MURKETING

Pitch of the day

Yesterday somebody using the Robwalker.net contact form sent a message, and all it said was: “Read my blog.” Followed by a link.

I found this depressing. Somehow it seemed to sum up the entire state of online “dialogue” these days — a blunt demand for attention. But points for honesty, I guess.

Idea for street-art project: Signs advertising fanciful future-use development plans

There’s a little building around the corner from me with this sign posted on it — a rendering of its supposed future. It’s been there for years, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s at best a hypothetical future, and arguably a fictitious one. The actual building remains vacant, and in fact is for sale. Any development that may take place some day depends on someone buying it, and what they might want to do. Till then, it’s just another empty building.

Here’s how it really looks:

As you can see, the disparity between the rendering and reality is considerable. In the rendering, in fact, the actual extant structure is a mere add-on, complementing a bigger building. Which in point of fact exists nowhere besides that rendering. IRL, it’s a vacant lot.

So as I walked past this spot for the zillionth time recently, it occurred to me that there are vacant buildings with no discernible future all over town — all over lots of towns. Wouldn’t it be cool to create completely fictional, but imaginative and exciting, “artist renderings” of their hypothetical futures, too? And post those renderings on the actual vacant buildings? (Disclaimer: Maybe someone is already doing what I’m proposing here and I’ve missed it. If so, sorry!)

Consider this, another empty building not far from Murketing HQ:

Seems ripe for an imaginary re-use, doesn’t it? And taking a cue from the above rendering, this structure is really just a starting point — imagine it tacked on to a thrilling Gehry-like complex, let’s say. Or supporting an immense waterslide, a re-creation of the Unisphere, a heliport, an Oldenburg-esque sculpture of colossal banana. It could make for a great rendering!

Mount that rendering on the building, and you have a happy imaginary future to contemplate, brightening an otherwise moribund presence on the urban landscape that currently does little more than remind the passerby that the economy stinks.

Sadly I have none of the skills or personality traits necessary to make such a scheme into reality. But maybe you do! Somebody out there — start rendering the theoretical futures of our nation’s unused commercial real estate!

In The New York Times Magazine: Ammo branding

TARGET MARKETING
Ammunition seem like a commodity, but even bullets get branded

ATK has been in the consumer-ammunition market for only a few years, but the commercial-products group of its armament-systems division now manages a portfolio of about 20 consumer-ammunition brands. That’s a fair amount of differentiation. Some of the reasons are obvious: the ammunition needs of duck hunters and of pistol-range enthusiasts are quite distinct from each other. But some of ATK’s ammo-brand differentiation sounds more akin to the sort of image making many people associate with, say, energy drinks or deodorants.

Read the column in the November 8, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

• A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher: “Now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.”
• To Do in NYC: Cyberoptix Show Nov. 14: Devotion Gallery, in Brooklyn. Bethany Shorb (past Consumed subject) featured. Click for details but “complements the hand-fabricated and -repurposed rubber fabrics with several forms of modified lace and tatted doilies.” I’d go.

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• How Luxury Will Survive: “As more individuals in Asia accumulate enough money to satisfy their daily needs and begin to have confidence in their long-term prospects, they’re interested in demonstrating to themselves, their neighbors, and anyone they happen to meet that they, too, have joined the club.” No particular evidence is offered to support this socio-cultural claim. But it might still be correct.
• Book Review — “Curious?” by Todd Kashdan: “Most of us engage in what Kashdan calls passive curiosity. If something odd crosses our path (say, a dog dressed up as a punk rocker), we are interested in learning about it. But there’s novelty everywhere, and it’s very much worth seeking out.”
• Croc Hunting: “Crocs are a symbol for our leisure culture and a symbol of adolescent adults. What is the nature of our current public spaces when we are allowed to and can wear Crocs in them? Crocs are the free plan of footwear. They free the barriers of the floor surface; sand to water to hospital, to home, to kitchen, to 5th Ave. No other shoe can achieve such a diversity of surfaces. They democratize footwear and break gender barriers.”
• Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End: “The main purpose of social networks, once we are coaxed into building them for ourselves, is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital.”
• A history of baseball and chewing tobacco.: Interesting.

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Linkpile

• But enough about you?: “More than six million memoirs sold last year, up from 1,256,000 in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan.”
• TV Finds That a Mortal Foe, the DVR, Is Really a Best Friend: “Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.”
• Culture (Not Just Genes) Drives Evolution: “The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood.”
• Cass R. Sunstein and political rumors on the Internet: “Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.”
• The White House’s war with Fox News: Louis Menand: “The more crowded and competitive this field becomes—more news chasing fewer newsies—the more journalism approaches the condition of coffee beans and major-league breaking balls: you never dreamed there could be so many varieties. But, unless you are an aficionado of political spin, you may prefer to grab the remote and start browsing for “Frasier” reruns. The market for news is narrowing down to people who need an ideological fix.”

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Linkpile

• Contest: Write a Six-Word Story about a “Significant Object”: “Can you create Significance for this Object in just six words? The winning response will be published on the Significant Objects site, and more to the point, on its eBay store. Proceeds from that auction go to the author of the winning submission.” Click through for details. Deadline is Friday.
• Lucha Libre Masks: Astonishing assortment.
• The Rise of Power Jeans: “Chosen well, jeans can suggest the wearer is confident and modern. Traditionally cut blue jeans carry a whiff of the laborer about them, so denim on a leader suggests a willingness to roll up the sleeves and dig in. There’s also something of the rebel in a pair of jeans. In the boardroom, that can read as creative.” Okay.
• The Music-Making Business: “Many of today’s DIY artists are far from strangers in a new land. They’re likely gifted musicians with some level of formal training and well-schooled in how to navigate the chaotic world of popular music. They say a new, leaner industry is rising from the rubble of the pre-Internet corporate model. It will be a place for smart, dedicated musicians who know how to play and do business.”

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In The New York Times Magazine: Hummer Owners

HUMMER LOVE:
How do the drivers of a widely loathed vehicle see themselves?

Hummer loyalists come across as a beleaguered lot. Less predictably, Luedicke and his fellow authors, Craig J. Thompson and Markus Giesler, argue that Hummer drivers position their ownership at the center of a “brand-mediated moral conflict” in which Hummer enthusiasts are not only innocent but also heroic. Conflict with vehement critics turns out to play a key role, with the Hummer owner casting himself or herself as a “moral protagonist” who must, according to this theory, “defend sacrosanct virtues and ideals from the transgressive actions of an immoral adversary.” And what sacrosanct virtues would those be? To oversimplify a bit: American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, love of the frontier, community and freedom.

Read the column in the November 1, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

NOTE: I am in receipt this morning of an email alerting me to the existence of a 2006 documentary called Hummerland. According to its distributor: “In this humorous documentary, the director went looking for the appeal of this modern-day tank. She returns with a tragic-comic send-up of our consumerist society.” Sounds interesting. As you know, once I’ve written about a topic in Consumed, I am on to the next one. But if you want further thoughts on Hummerthink, this might be worth checking out.

ANOTHER NOTE: I am also in receipt of another email from someone who did Hummer-related research: “Vehicle of The Self,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 2006. Again, my interest was in the points made in the specific research that I cited, and what it implies about the disconnect between how we think of our own consumption decisions and how others “read” them, not in offering a comprehensive assessment of Hummer-ness. But if you’re interested in the latter, there’s more fodder for you.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

• Moral Fiber: Breakfast and believing: Joshua Glenn codebreaks the ads for clues to the Middlebrow soul. Highly interesting, as always. (Bonus link: old Consumed on Cheerios as a “character.”)
• How friendship became friending: Another good essay by Rob Horning on social networking, society, identity.
• The surprising beauty of portraits on gravestones.: Photo essay by by Camilo Jose Vergara
• Sad state of scares when focus is on zombies, vampires: “What about the gremlin? The yeti? The triple-threat ghoul, who robs graves, drinks blood and eats the dead?”
• Flip-Flop Frame | Significant Objects: Story by Merrill Markoe. “This poorly articulated caricature of a foot wearing a flimsy multicolored flip flop sits atop a frame that boldly declares, ‘Whatever I have enshrined here is something I hold in contempt.'” Very exciting to me personally to have gotten Merrill Markoe into the project.

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Kate Bingaman-Burt Wants To Draw Your Mixtape

Linkpile

• Ecko slam-dunked: “Under the terms of his deal with Iconix, Ecko is surrendering majority control of his trademark in exchange for $63.5 million in cash plus $90 million in financing for a newly formed joint venture.”
• What’s a cult?: How governments decide whether a religion is real or not.
• Remember the guy who made the anti-United Airlines video?: He took a United flight recently, and they lost his bag. Haw.
• Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search: Lots of interesting points and thoughts in this essay about information, Google, libraries, and possible futures thereof.

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• Artists plan to encase vacant Detroit home in ice: “To draw attention to foreclosures that have battered the region.” Yeah? is there a big problem with people not knowing about foreclosures and vacant housing in Michigan? I think that info is kind of, you know, out there. Why not do this in Westchester County or somewhere that would actually be surprising. The net effect of this is just to reinforce an existing perception (ie, Detroit is a basket case!) not raise any new ideas or insights.
• Cereal ads might be bad for your childs health: Study: “the least healthy breakfast cereals are the most frequently and aggressively marketed to children.”
• The art of deception: When it’s fun to be fooled: Sounds like a great exhibition. It’s in Florence, though.
• Human Avatars Are Better Salesmen: Study: “The participants perceive human-like spokes-avatars as more attractive, and players who interact with a human-like spokes-avatar perceive the iPhone advertisement as more informative than those who interact with a non-human spokes-avatar.” Now you know.
• Counterfunctional feature of the day: “Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate is blank, i.e. no inscriptions on the keys. Nothing at all.” Um, great? (Thanks Jonah!)
• Musicians call for release of torture soundtrack details: “Famous artists like Pearl Jam, REM, Rosanne Cash, and the Roots filed a Freedom of Information Act demanding that the US government list the names of the tunes that were used as soundtracks in interrogation situations.”
• Valerie Hegarty: “Destruction Art.” Pretty cool. Via Coudal.
• Ad for eyelash drug Latisse goes too far:: Consumer Reports Health Blog: “Its flashy ad campaign has caught ire from at least one other group: the Food and Drug Administration, which in September warned Allergan that promotional materials on the drugs Web site omitted or minimized certain risks.”
• The Uniform Project: Just checked back in on this and wow, the amount raised is now more than $27,000. That’s amazing!
• In One Man’s Garage, Pan Am Still Makes the Going Great: “Mr. Toth has built a precise replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo in Redondo Beach, Calif. The setup includes almost everything fliers in the late 1970s and 1980s would have found onboard: pairs of red-and-blue reclining seats, original overhead luggage bins and a curved, red-carpeted staircase.”
• Inside the App Economy: “At least 100,000 apps have been created. Some startups that staked their claim in the app economy have become large, lucrative businesses in just a few months. Two-year-old Zynga, which makes popular game apps, is already profitable, with more than $100 million in revenues.”

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Linkpile

• Terry Teachout on the Mystery of Music: “It won’t surprise me if neuroscientists eventually succeed in unlocking the mystery of music. I don’t fear that prospect, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don’t know what it means.”
• Going Offline in Search of Freedom: ‘The promise is of infinite knowledge, but whats delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same.”
• Robert Mars: I’m smitten with this guy’s work.

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Flickr Interlude

Clown Motel – Tonopah, Nevada, originally uploaded by Vintage Roadside.

Caption is: “We just got home from a 6000 mile road to Nashville, TN and back. We capped off our final night on the road at the one and only Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada.”

Suddenly I want to go to Nevada.

In The New York Times Magazine: Redbox

FEW RELEASES
For some at-home movie watchers, less is more.

Some studies show that consumers are happiest with a lot of choices. Other studies show that consumers are confounded (to the point of nonconsumption) by too many choices. So much, then, for studies. What about an actual business that allies itself closely with one or the other of these theories? For instance: DVD-rental kiosks that hold only 125 to 200 titles. That’s a pretty limited set of choices even by the standards of a Blockbuster, let alone of Netflix, which has an infinite-seeming selection. Back in 2002, Mitch Lowe asked his kids what they thought about such a scheme. They pronounced it “crazy.”

Today there are more than 18,000 redbox kiosks at drugstores, grocery stores and McDonald’s franchises all over the United States; new locations are added at a rate of about one per hour. …

Read the column in the October 25, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.