Archive for the ‘business’ Category
New term via Frog Design, Indentured Advertude: advertising where you are held hostage… appearing on every conceivable flat surface that you might possibly look at, like grocery store floors. It is oppressive, aggressive and reeks of desperation.
Amen.
08.06.19 / business
BBC: America is, I think, the only country in the world which permits advertising of drugs which are available only through your doctor. The insidious message is simple; if your doctor is not offering you this drug, maybe you should be asking for it.
Core77: Rob Walker’s Buying In carries the reader on a frenetically paced tour of senseless consumption spanning from Viking ranges to custom high-tops. Along the way he introduces the reader to a diverse cast of characters like Dietrich Mateschitz, the entrepreneur who brought the world Red Bull, the sponsor of both the Flugtag air races, and in the opposite direction, the late night drunken falls of people who’ve imbibed too much alcohol along with the cough syrup caffeinated punch of that narrow little can. Other characters include an assortment of white guys without any discernible street-cred who’ve managed to build clothing empires around hip-hop and urban culture, and even viral marketers who pretend to be customers, proselytizing to others about the merits of products (and apparently not always disclosing their affiliations).
Google’s “analytics evangelist” Avinash Kaushik says many websites suck, all because of the HIPPO — as in the “highest paid person’s opinion.” Mr. Kaushik employed the word “sucks” frequently when he talked about the traditional metrics used for measuring online marketing. And as far as online marketing goes, it sucks too. He likened it to a “faith-based initiative.”
08.05.22 / business
Steven Heller: It’s sometimes embarrassing the way that designers prostrate themselves—and the English language—in their promotional material describing in words what they do, as though their designs alone aren’t enough to tell the story. It may be true that some clients (or prospective clients) don’t have a good grasp of what design is, but most have eyes and can intuit. During the nascent period of graphic design (somewhere around the mid-1920s) all that a commercial artist advertising in one of the many promotional annuals had to say was “Jeanne Doe, calligraphy, layout, illustration,” and the point was made (in part because the services were being bought by agencies or art directors, not directly by clients). Today, with non-design clients being more active in the hiring process, something called design philosophy has become the basis of a new patois. Philosophy is not pejorative, but when it turns to sophistry—beware!
Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma: Today it is the driving force behind a new generation of D.I.Y. entrepreneurs who are raising hell once again. Disruptive new D.I.Y. technologies are causing unprecedented creative destruction. The history of punk offers us valuable insights into how this new world works. Punk was an angry outburst, a reaction to mass culture, but it offered new ideas about how mass culture could be replaced with a more personalized, less centralized worldview.
08.04.19 / books, business, culture
Design Observer: Advertising has been a favored target of social critics. In the 1930s, Ballyhoo, a popular newsstand humor magazine, and the prototype for MAD magazine, which in turn was the father of sixties’ Undergrounds and the granddaddy of contemporary zines, savagely ripped the façade off the hucksters on Madison Avenue. Ballyhoo took original quotidian ads for automobiles, detergent, processed foods, you name it, wittily altered the brand-names (a la Adbusters) and caricatured the product pitches to reveal the inherent absurdities in the product claims. Likewise, in the fifties and early sixties, MAD magazine skewered major brands by attacking the insidious slogans endemic to advertising. They came up with such classics as “Look Ma, No Cavities, and No Teeth Either,” a sendup of Crest Toothpaste’s false promise of cavity free teeth, and “Happy But Wiser,” a slam at Budweiser beer through a parody ad that showed a besotted, forlorn alcoholic whose wife had just dumped him. MAD was the influence behind Wacky Packs (created by Art Spiegelman), which came inside Topps Bubblegum packages, that used puns on mainstream product brand-names to attack society, politics and culture (i.e. Reaganettes, a take-off on the candy Raisinnettes that looked like the former American president). Paradoxically, Ballyhoo, MAD, and Wacky Packs were all mass-market products, but because of their respective exposure each had an influence on the kids who grew up to produce the icons of alternative culture.
David Hornik: The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance — don’t do one thing, do it all; don’t sell one piece of content, sell it all; don’t store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn’t work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.
08.04.02 / business, culture, media
Banksy: The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
08.01.27 / art, business, culture
The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance
Design Council: The study has charted the performance of companies grouped together for their consistent showing in design award schemes. It has discovered that a Design Index of 63 companies and a further Emerging Index have held their lead over the stock market as a whole during bull and bear markets as well as during the recovery period which began in 2003. Since then, the Design Index has grown by 43 per cent and the Emerging Index has risen by 74.3 per cent, compared to 26.2 per cent growth for the FTSE 100 Index.
