Archive for the ‘business’ Category
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, culture, business
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 / media, culture, business
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, culture, business
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.
Urban Spam Deleted In São Paulo
IHT: Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom.
Tony de Marco’s photos of São Paulo
07.06.28 / art, culture, business
Advertising Practitioner: The dismal nature of the branding science has started to become clear to business recently and they’re starting to vote with their investments and appointments. They’re turning from the people who create perceptions of value to the people who create actual value - the designers, technologists, innovators…
07.06.22 / business
Chris Anderson: The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare…
07.05.29 / books, culture, business
Mutual dependence has unexpected consequences
… people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.
Mark Busse: Looking beyond the issue of divinity and objectively examining the psychology and behavior of religious groups and comparing this to brand loyalists, we find parallels and lessons we can learn as marketing strategists and communication designers. Both passionate religious leaders and cunning marketers use carefully crafted icons and symbols to create visual references and identifiers for their particular group. Both groups rely heavily on the message, doctrine and ideology to create a feeling of like-mindedness in their followers. They each hand pick and elevate deacons or heroes for others to look up to and emulate. And perhaps most importantly, both groups use fear and play on emotions with their promise of salvation to elicit reaction and devotion from their particular tribe, creating a sense of belonging to a clear community…
07.03.12 / business
