It’s funny how ideas come together. I’ve been slowly making my through Grant McCracken’s Transformation and this morning on the train, I came to his section on the post-modern transformation of man, in particular on the absorption of hip hop culture into the wider mainstream (read: non-African American. The chapter coincided with Absolut’s viral campaign feature a KW pill that turns you into Kanye West, entitled “Be Kanye,” which I first noticed it as a guerilla ad on the subway.

Image source: bekanyenow.com

The tension between the authentic and the simulated is a major theme of his book. Here, the transformation and exchange is at its most literal, take a pill and physically into West. Instead of “being like Mike” (or West) the transformation is complete. The amazing part is that obviousness of the gesture, instead of the usual implied subtext that Rob Walker discusses, the promise of transformation IS the text. Their only gesture to veil the promise is through the parody of an informercial, there is not real pill, just drink Abosult. I wonder how much further would a marketing campaign take the suggestion of the literal transformation.

Image source: bn.com

I’ve recently finished, OBD Obessive Branding Disorder - The Business of Illusion and The Illusion of Business, by Lucas Conley, who write for Fast Company. I’m way behind on blogging, so I’ll keep the book review short, and will reference the book in some other posts that have been brewing in my brain.

Conley discusses branding and marketing along similar lines as Rob Walker’s Buying In. However, he takes a much more explicitly critical view of the current practices of today’s marketers, where as Walker writes from a more description perspective. One of Conley’s most interesting passages is on “buzz agents” that are paid to push products to friends and acquaintances. His concern is that when any stranger or worse any trusted friend or family is a potential marketer, the value of our entire social network are at risk. This risk is exacerbated by coupled with findings from the American Sociological Review from 2006 cited by Conley. The General Social Survey (GSS) which measure people feelings and social perceptions, found three times the number of people who stated that they didn’t have anyone to discuss important matters, than 20 years ago. The study also reported only half of the participants claimed to have two or fewer close friends and a quarter claiming having no confidants at all. Therefore, not only are we getting more isolated, the trust of the people we do interact with is decreasing as well.

Telecommunications encourages people to seek out relationships over space, and makes it easier to avoid those in their immediate surrounding. Further, as mobility increase and people move across states and countries to attend school or to find work, traditional face to face social networks are weakened. Just as Walker states that we use brands to create our own identities, Conley states that we form communities based on brands.

One side distraction of the books is its, at times, loose use of statistics to bolster arguments. In one early section, describing how US companies are replacing innovating with marketing. This is a troubling observation, reveals in the way company reshape, repackage, reposition, and retire their products rather actually innovate. Conley cites that the number of hours worked in the US is decreasing while they are increasing in the countries, many of which are in Asia. This idea would only be relevant if more hours worked translated to more innovation, which is may or may not be true. While I agree that sacrificing research and development for more marketing and brand positioning is bad for long term business practice, confusing links to data is distracting.

Overall, OBD is a good read. He notes the ironic end point, that anti-branding voices such as Ad Buster and Naomi Klein, author No Logo, are established brands themselves. I appreciate that Conley attempts to tackle the idea of how to rethinking the brand which surrounds us. Although he doesn’t provide an actual roadmap to encourage social and corportate change, which may not even exist.  If brand are inescapable, then what are people who agree with Conley to do?

Late nights are a rarity, but still fun. Here is a photo taken at 3 a.m, about a week ago. Alex was craving ramen, and we scored on at this place on St. Marks. Sorry, I didn’t take photos of the food or even remember the address. I leave the food blogging up to other people I know.

Image source: Style.com and Vogue.co.uk

When March rolls around each year, fashion magazines present their Spring/ Summer fashion issues. This usually means issues of a US-published magazine such as Vogue are hundreds of pages thicker than others times of the year. Most of the additional pages are advertising from fashion brands. UK and European magazine, while still focusing on the upcoming season, maintain their standard, thinner size. As with many similar US versus European comparisons, American Vogue more heavily relies on ad pages to generate revenue, where as British Vogue which is more subscription based business model. Regardless of business model, both maintain their statue in the fashion publishing industry.

As I understand the magazine publishing world, magazine advertisers pay rates based on circulation. Higher circulation leads to higher ad rates. Although, some niche audience magazine will command higher rate for somewhat lower circulation numbers, about the marketing will be more targeted. American Vogue, along with many other magazines published in the US, has the incentive maximize their circulation. One result of this incentive, is that American Vogue has expanded beyond pure fashion editorial, and into what one might call “Vogue lifestyle.”

To spread the appeal of American Vogue, celebrities most often that in the past, grace their covers, rather than the models on their European counterparts. American Vogue’s big spring issue featured Drew Barrymore, where as, British Vogue had supermodel Kate Moss. While Moss is a celebrity herself, she is still primarily known for being a model. A better comparison would be the February 2008 issues, with British Vogue featuring Russian model Sasha Pivovarova (the face of Prada for much of the decade) as opposed to the cover of its American counterpart with actress Kate Bosworth plugging her movie “21″.

The sacrifice of expanding American Vogue’s subject matter, is the decreasing coverage of solely fashion editorial photography and articles. Instead, the magazine covers celebrities, food, beauty, and travel. Admittedly, because American Vogue has a much bigger circulation and therefore bigger budget, the fashion editorial shoots do have higher production values. Further, their food critic, Jeffrey Steingarten is one of my favorite food writers.

Chris Anderson of Wired recently published his article on Free. Much of the free content on the web is ad supported. Because ad-based models, including the likes of Goggle, were the initially profitable web media, the Me-toos of the digital world are all following suit. Interesting, in the web 1.0 era, people used to point to the WSJ.com as the golden child site, which got people to pay for it, something that most newspapers have never been able to do.

However, there is something to be still said for pure subscription content model. Anderson is obivously a smart guy, but I hope that his ideas on Free don’t encourage people to blindly pursue ad-based models, without really reading what he is discussing.  Towards the end of his article, he notes that in a Free economy, attention and reputation become scare resources, and sometime, that people are willing to pay to receive.

British Vogue is much more narrowly focused on pure fashion editoral, which may make it more niche. But there isn’t anything wrong with that smaller audience of people looking for strong fashion writing and photography. There will always be a market for targeted content, it is just that the standard for what people are willing to pay for has risen. The death of the subscription model is premature and should not be discounted. The game is just a lot harder than it used to be.

So, I downloaded the album, which I paid $USD6. Frankly, for what is being reported as the death of the record label, it was a little anti-climatic. That is, I paid for a album over the internet that I could have gotten free. The album is good, sort of what we’ve come to expect from RH. Although, it usually takes me a few listening sessions for me to figure out what is going on in their albums. Now what?

For the second act, Trent Reznor announced that NIN has fulfilled their music label contractual obligations are now planning to go it alone, which isn’t all that surprising.

Starting your own record label or self-publishing is not a new thing, as seen with Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe started in the 1990, to cite one example. So, the real question still to be answered is, can this scale outside established musicians who admittedly benefited from aspects of the traditional music industry?

Will the home grown bands who grow a fan base through touring, myspace, pitchfork reivews and other grassroots efforts continue on a DIY career path or will they eventual jump to labels, as did Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?

Image source: In Rainbows

Way back in 1999, Public Enemy released “There’s a Poison Goin’ On” only on the internet, with indie label Atomic Pop. After sluggish sales, they eventually sold a CD version as well. I applauded PE for their efforts, although it wasn’t surprising with the outcome. Broadband penetration was much lower and PE has past it’s peak of popularity. Eight years later, the internet is buzzing with Radiohead’s announcement that they are releasing their latest record, In Rainbows, without a label. You can buy the disc set at a pricey £40.00 ($USD 80) or pay whatever you want for the download.

Of course, Radiohead is in a better position to do sometime like this kind of experiment, after having sold millions of records and toured extensively throughout the world. I’m sure the die- hard fans (of which there are many) will purchase the disc set. However, after Thom Yorke’s last album was circulating the internet months before its official release, Radiohead figures to try to recoup some of the lost revenue from p2p file sharing.

I paid £2.50. There is a £0.45 credit card process fee, which they only tell you about at the end of your purchase. I’ll give them a “free pass” on that one.

I got the download code, and will be able to get the album starting on October 10th. I’ll probably wait a few days, because I’m sure that their servers will be clogged at first. I’m not in a rush, as my Radiohead interest peaked a few years ago (I bought Amnesiac on the day it was released.)

I would love to see the numbers, and the distribution of what people’s willingness to pay for the album. It isn’t clear if this is sustainable for other bands, even famous ones. Radiohead is getting a lot of free press for being the first. The 10th band who tries this, won’t have the added benefit of extra publicity. I mean, I’m writing about buying an album on the internet.

I’m sure it will be available on the internet for free the day it is released. I could have gotten activation code for free as well, but I want to reward them for their efforts. I’m also buying the album for $USD5, which is actually how much it is actually worth to me. Although, it may be not be “rational” in the purely short term economic sense, I definitely wanted to reward Radiohead for working in this way.

Image source: amazon.com

Currently, a campaign for the new book in the Jason Bourne series is plastered on many of New York’s subways. The timing of course coincides with the latest movie of the third novel starring Matt Damon. As I understand it, the novels have little similarity to the movies. After seeing the ad many times, I finally noticed the wording, “Robert Ludlum’s” in the title, which I realized implied that he didn’t write the book. The actual author Eric Van Lustbader is listed below on the book cover in the ad. As it turns out, Ludlum died six years ago. What is the implications of having other writers take the helm of a character after the original author dies?

This phenomenon isn’t new, as many James Bonds books and stories were published after Ian Flemming’s death. (What’s up with the JP initials? I’ll leave that one up to the conspiracy theorists.) Generally, these posthumous works are mostly amusing, and generally confined to the realm of genre fiction, either thrillers or mysteries. They do have two interesting potential effects on the ideas of intellectual property, which surround the ideas of authorship. On the short term, these works seems to support the status quo, that the owner of the rights, most likely the author’s estate, can and should commissions new works, which are sometimes based on remaining notes or drafts. Just because an author dies, doesn’t mean that the audience stops desiring new stories for their favorite characters. In this perspective, the owners will take a strong and closed intellectual property stance to increase the revenue generated from the new and old works. Especially if they own the author’s notes, the new books have a preceived legitimacy.

in the long term, however, this kind of cultural production starts to erode that legitimacy and further pushJames Boyle’s notion of the “romantic author” which supports the tightening intellectual property regimes that cross the bounds of reason and the original intentions of the copyright. In that, seeing Lustbader’s name associated with the series starts to weaken the brand. If they are of equal or perhaps even better quality of the original author, readers start asking what makes the original author so special? If the new books are bad, readers start questioning why one author gets the privilege of penning new works and they may be more apt to enter the world of fan fiction. Increases in fan cultural production will hopefully then add pressure against restrictive ip attitudes, which make the fan work illegal. The application and defense of an author’s rights extending beyond his death may actually encourage the weakening of those rights.

I’m on Day 3 of a trip to San Francisco for work. I haven’t been in downtown San Francisco in almost ten years. I’ll write more very soon, but here is a tidbit to keep the blog posts flowing. It is what it looks like, a mailbox that has been branded to look like r2d2. It’s totally random, but then totally makes sense… I think. Not bad from a camera phone. The photos that I really want to post will have to wait until I get back to New York, because I left my camera cable at home.

Image source: heroswiki

I love this study that NBC did, looking to see if people remember anything about the commercials they skim over then they fast forward them using their DVR. They used vests with sensors to record physiological data including, heart rate, respiration, galvanic skin response and physical activity, on 20 viewers of Heros (of course they had to choose that show.) The researches found that the volunteers in the study were just as physiologically responsive to the fast forwarded commercials as people watching at normal speed. Further, they had about the same brand recall as the others.

They raises some very interesting questions. First, to what extend are people susceptible to messages that they made have a physiological response, but may or may not recalled them. What the ethics of tapping into those responses?

Another question is more practical, how should brands, marketers and agencies react to finding out that audio-less micro-version ads have a similar response and recall to the million dollar full length originals?