Posts
Check out this image from a marketing e-mail I received at backcountry.com today:
Scraggly Mountain climbers, done for the day, kicking back with some bratwurst on the grill and intensely smoking a joint. Check out the other dude sitting on the rock, he's like "pass it back over here, bro."
All too often, brands water down their messaging by offering a too-glossy version of reality -- a hyper-idealized filtration of the truth that is plastic and boring. In the case of outdoors lifestyle content, you can look no further than the covers of Outside Magazine to see the ultimate example of this phony perfection.
But cool brands aren't afraid to be subversive by presenting images that more closely match reality. Cool brands understand that the really real can be more attractive, and certainly more interesting, then the ideal. Brands like American Apparel get this -- by using normal-looking people in their ads and catalog - ok, sure, the girls look like jail bait extras from a Larry Clark movie, and the poses are semi-pornographic, but the models are not super airbrushed and impossibly thin. They're above average, sure, but they're hot because they have flaws. They're hot because they're real.
The messaging of the 1950s, where marketers crammed illustrations of perfect families engaging in perfect activities in perfect settings down people's miserable throats (as depicted so brilliantly in Mad Men), like so many valium, are still alive and well.
Customers aren't perfect. And perfection is boring. In today's age, brands that present more realistic scenarios will win more, and more loyal, customers.In the first instance, customers think, "hey, that could be me." In the second, they think, "wow, that will never be me. Pass." And that's why amateur porn is so popular.
In truth, it's all about finding a line, and a balance between the idealized and the real. The real in the case of backcountry might be a fat guy buying a bunch of camping equipment and sticking it in his closet for an eternity. In the case of American Apparel, you won't see a 250-pound woman in their catalog. And people won't watch amateur porn of fat, ugly people either (unless that's what they're into). But employing some realism will result in a stronger brand with more loyal customers. We'll call this the REALIDEAL. Bestselling business book TK.
this guy is awesome:
No way you'd see people this weird in the hipper parts of Manhattan or Brooklyn -- this is upstate weird; detached form reality in a scary/awesome way weird.
Middle aged people originally from Denmark who now support themselves making stained-glass portraits of the Virgin Mary in their back shed, who unwind after a long day of "work" with a crushed-up oxycontin stirred into a glass of Slo Gin mixed with RC Cola, while listening to bad world-music inspired drum and bass weird. David Lynch weird.
And I love it.
This is really worth watching in its entirety. Smackdown.
Yesterday Naval Academy "Plebes" attempted to scale a 21-foot-tall, lubed up obelisk. There is nothing homo-erotic about this, these young, virile, greased up young men working as a team to conquer this hard, slippery, historical erection, I can assure you.
Sorry my loyal readers --- I've been insanely busy lately. To make up for my lack of posts, here are some thoughts:
1) West Virginia dem primary: 95% White people, 70% of whom never went to college. This is Hillary's base: rednecks! I don't think it's news to many that rednecks tend to hate black people. O'bama can't connect with white redneck racists. Hillary has a point.
2) Park Slope is suspending alternate side of the street until further notice! Holy crap:
Alternate-side-of-the-street parking will be suspended entirely on residential streets in Park Slope starting on May 19 — putting a months-long end to the weekly hassle of moving your car.
The downside is that there will be no residential street cleaning at all this summer.
For car owners, the alternate-side parking suspension is like a kid’s summertime vision of the school burning down. The change is necessary so that the Department of Transportation has enough time to install street signs explaining new street-cleaning regulations that will reduce “No parking” times on residential street-cleaning days from three hours to 90-minutes.
And
in commercial zones, streets will be cleaned as many as six times a
week, up from four or five, and at staggered half-hour cleaning
schedules, said Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman, who
said he has been calling for just such changes for 20 years.
Here's a typically overwritten Times take on the story:
3) Engagement party was a smashing success: Checkit. In other nuptial news yesterday was Melissa's and my six year anniversary of our boyfriend/girlfriendship. Exciting stuff.
4) I bought a bicycle... following Phil's lead, I've decided to bike around Brooklyn. Should be fun.
Anyway, have a nice day/
Recently, John Chasin of MediaPost wrote an opinion piece concerning proposed legislation by NY State Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky to allow for opt-out provisions to protect user privacy online - these privacy settings are designed to protect "personal" data from being used by web services to serve personalized, targeted advertisements to users across multiple web properties. See NYT piece about the legislation here.
Of course people have always been paranoid about privacy with regards to the web -- there are many reactionary privacy protection groups out there who go apeshit whenever a new technology comes out to threaten our privacy. Many also argue that privacy is an illusion. Several years ago, Reason Magazine released a stunning issue with a satellite image of their subscribers' homes printed on the cover -- in their piece called "Database Nation," they argue the benefits of corporations' ability to use customer information to more effectively target and and private services to consumers - as long as the government keeps their hands off the data.
But in today's post-9/11 age, there is no guarantee that the government will keep their hands off of this sort of data - witness the issue with telecoms passing information to government under the Foreign Services Intelligence Act. Recently, our President has pushed to pass legislation preventing corporations from being legally liable for violating their customer's privacy and handing over data to government (when the request is most likely illegal to begin with).
Based on the fact that government is capable of capturing this data and using it for their own purposes at will, I am completely for end users being able to opt-out of preventing the collection and aggregation of user data. I don't dispute the benefits of providing such data -- check out this content recommendation in my Google Reader:
Take a look at the second item -- the BassFan News recommendation. There isn't a single feed I subscribe to in my Google reader that relates to bass fishing. My Google Reader is full of geeky web blogs, some music stuff, national news, and some local news and information. Either Google coincidentally recommended something I would like, or they culled the data from elsewhere, most likely another Google service, such as Search or Gmail. Imagine the amount of data they'll be able to collect with Doubleclick code on the pages of 80% of publisher web sites.
Is the data serving my needs and bettering my experience? Yes. Will it help marketers (and Google) make money? Sure. It's a win win... except for one thing. Because at any moment the government seems capable of subpoenaing this information and to abuse it at will. And that is pretty scary, and not outside of what authoritarian regimes such as China are currently doing.
But perhaps instead of legislation demanding opt-outs on behavioral tracking, what we really need is for government to uphold our constitutional rights to privacy. Maybe large corporations, when faced with the prospect of widespread user opt-outs due to privacy concerns, will lobby government to push for tighter privacy legislation - keeping government hands off of their data. Of course, the average American is, for some illogical reason, more freaked out by corporations having their user data compared with the state.
Something I'll think about more as I read BASSFAN News ...
Melissa's Macbook is less than two years old, and has had a battery that died, a hard drive that crashed, losing tons of important data, and now the thing needs a new motherboard - none of it covered under warranty.
What a piece of junk.
Total cost of replacements is close to double the price of the original machine.
Ugh.
I thought I'd continue my anti-government rant with these photos I took of Litchfield Villa, just inside Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
It's a really beautiful building, now being used as the headquarters of the Parks Department. But as Melissa and I walked by we noticed that the Parks Department transformed the bay in the very front of the building into a supply closet!
Boxes stacked 10 feet high.
Oy gavolt! Way to treat an beautfiul historic building owned by the public - surely the case of cold and brutal bureaucratic utilitarianism. And these are the guys in charge of making the park a nice place! I would make that room into a breakfast nook.
Take a look at this photo, a new series of subway ads being running by some to promote the congestion zone tax... the same congestion tax that is leading to widespread complaints from experts because NYC does not have the mass transit infrastructure to support the people who will stop driving into Manhattan, overcrowding a transit system that is already pretty crappy. Take a look at the ad's language:
The group's web site, bettertransit.org's mantra:
All in favor of less crowded buses and subways, raise your hands!
I'm not saying that a congestion tax is a bad idea. Traffic sucks, and the benefits may outweigh the costs (although many do believe that this proposal may actually make traffic worse in some areas, such as the outer boroughs) - but it's ridiculous to suggest that making it cost-prohibitive for hundreds of thousands of motorists to drive into the city will result in better public transit service. Just the opposite is true - one of the main complaints from critics of the tax is that we do not have the infrastructure to support more public transit commuters. The money may help.... eventually... but who knows? Things could very easily be permanently worse for straphangers....
In the short term at least (and by short term I mean like, 5 years), public transit will probably suck much worse, as motorists can be counted on to add more stress to our already messed-up system. Who are these guys kidding?
