Month: March 2008

Cadbury, Airport Trucks, WTF***?

Fallon’s new Cadbury ad fails in every way that Gorilla succeeds. No whimsy. No personal touch. It ain’t going viral.

The premise of the spot is that a fleet of airport vehicles has “pimped themselves to show their unique character, ready for the race of their lives.Ã¢â‚¬Â[1] So, like Pixar’s Cars, we’re expecting cheeky and anthropomorphized characters.
Cool, let’s roll.

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Now it feels like the truck we’re supposed to root for is the small orange underdog we follow from last place. But just as it gets toward the front, the spot cuts to a Dukes of Hazzard shot of the large blue truck. So is that now our hero? Dunno. In closing the camera pulls up, Queen sings “no stopping” and the trucks keep trucking. So not only am I still sans hero, I don’t know who wins the great race.

Well, maybe the spot is not about one truck in particular, but about their collective joy at an illicit runway race. Yet throughout the ad, we keep seeing bits and pieces of humans, prepping and driving the vehicles. This furthers our narrative dissonance: Are our heros the trucks or the drivers? We never meet the drivers, so can’t pick a fave, but care less about the trucks, cause they haven’t truly “pimped themselves”.

I’m lost and lonely on the tarmac.

Now dear reader I love abstraction. Some of my favourite movies have no clear arc or heroic payoff – Lost in Translation, I’m Not There, Hiroshima Mon Amour, etc… Great adverts and art empower themselves to tweak narrative conventions. Fallon’s Gorilla is one of those greats, a 90 second window into the world of a hirsute drummer. I love that spot like a fat kid loves cake. But Airport Trucks? Similac.

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[1]Cadbury’s Tony Bilsborough

March 29, 2008
PSFK: Postcards From Yo Momma

smrtgrl Kat Hunt and I were talking about the newnew blog Postcards From Yo Momma – could it be the next
Stuff White People Like? Maybe so, maybe not, as a friend of Kat’s declared Momma passe….after two days, an ohso New York thing to do. We might be the fastest moving creatures on earth, but does this always lead to innovation?
Pre-2.0, part of being a New Yorker was about knowing secrets. In the era of Flavorpill, Thrillist, etc.. anyone can paratroop into town and dial into what was once clandestine. The counterpunch to this is a spike in secret clubs/bars – Milk+Honey, The Back Room, Old Rabbit Club – and guerilla dining units. Yet their currency is one of quick cool, not really innovative culture. Is our fairtown flatlining or just us types? Or is this question passe?

Like the artworld moving from Paris to NYC in the 1950’s, I wonder if BRIC will come to the cultural fore. TATA buying luxury while making the $2500 car. Baile Funk influencing Diplo then to Wburg. Moscow’s billionaires. China PWNing the web. In 2058, is there gonna be a new New York?

*my spies now tell me Momma’s got a book deal

March 28, 2008
PSFK: Conference Culturejamming

(soaked up heaps of ideas at PSFK yesterday, so begins a lil loop of yawps, queries + kisses)
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Earlier this month, Business Week wrote about Pepsi, Nike and other big guns subverting the ‘official’ brands of the Beijing Olympics. But could a brand hack or subversively sponsor an advertising conference? If well executed, would it be well received? I imagine a large conference is fair game, but are the nimble new off-limits?

Quicker than quick, cooler than cool.

6/9/2008
Olympic Advert Hijack

March 28, 2008
Real Recognize Real

As Eric Henderson and Agency Spy recently wrote, all cultures are rooted in unique codes and mores. If you are an outsider reaching in, be honest about your status, otherwise you’ll just get shook. One of my favorite examples of cultural missteps in the YouTube era is the P Diddy & Burger King collab.

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On a platform whose billion dollar market value is based in egalitarian DIY, Diddy not only looks pompous, but gets all the codes wrong. BK ‘bought’ him a YouTube channel? And so this gets flipped by Lisa Nova to the tune of +1.5 million views.

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It spawns a raft of other spoofs and poor press for both ‘Kings’. While DiddyTV is going strong, BK is MIA and Young Nov’ is keeping it real in the YouTube era.
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read about it in this book, matey
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12/10/08 Naked shows that Diddy just seems to be outta touch. It aint even that’s he’s so lux, he’s just so lame.

March 26, 2008
Beautiful Losers

As piracy remixes the old business models of music and film, the money ‘lost’ doesn’t disappear, it just gets spent elsewhere.

When I was a teenager, I’d spend money on music in the act of fleshing out my personality – (both publicly and privately) – Rolling Stones/Tribe Called Quest/Blues Traveller, etc… Each $12 CD added what I felt was another aspect to myself. And since the 90’s things done changed – thanks to the internets, a kid can change his entire music collection (and subsequent claims to identity groups) in an afternoon and at no cost. With the decrease in cost of music, so decreases the social value one can gain from association. Sacrifice of money is no longer part of the equation music = identity.

So where does the money + value go? While music can easily be ripped to possess, this is not yet possible with clothing or aspects of industrial and artistic design. Digital as we are, these products are still quite tangible, and I think now carry an even greater value in our quest to claim individuality. Witness the rise of Threadless and Etsy. Nowadays there are far more subsets and identity groups amongst teens – and the nuances are oft fleshed out via the visual language of clothes and accessories. Well, where is this heading?

In the 80s, Punk and Hip-Hop empowered everyone to become a musician. Cool kids were in bands. In the 90s, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez did this for filmmaking – cool kids rocked a camera. Next? Premiering at SXSW, the doco Beautiful Losers, is a window into the world of the DIY artists that coalesced toward the end of the 90s. While once they were fringe, they have since become mainstream, and the new cool sees them kids rocking photoshop and silkscreens like an electric guitar.

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March 25, 2008
E Pluribus Unum

No two objects have meant as much to visual culture of late as the widespread use (and piracy) of Adobe Photoshop and the availability of digital cameras. It is no wonder, then, that the stock photography business is booming. And should we be surprised that Bill Gates presciently entered this business long ago? His stock company Corbis is the number two player in the industry.

The creation and manipulation of images remains one of the simple pleasures of computer ownership for a great many. It is also the secret weapon of the blogosphere. From Perez, et al.:

Skipping ahead to business class, I’ll note that the same image creation tools in the hands of professionals can take on wide-ranging and even sublime implications. Witness Shepard Fairey‘s entry into the most captivating narrative in a generation [1]:

The middling photographer in all of us lives and dies in the paintbrush and rubber stamp, the eraser and the magic wand tools in Photoshop. Somewhere around there I had the idea of creating a desktop calendar. It was, for me, a purely functional idea. Being able to visualize the coming weeks gives the processing of time a much-needed physical component that helps prevent it from getting lost in the mind haze of Life in the Big City. That’s the theory anyway. The down-side of doing so publicly, I realized only later, is that I’d have to create a new one every three months. With that, I present desedo’s 2nd quarter desktop calendar — available here at our free store. [2]

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1. Speaking of Fairey, many skateboarders have become paragons of outsider culture, not as many are invited to lecture the creative world via the PSFK conference.
2. The four photographs in this post comprise the pixel space from which the calendar was wrought. Out of Many, One.

Oh, and take that Photoshop!

March 23, 2008
Stuff White People Like (and don't)

Christian Lander, EIC of the blog Stuff White People Like, just inked a book deal for 325K. While the blogosphere has been ripe with race-based blogs for a while, this might be the first of its kind to go from pixel to print. I’m now curious to see the tone of future white-scribed humor blogs that touch on racial politics and poetics.

Of note is that SWPL, and its progenitor Black People Love Us, are both racially self-immolating. Based in the concept of white folks being goofy and absurdly unaware that ‘others’ are equals, not exotics, this brand of humor doesn’t spit fire beyond the white man in the mirror.

Historically, white (liberal) comic commentary has avoided other races, while on the flipside comics of color use greater narrative freedom in speaking their mind. One root of this is simply in our nation’s power structure – white people get to run the country and so everyone else can have comedy & cool. Now does this rubric change if Obama becomes president? Will white folks then feel a new sense of comic and cultural freedom, so that next time someone says “Larry Bird is overrated”, they’ll retort with ease “Yeah, well so is Antwone Fisher.”

(black people love this movie)

March 21, 2008