MURKETING

Event marketing

Having developed an interest in the conference/guru/expertise industry lately, I was not surprised by this, but interested to see it get an airing in public on PSFK:

Apparently payola is a common practice in the conference business — a sponsor pays, a sponsor gets to speak. And we thought the whole conference business was a big scam already. I suppose we were naive to think that conference organizers were curators of the best content available for the attendees. Turns out, that attendees are being charged a lot of money to listen to the speakers who pay the most sponsorship money.

There are many variations on this out there in the conference world. On the other hand, it’s not particularly clear to me what the motives and expectations of conference attendees are. Are they interested in hearing from famous names? Are they interested in hearing things that confirm their existing biases and points of view? Are they interested in things that challenge their existing biases? Are they actually more interested in the other attendees than the presenters?

“Blogola” and other ways of skirting those pesky elites

The WSJ has two interesting articles today on the empowered grass-roots culture that’s replacing those annoying gatekeeper elites we’re all so sick of. The first is available here. It’s about TV networks blowing off critics and newspaper writers and buttering up bloggers — sorry, focusing on “blog outreach.” After all, as the Journal notes, mainstream media writers a often restricted from accepting freebies that might influence their coverage. Happily, the honest and transparent grass roots have no such rules.

Giving away DVDs is a cheap way to curry favor, but some networks are courting bloggers with Hollywood’s true currency: access. Fox News Channel says it recently thought about trying to flatter a New York Times writer with an invitation to an industry dinner hosted by President Bush. Instead, Fox says it sent invites to several New York media blogs — outlets it considered to be of more strategic importance.

Bloggers often return home with pinwheels in their eyes…. Indeed, some blog writers are even happy to let networks play editor. “I hope you like it,” wrote [one blogger who had been invited onto the set of a sitcom] in an email to CBS to flag her “Old Christine” posting. “If there’s anything you’d like me to add, just tell me and I will.” She signed the note, “XOXO.”

The best part? “Network PR experts say blogs are important because they often serve as idea farms for professional reporters.”

And why shouldn’t they, hm?

To all of this I can only add that the same basic practices are, I suspect, extremely common with product and cool-shit blogs. When not busy trumpeting the new transparency, I have a feeling that many such bloggers are positively raking in the free merch. It’s hard for me to say for certain, of course, since they very rarely disclose policies regarding such matters. (Allow me to transparently reiterate that I obviously do not accept freebies.)

Anyway, the other story is about “features like most-viewed, most-popular and most-emailed lists” that theoretically “democratize news and information, advocates say, letting consumers play a role in what’s deemed worthy of others’ attention, taking it out of the hands of an unseen editorial elite.” Not surprisingly, these features can be gamed.

One interesting excerpt:

Online video sites face challenges as well, as people try to game the “view counts” for clips by using automated software to repeatedly click on videos. Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has spotted spyware software that hijacks individuals’ Web browsers and makes them view specific videos on YouTube. Other spyware Mr. Edelman has documented forces users’ computers to visit a clip on YouTube and give it a top five-star rating.

“Our computers are so good at counting that we treat their answers as infallible, but they’re subject to gaming both through ordinary counting errors and through systematic attack,” says Mr. Edelman.

All together — or not

Got 20 minutes to kill? Sure you do.

Check out this 1970s Navy recruiting film, narrated by Lou Rawls, and with a superdope sound track by “Port Authority, the US Navy’s Soul Band.”

Rawls, in his astonishingly authoritative voice, explains how when you sign up, you canlearn electronics, “like these brothers.” You’ll “get threaded out” with a Navy uniform. You’ll learn to swim — “swim man, dig?” And you’ll also experience this epiphany: “When you’re hungry enough, common weeds taste like soul food.”

Getting “threaded out” is a piece of slang that really, really needs to make a comeback.

More seriously, the film is a pretty fascinating document. I became aware of it after hearing an NPR piece the other day about the near-collapse of black enlistment in the armed forces; African-American sentiment has been strongly anti-the-Iraq-war from the start, and apparently black enlistment has fallen fifty percent since it started.
It’s interesting, with this old recruiting film, to sort of listen between the lines, and decide for yourself just how openly it is saying: Look, this is a racist and sexist society, but as an African-American, woman, or both, you’ll have a much better chance of rising on your merits than you will in civilian life.

Or, as Rawlsy soulfully puts it: “The new Navy is together, all together.”

Toy Story

In Consumed: The Vladmaster: How a 3-D children’s toy found a new life as an indie art product.

Media forms come and go, and often this seems like a zero-sum game. New forms of communication pop up and others promptly become obsolete as a result: the killer app leaves a dead-media trail. When a man named William Gruber created what became known as the View-Master in 1938, he had high hopes for it as a media format. After all, it took a place among the wonders of the 1939 World’s Fair. “His original intention for the stereoscopic viewing device — he didn’t even like the name View-Master — is that it would be an educational medium,” says Annie Dubinsky, assistant director of the 3D Center of Art and Photography. Instead, it became a wildly popular children’s toy.

The View-Master is still around and is not radically different from what it was decades ago. Each View-Master reel contains 14 pictures that, to the viewer, appear as seven stereoscopic images. Hold the plastic device up to your eyes and advance through the images by pressing a lever on the side. Many would see this decidedly low-tech artifact as nothing more than a mildly nostalgia-inducing bit of consumer kitsch. But a few years ago, a 29-year-old Portland artist who calls herself Vladimir saw something different: a potentially potent media form….

Continue reading by way of this NYT Magazine link, or this Boston Globe link.

Additional links: Vladmaster; 3D Center of Art and Photography; Toy Hall of Fame View-Master entry.

A totem of a forgotten era

Any of you kids old enough to remember the heyday of Kozmo.com? Here’s a (refresher).

I hadn’t thought about the company in some until reading this post by DL Byron on BikeHugger about somebody “scoring” an old Kozmo bag on eBay:

I’ve seen these treasured bags in Seattle and San Fran. I don’t know more about their history, other than they were used by Kozmo messengers and last forever. I also periodically miss Kozmo and their tragic dotbomb.

Check the post for nostalgic comments about Kozmo etc. Apparently these bags have sold for as much as $280! Pretty amusing.

Will Web 2.0 produce similar artifacts? No way! It’s totally different this time around!

Right?

Phad watch: “Ecosexual”

Somebody used this term, “ecosexual,” in a pitch I got the other day. It’s a “new trend,” of course.

So what’s an ecosexual? Someone who could pass for gay, straight, or a bamboo-cutting-board fetishist?

Or does ecosexuality involve carbon-neutral porn, organic cotton lingerie, sex with the compact flourescent lights on, or sustainable — oh, never mind.

According to Wired an ecosexual is: “A person who’s into hybrid cars, low-energy lightbulbs, and recycling.”

Really, really, disturbingly into those things, I guess.

Fashion corner

The Hater assesses celebrity current-events T-shirts:

Even though topical celebrity joke t-shirts are the lowest, most annoying form of fashion communication, they can also be a useful tool—especially when it comes to figuring out who in a crowd of strangers has a horrible sense of humor. Engaging in conversation in these situations is unnecessary. If someone is wearing a “Free Paris” T-shirt, that person is not funny, and should be avoided at all costs.

The rest of “What Your Jokey Paris Hilton T-Shirt Says About You,” including examples of topical Hilton Ts, is here.

(Thanks Cousin Lymon.)

The view from Murketing HQ earlier this morning

Good morning
Originally uploaded by R. Walker.

So this is what I woke up to today, around 6 a.m. or so: A fire across the street. No one was hurt, it started upstairs, which was vacant. Some people live downstairs but they’re okay. This was sort of the high point of the fire, when I was getting a little concerned. But the Savannah Fire Dept got it under control pretty quickly.

Defining innovation down

Speaking of the WSJ, Ann Zimmerman (a long-ago colleague of mine in my Dallas Observer days, though I haven’t spoken to her in many years), had an interview with the honchos at Target the the other day. The theme, of course, was how wildly cool and design-forward Target is. Example? One exec offers this:

We share ideas so that a good idea in one part of the company can translate to another. We have the line Simply Shabby Chic, for instance, and we’re able to say well, you know, that has application in pets. Now who’d have thought that you could take print and pattern and what we do in dinnerware and put it on doggy bowls? We’re structured in a way that fosters innovation.

That’s right. A pattern from dinnerware, recycled on a dog bowl = innovation.

We live in a time of wonder.

Factories and branding

Previously noted here: Good questions raised by Notbillable about the “startling fact” highlighted by the pet-food recall that scores of brands were all made by the same manufacturer.

The WSJ has a good story on this today, by Ellen Byron. She got someone from Menu Foods to talk, at least a little, and offers plenty of context and examples of how widespread similar practices are, across many industries.

“The sheer magnitude of how many branded products come from one source erodes the whole basic premise of what branding is in the eyes of the consumer — they feel duped,” says Eli Portnoy, who heads Portnoy Group Inc., a Los Angeles-based brand-strategy firm.

Duped by branding? Say it ain’t so!

An empire of lattes

An NYT dispatch from Riyadh on the “cultural collisions” within Saudi Arabia today, notes in passing that Starbucks cafes “are as ubiquitous here as they are in Manhattan.”

KAWS

Some day I should probably write about KAWS. Above some jeans he just did for Levi’s. Below, some shoes with VisVim. Both, I believe, are for his Tokyo store, Original Fake.

He’s a very productive young man, and a talented artist — I mean his actual paintings and prints, aside from the products.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with his products. I bought a KAWS pillow myself.

I just mean that he’s found a way to strike that balance between art and commerce that’s more interesting than most. Or at least that’s what I think. Or … maybe I just like his style.

Social media benchmarking

A whole new wave of “social media” or “citizen journalism” triumphalism swept through the Internet recently, sparked by Facebook/MySpace usage during and after the Virginia Tech killings, and the Digg-distribution of DVD copyright protection-cracking code. The upshot of way too many analyses for me to even attempt to link to: You can’t stop The People in the new social media world! It’s a paradigm shift! Don’t you get it?

I get it. In fact, I’m tired of getting it. I want to know when the new paradigm is going to result in, oh, I don’t know, a better-informed public.

As an example: As recently as this past January,

Many adults in the United States believe Saddam Hussein collaborated with a terrorist network, according to a poll by Knowledge Networks for the Program on International Policy Attitudes. 32 per cent of respondents think Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, and 18 per cent think the Iraqi government was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

That is, half of the American public still thought that Iraq had a significant role in 9/11.

Now, I certainly understand that the “mainstream media” had a big role in this false belief. The recent Bill Moyers Journal on this subject made that case in devastating fashion.

On the other hand, that program also made it clear that some reporters and stories were getting it right all along. Why didn’t the “word get around”? Why has the word still, evidently, not gotten around?

How about this as the new benchmark: When the social-media revolution results in a substiantial drop in the number of people who believe in something that’s not flat out drop dead wrong, and has massive, far-reaching consequences, then some triumphalism will be appropriate.

Too much to ask?

The value of Paris

So have you actually read the petition that Paris Hilton’s people are apparently trying to use to keep her out of jail for this DUI thing or whatever it was?

She provides hope for young people all over the U.S. and the world. She provides beauty and excitement to (most of) our otherwise mundane lives.

Apparently more than 3,000 people have signed it.

I think they should go to jail.

Um, what?

Dr Pepper is branding an entertainment event that puts a musical band in a bubble as they cut a new album.

In a partnership with MTV, and Epic recording artist Cartel, people will get the chance to watch for 23 days as the band make its new album while sealed inside a “huge transparent bubble,” the companies said.

All the details here. No, it’s not The Onion.
Also: DrPepperBubble.com.