kind of impressive details that apparently marked the original Matchbox models, as described today in the obituary of Jack Odell, who started making those tiny cars in the 1950s:
They were finely wrought things. Mr. Odell designed one machine to spray-paint tiny silver headlights on the models and another to mold interiors. All the dashboard dials were in precisely the right place. Some cars had more than 100 die-cast parts, including windshield wipers and ceiling hooks.
Sounds impressive. By the time I was flinging tiny cars across the kitchen floor, they were not nearly so fine. I assume those older, complicated models must be changing hands on eBay these days.
What is it about miniature replicas of cars, anyway? I don’t know what’s up with Matchbox and Hot Wheels these days, but I do know that interest in this general category of toy/collectible remains, and that it’s possible to buy miniature donks. Whether these items would live up to Odell’s standards is hard to say.
Posted Under:
Obituaries by Rob Walker on July 17, 2007
Comments Off on 3 billion cars, 12,000 models
I recently noticed an ad agency advertising itself to potential clients by asking if their brands could pass “the T-shirt test.” Please. The T-shirt test is for also-rans and wimps. Can your brand pass the tattoo test? Joining the likes of Nike, Apple, and PBR, is none other than brand underground subject The Hundreds. That’s their bomb logo, inked forever into some loyal (and in my view crazy, no offense Ben & Bobby) consumer’s skin.
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