LINKS FROM February 2007
"Ascots invoke images of old Hollywood and a royal day at the races. This hybrid of a tie and scarf is a rare sight these days, one that will surely bring attention to the man who dares to wear it."
"Google marshalled all its assets -- YouTube, authenticity, actual product features -- to tell a compelling story."
Tags: google advertising video youtube email
What is an Open Creative Community?
"The barrier to entry is creative citizenship, and you are either a citizen and a participant or you are not, based on your individual relationship to that community’s interests, practices, proximity and values."
Tags: creativity likemind opensource community culture technology bestarticlesof2007
Petrol lit with a cigarette? Only in the movies
Once again science comes through with answers to the big questions.
Tags: science movies cigarettes
"Co-creation isn’t about holding a contest for a consumer. Companies have been holding jingle-writing contests and Oscar Mayer kid auditions for decades. The real news is the emergence of dialogue."
Tags: marketing cocreation
"Printable cold sores allow us to take action! Bring these people back down to our level, and tell advertisers that you don't agree with their message. How can you help? It's easy..."
Tags: advertising culture beauty funny
"Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe
Tags: culture powerpoint data design philosophy visualization
Beauty and the death of zero sum
"Zero sum is dying in our culture. The notion that there is one single hierarchy of any kind is now in question."
NFL Films and the reinvention of football
"Ed and Steve say they thought about football as something theatrical, perhaps even operatic, well, come to that, actually mythical. They accomplish this effect with stirring music, slow motion athleticism, and a grand, booming narrative."
Tags: football sports culture marketing history
Get the message: it's the medium
TV can be dangerous to your health.
Tags: television research health
"The way to inspire a designer is to give them the message and feeling you want to convey, and the freedom to convey it in a fresh, new way."
MySpace driving down the price of advertising
"Which means, I think, that while MySpace is making more money every quarter, it's actually getting worse at monetising the traffic it generates. Or to put it another way, its yields are declining."
Tags: myspace advertising business
Creative photos by Chema Madoz
Some gorgeous and strange photographs.
Tags: creativity photography bestarticlesof2007
"Gender equality has come a long way when the press doesn't differentiate between homicidal maniacs who are men, and those who are women."
Shareholders as Brand Evangelists
"We tend to view consumers as marketing’s focus and shareholders as finance’s focus. But odds are if you’re a publicly traded company, you have a lot of individual investors who bought your stock because they simply love you as consumers."
Tags: marketing business stock wordofmouth starbucks
How to do it right . . .
"People need to believe in things and “brands� give them a reason to believe. Whether it’s an attitude they agree with or content they can depend on viewers . . . go most often to the places they can count on (and then, of course, adverisers follow,
Tags: marketing branding youtube media2.0
"I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he "rejected" Judaism and inspired Christianity."
Tags: religion bestarticlesof2007
Mildly Disturbing Greeting-Card Messages.
"Happy Easter! May the blood of Jesus, spilled for you, splatter your holiday with warm crimson cheer."
Life Fitness will merge exercise equipment and iPod
"Earlier today they announced a new line of equipment that features built-in iPod integration. Once an iPod is docked, users can control playback and watch video via the machine's built-in LCD."
Tags: ipod apple fitness technology
JetBlue Begins Reimbursing Stranded Passengers
"The company will begin payments ranging from $25 toward a future flight to a round-trip ticket to passengers kept waiting by the airline’s own mistakes."
Tags: nytimes airports travel business
"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished . . . "
Tags: community networking marketing culture
Will Online Video Remain A Monopoly?
"It would, however, be deeply ironic if “community� becomes the mechanism of monopoly for New Media, replacing the limited access to production and distribution that defined Old Media monopolies."
Tags: video community youtube google media2.0
The bizarre economics of the hotel minibar
"Why you should stay at hotels that overcharge for drinks and Wi-Fi access."
Tags: economics travel marketing
"Adafruit laser services is an appointment only laser etching service in New York City, NY USA - get your laptop, iPod, cell phone or any other gadget laser etched and learn about high powered lasers in person!"
Tags: nyc personalization
Hollywood to immortalise pop frauds
Universal is making a Milli Vanilli movie. Thank goodness.
Tags: movies music history funny strange
"I’m told some of their executives broke into a sweat as we worked through this rigorous process that requires you to let go of something in order to get something better."
3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing
"Traditional marketing theory and methods developed over the last 50 years are antithetical to Viral Marketing."
25 Most Interesting VoIP Startups
"This list presents our choices for some of the most exciting VoIP companies and products to watch."
On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry
"We think it takes a lot of balls to destroy what you have in order to make room for the new. Even if we fail, at least we gave it a shot. But hopefully, we won't."
Tags: business risk startups entrepreneur
7 Branding lessons from the Dove campaign
"A global research project told them [Dove] that of the 3200 women they had surveyed, only 64 of them (or 2%) were prepared to call themselves beautiful. Seventy-six per cent of the respondents wanted the idea of beauty to change. "
Tags: marketing advertising branding trend research beauty
"Understanding that trends in public opinion are driven not by a few influentials influencing everyone else but by many easily influenced people influencing one another should change how companies incorporate social influence into their marketing campaign
Tags: marketing influence wordofmouth
On March 22, World Water Day, participating restaurants in New York City will invite patrons to donate just $1 for the tap water they usually enjoy for free.
Tags: restaurant water charity nyc
Beyond the X's and O's, a Lesson in How to Be Big
"For starters, protect the product by limiting its exposure."
Tags: nytimes sports marketing branding business television media
They sleep 18 hours and party 24.
Tags: funny video youtube television
Some Thoughts on Last Week in Boston
"Trying too hard to be cool only shows that you have absolutely nothing to say."
Tags: graffiti marketing advertising streetart
Doc Searls on opening up your ideas.
Tags: ideas opensource patent
Brands are "used to living in a world of quite crisp lines but those lines are getting less clear. The best response, it seems to me, is to forget about the increasingly suspect goal of 'message delivery' and try and get more interesting, more useful or i
Tags: branding marketing trend brandedutility media2.0
"Stratfor specializes in providing situational awareness, focused insight and actionable intelligence in the areas of geopolitics, security and public policy to help our clients prepare for uncertainties and take action for maximizing results."
Tags: security consulting politics terrorism
The WNYC's Amy Sedaris Craft Challenge Pool
It's food . . . with googly eyes!!!!
Tags: funny photography food flickr
A Good Corporate Blog: Southwest Airlines
"ts strength lies in it's the diversity of its writers who represent a number of different sides of Southwest's business; from pilots and attendants, to schedule planners."
Tags: corporateblogging blogs business travel
How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century
Some ideas to fix the American education system.
As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
Tags: attention radicaltransparency identity culture trend blogs youth technology
The Best Town to Make an Upper Lip Stiff
"An explosion of cocktail quality and variety in London’s watering holes is making this city a new locus for connoisseurs of mixed drinks."
Tags: bars cocktailculture london nytimes
"Now that a billion people are online, even sites aimed at a narrow slice of the Web audience can attract huge crowds. Make way for the meganiche!"
Tags: business economics longtail marketing trend
Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information.
Tags: business finance culture
Finally, the history of General Tso's Chicken.
Tags: food history nytimes china
Draft article on drinks innovation
"The increased extent to which consumer culture leads market development means that the gap between marketing ideas and innovation ideas is paper thin. And perhaps it has been ever since Sol put its slice of lime in the top?"
Tags: cocktailculture alcohol branding marketing cocreation innovation
Pipes: Frequently Asked Questions
"Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code."
Tags: api yahoo mashup tools web2.0
"I thought I'd bounce around a few thoughts. It's basically about taking a few key trends and looking at them at a different angle."
Tags: trend marketing brandedutility blogs curation
"Make your Valentine’s day STEAMY! Take your Valentine to White Castle on Wednesday, February 14 between 5 and 8 p.m. and enjoy hostess seating, candlelit dining and your own server."
Tags: funny food love relationships
Gorgeous website for a French design company.
Tags: flash portfolio inspiration
A book by the agency LOVE used to help them pitch themselves. Looks like a children's book complete with textures to touch. Beautiful.
"So how does a creative person increase demand for their work?"
Tags: creativity economics marketing
I Know What You're (Collectively) Thinking, Planning
"How long before the collective search terms of a company can be used to sufficiently predict the products and services they next bring to market?"
Tags: attention business search future identity privacy
Jay-Z to help relaunch Cherry Coke
"Jay-Z is set to help relaunch Cherry Coke. The rapper's Rocawear firm will design the new can, and the product's TV commercials."
Tags: branding marketing design trend music
Patrons or Pirates: the music industry has to choose
What if the music industry restructured itself to more resemble the arts?
Tags: art music business culture
Nintendo's Wii, Radiating Fun, Is Eclipsing Sony Machine
"There are growing signs that Nintendo’s Wii, which gets couch potatoes off the couch, has taken the lead over Sony’s PlayStation 3."
Tags: videogames
Texas Governer Orders HPV Vaccine
Surprise move mandates shots for schoolgirls to prevent sex virus that leads to cancer
"Rip out all of the faces from the Skymall Catalog. You will see from all of their smiling faces that they are pleased with their liberation. The images can then be used to create data visualizations of Skymall demographics."
Tags: funny demographics magazines race visualization
Just another lonely, terrorist-like blogger
CK breaks down why bloggers are not necessarily as lonely as one professor seems to think they are.
Tags: blogs community culture books
"The love affair our culture has with communicating by keyboard has drastically reduced the amount we write by hand, so much so that the New York Times recently reported that the skill, "like an unused muscle," is pretty much dead by . . . High School."
Tags: culture technology communication
"Experience exists only in the minds of your customers. When a person engages with your products, services, and environments, a set of distinct human qualities comes into play:"