MURKETING

Site update (redux)

Okay, I won’t start doing this all the time, but I thought I’d follow up regarding this post the other day about del.icio.us links and RSS and all that. A couple of comments on that post — thank you for those — led me in the right direction. Unless I’ve screwed something up, this is the last you’ll hear of the matter.

The relevant bit for readers is this. If you read this site by, you know, coming to the site itself and looking at it, then you may want to glance over, from time to time, at the sidebar at right. That’s where del.icio.us links will be added, all the time.

If you don’t know anything about del.icio.us, or RSS, etc., that’s fine, you don’t have to. All you need to know is: A rotating and constantly updated series of interesting links will now appear in the sidebar, so check it out if you want to. And you can stop reading this post and go on with the more important tasks of the day.

[I hesitate to bring this up, but: In the process of doing all this, for totally unrelated reasons, I’ve migrated my del.icio.us links from an account named Consumed to a new one named Murketing, which is what I’ll be using from now on. Again, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter. “Interesting links in the sidebar” is all you need to know.]

If, instead, you use an RSS reader, you’ll see those links by way of a daily summary now added to the Murketing feed. [And if you are an RSS reader, you may have been subjected to some double-post shenanigans as I worked all of this out. Sorry. I think that’s over now.]

From my own testing, I don’t think you necessarily have to switch to the Feedburner feed to get the links summary. Still, here is the link to that feed if you want to subscribe to it:

Subscribe in a reader

I’ve also put that link in the sidebar, for now at least. I have mixed feelings about the RSS graphic, which I think a lot of people now recognize, but which, because it is orange, is an unslightly blemish on this sight’s delightful black-and-white color scheme. So I may get rid of the icon later. Or try to figure out how to make it black.

The bottom line is, I’m pretty sure I’ve done what I wanted to do, and in a way that you don’t have to do anything. Simply do nothing! Okay?

Now, if you’re curious, this is what I did. Please continue…

Coming soon: Another low point

Dear Rob,

SnoreStop, the company which helped pioneer forehead advertising in 2005–

Normally, that’s where I would stop reading. But for whatever reason I skimmed down the press release. Here’s the deal:

Anxious to reach snorers and their long-suffering spouses where they need snoring relief most, Green Pharmaceuticals (the parent of SnoreStop) will shortly begin seeking couples willing to permit SnoreStop ads within and just outside of their home bedrooms, in exchange for cash prizes, a brand new bedroom makeover, or a Second Honeymoon vacation package.

The ads will come in three forms: SnoreStop posters to be placed on bedroom walls; promotional flags to be secured just outside of bedrooms; and rooftop banners to be affixed just above bedrooms. …
Recognizing that bedroom advertising can, of course, only reach a very limited consumer base, SnoreStop will supplement the campaign by sending real-life couples out into the public wearing branded pajamas reading:

OUR BEDROOM IS SPONSORED BY SNORESTOP.
SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE THE WAY WE SAVED OURS!

Here, then, another litmus test for Americans. Which of your fellow citizens will do this? Because certainly someone will.

Diversity and isolation

This is interesting:

What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes…

Still, in the long run, Putname figures: “If this country’s history is any guide, what people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing — what they see as “other” — can and does change over time.”

Here’s the writeup from the NYT Mag.

Go Logo

In Consumed: Themed Donks: Customized cars that use commercial logos as part of the creative palette.

The allure of aesthetics has been a fact of automobile design for many decades. But carmakers have never been able to match the inventiveness of some car owners, dating back at least to creators of tangerine-flake objets d’art that Tom Wolfe celebrated in the 1960s. To believe that auto expressionists will run out of gas at some point is to underestimate their ability to create previously unimaginable novelty. Picture, for instance, a 1976 Impala improbably perched on 26-inch wheels and painted in colors inspired by a variety of Hawaiian Punch. This is what’s called a donk….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Additional links: Pictures of donks; more pictures of donks (site plays music); and more pictures of donks; Mr. Scrape Customs; Donk Box & Bubble magazine.

Discrete shout out: Thanks Kate!

Site note

Regular readers may have noticed that a few weeks ago I started adding del.icio.us links to the site in the form of a daily post. I’m a big fan of del.icio.us, but I started using it before this site really existed, and always thought of it as something useful for organizing my own research, and didn’t give a lot of thought to whether there might be any value (to you, I mean) in “sharing” my links.

Of course I saw that other people were posting ther del.icio.us links, and realized that I enjoyed seeing them. So I finally got around to enabling the “daily blog posting” feature.
However, I don’t like the way the daily del.icio.us post looks. So I’ve turned that off in favor of the “link rolls” feature, which means that my del.icio.us links now show up in the sidebar, and update constantly as I add things. I think is both more useful, and a lot better looking.

The downside of this is people who read Murketing.com via RSS readers won’t see those links any more (unless of course they click through to the actual site and look at the sidebar). I’m not sure, right now, how to resolve that. I’ve noticed that We Make Money Not Art somehow has del.icio.us links in its RSS feed, and in its link roll, but not in the body of the main blog itself. I think that’s the ideal scenario.

There’s no tech staff or even a clever intern here at Murketing HQ, it’s just me, and for a variety of reasons (the biggies being: more pressing things to attend to; impatience; and a disinterest in either reading jargon-filled directions or having any real understanding of coding), I’m very slow and clumsy when it comes to figuring this stuff out. So I tend not to do detailed updates about every little trial-and-error tweak.

But in this case I thought I’d let you know: del.icio.us links in the sidebar if you want to see them.

The Product Is You

What’s your take on this person? Credit cards burst from her pockets. She carries two bags full of stuff, and uses two gizmos at once. Her smile is unconvincing, her gaze glassy and unfocused. She looks dazed, rather zombie-ish. Who is she?

If you’re fan of Bravo, she is you. Or at least, she is the representation of you that Bravo uses to round up advertising.

I will explain what I mean by that in this first installment of yet another new Murketing feature, an occasional series called “The Product Is You.”

Trade journals for the advertising and marketing business are themselves full of ads. Of course the ads there are different from the ones you see in regular magazines, because these are not aimed at consumers. They are aimed at advertisers.

That is to say: Networks and magazines and other entities whose business model depends on advertising take out ads in the ad trades, to attract advertisers. Got it? So what they tout in these ads-to-attract-advertising, is their audience.

What they are packaging and selling is, in other words, you, the consumer of media, potential target of advertising. If a media entity attracts consumers that advertisers want to address, then it can sell more advertising time, or space.

This Bravo ad, which took up two full pages of an advertising trade, is an example of a particular style of audience-packaging that I’ve always found fascinating. It’s an example that I think is worth lingering over for a moment.

Bravo’s pitch is that its viewers are “affluencers.” These desirable creatures are “now available” to advertisers who buy time on Bravo. As you can see, these sample affluencers are depicted here in fully packaged form. They are right there, sealed up, ready to be bought, and sold to. Please continue…

Re: George Saunders

This Q&A with George Saunders, by Jim Hanas for Stay Free, is worth reading. Coincidentally I just started reading his collection, In Persuasion Nation. I always read his stuff in The New Yorker, and read one of his earlier books, CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. Saunders is an astonishing writer, both in terms of his use of language, in the perceptive intelligence that guides it — that is, he both has something to say, and knows how to say it.

So a quick excerpt from the Q&A:

STAY FREE!: When you look at American culture today—commercialism, reality TV, the war, all the things that are in your stories—what do you see? What is your diagnosis?

SAUNDERS: I’ll give you a couple answers. One, there’s a cultural divide between the people at the top and the people underneath. So, in commercials: who’s making them? A handful of people. Why are they making them? To persuade us to buy things. There’s a group of people who have the power to broadcast and to put this huge machine at their disposal—this very beautiful machine that can make incredible images and sounds—and then there’s the rest of the population, which is “done to.” I would say that the gap between the doers and the done to is wider than it’s ever been. The politicians—the people running the country—are isolated from us. I’m 47 and I’ve had one contact with a congressperson—[New York congresswoman] Louise Slaughter called me back one time when I wrote her a letter—but that’s it. I’ve called a number of them, and you know that somebody checks off a box and then that’s it. That’s a huge thing, and I think it’s a new thing. I don’t think that people have ever felt as powerless or unimportant.

To read his second answer, and the rest of the Q&A, go here.

Coinage smackdown: “Skurban” vs. “Hopster”

I don’t know who floated the word “skurban” as a term to encapsulate the mix of skater and “urban” styles.

I do know that it was roundly mocked.

I also know that Complex has offered up an alternative, in the form of “hopster.” Which is meant to connote “hip hop + skate + hipster.”

Is this any better? Worse? Necessary? Interesting in any way? I’ve certainly listened to enough people tell me how their brand speaks to fans of hip hop and skating, as if there was something surprising or radical about that. (If someone said to me that their brand spoke to fans of hip hop and social realist fiction, I might be more interested.)
I have absolutely nothing riding on the answer, but if you have an opinion, let’s have it. No private email to me about it: Say it in public, or don’t. Calling me an idiot for asking the question is acceptable.
No obligation of course.

To Do in NYC: Shepard Fairey

If I still lived in the bi-state area, I would certainly check this out: Shepard Fairey at Jonathan LeVine Gallery. More here. Bias alerts: I’m generally a fan, and contributed an essay to the book Supply & Demand.

There’s a strange one in the jungle

Years ago, in the Slate days, I made some throwaway reference to the Judy’s and was pretty surprised to get immediate and enthusiastic responses about it. While murketing.com ain’t Slate in terms of online readership, maybe someone out there will want to know that in an interview with Houstonist, Judy’s member Jeff Walton says:

The million dollar question: When will The Judy’s music be available on CD or digitally?

Very soon, we are working on it now. Hopefully within the next couple of months. We will have the CDs available through a website (wastedtalentrecords.com), iTunes, and hopefully through some stores. We also plan on having t-shirts and other things. After that, we are going to do a Washarama anniversary special edition which will be a multi disc set.

Last time I looked into it, buying a vinyl, used copy of Washarama was a $50+ proposition, if you could locate one. So I’m pretty pleased to hear this. You, on the other hand, may not care, probably because you don’t have a memory of getting your nose bloodied by a hurled cup during “Guyana Punch” in about 1986 at Numbers in the Montrose. But cut me some slack, okay? And just wait, Wes Anderson will put “All The Pretty Girls” in a movie at some point, and you’ll get it.

Or not.

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. Please continue…

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.