Ephective Ephemera
An interesting post last week over at Idea Sandbox on the concept of fallow field farming, and whether brands ought to explore a methodology that halts short-term growth to allow operations/markets to replenish:
What about the notion of letting the business rest for a season to allow it to rejuvenate? Instead of aggressively building new stores [...]
We’re suckers for rapid, identifiable transformation. It drives investment. It drives news cycles. It drives Twitter.
Calculated, unidentifiable transformation is a much murkier proposition (which is, perhaps, why the changes in China scare the hell out of so many Westerners). It’s also a big part of the reason for the collective impatience with President Obama – who promised change (but did not promise that it would be instantly recognizable).
I’ve noted frequently here, and in a particularly robust conversation with Gareth Kay, that there exists tremendous inherent value for brands in mundane, incremental change that reveals itself only through the larger transformations it enables. Consider the massively incremental transformations at HP as outlined by Carly Fiorina some years ago or the slow evolution of IBM into a services provider.
In a post this week on the ongoing problems of subscription music services, Anthony Volodkin aptly summarizes the perilous landscape of the space from a user’s perspective:
So [instead] they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music. We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless. Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.
I’ve been ruminating all weekend on this video, created by the good folks at Moving Brands. In summary: they found that a white paper on ‘Living Brands’ dated quickly, as is the nature of such documents. Rather than republish the document in a new iteration, they decided to employ augmented reality as a means of updating the document in real time. Essentially, anyone who has purchased the publication will find that the document is truly evergreen.
“Sometimes I like to talk about the “paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.”
– Freddie Laker via Take Me To Your Leader
Pianotrappan:
”Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator and feel better” is something we often hear or read in the Sunday papers. Few people actually follow that advice. Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do? See the results here.
(via Rolighetsteorin and The Fun Theory by Volkswagen
Some choice pearls from an imagined, and quite interesting, Media Magazine ‘interview’ this month with Bill Bernbach (who passed away in 1982), culled from verbatim quotes, and surprisingly prescient:
I want to warn you against believing that advertising is a science…Logic and overanalysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It’s like love – the more you [...]
Jason Kottke has a post today recalling this quote from legendary ad man Howard Gossage from Harpers in 1960:
Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on [...]
Over on ISO50 this week, Scott Hansen posts on Linda Aldredge’s treehouse – a lovely construction outside of Woodstock, New York, covered in more detail by Inhabitat and Domino.
Aldredge, from the Inhabitat interview:
With treehouse building, you have to take into account all the various changes a tree will make in it’s lifetime with your house. [...]
Before there was a Heroes comic book series, Marvel created a fantastic series of comics called ‘What-If?’ that lived entirely outside the (admittedly limited) constraints of the existing character and narrative arcs of its properties.
Some of my favorite titles:
What if Conan the Barbarian walked the earth today?
What if Captain America had been elected president?
What if [...]
Ran across this sign today in the parking lot of the wholesale giant from whom I was purchasing baby wipes and dishwashing detergent:
It brought to mind a similar sign I’ve come across at IKEA (my shopping habits are frighteningly naked at the moment):
I happen to very much like the idea behind both messages: effectively that [...]
I was never much of a skater, though not for a lack of trying. In the end, I think I was much more interested in the culture that it embodied (and was as far flung from my rural Texas upbringing as could be imagined) – mostly the recordings of Skatemaster Tate1.
Still, absurd co-opting of skate [...]
Two more seemingly-unrelated articles, with a thread in common:
ESPN’s Buster Olney, among the best sportswriters in America, and my favorite source for baseball analysis, wrote a poignant piece last Saturday – before the news of Alex Rodriguez’ positive drug test broke – in which he argues that it is a business imperitive that baseball players [...]
PSFK posts today on Google’s Power Meter initiative.
It’s a fabulous idea, to be sure: Allow anyone with a smart meter to plug into the Google application and retrieve a visualization of their actual power usage, thus enabling users to make informed decisions about their power consumption, and ultimately cut down on both usage and costs [...]
Poster Boy is a New York subway artist who, it appears, eschews spraypaint for a razor blade.
His work is wildly popular, and one imagines that he’s on the way to a show of his own. View his Flickr stream here.
While watching the video, I found myself wondering what the folks at Showtime think about the [...]