Yesterday the Times ran an interesting piece about French advertising, noting the cultural (if not legal) norms there prevent such things as the hard sell.
To us money implies corruption, and moreover, because we consider ourselves the inventors of freedom, never mind if that’s not true, we still consider advertising as a kind of manipulation,” Mr. Séguéla said. “This explains why television commercials started so late here — essentially because leftist opposition saw ads as corrupting [...]
6 Our World
In a US Army effort to boost their ‘human capital’, they will
begin recruiting skilled immigrants who are living in this country with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become United States citizens in as little as six months… Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.
This [...]
0 Current Events
One of the things we’ve been talking about recently at Desedo is the fluidity of identity. How different situations bring out different facets of one’s personality or brand and how this fluidity gives a picture in the round of a complex object. Witness Kanye West performing with Jay-Z in three acts:
Hip-hop
Hip-hop for adults
International superstars
What we also see in these photographs is the progression both men have made as they’ve grown from being popular in [...]
3 Pop
The product really is the marketing.
Make better products first.
-Paul Isakson
This is one of my favorite presentations about branding within the new media landscape. Not only for the content, but for the crisp aesthetics, which look well informed by Tufte’s critique of powerpoint.
1 Industry