 November 20, 2008
Title Nine offers a compelling spin on the tried-and-true-but-a-little-bit-boring gift card. It’s the Title Nine Gift Pack. (Don’t cringe, it’s not as generic as the name.) Choose from two options. For $89 you get:
Or, for $149 you get all that plus a larger gift card ($100) and an additional bag. Two great gift options for the “women on the move” in your life. While I love the convenience and flexibility of gift cards (especially when you’re being so careful about where you’re spending, and especially when you’re shopping for as many sisters and nieces as I do), I dread their one-dimensional (literally and figuratively) nature. While my holiday email and catalog threshold are already being tested, I look forward to more retailers packaging up easy, can’t miss gift package ideas. November 18, 2008
 Tylenol's Feel Better Should Work Harder OnlineTagged as: engaging, personalPosted by: Kelly Mooney
November 4, 2008
Consumers snap up pictures with their cameras or their phones wherever and whenever (remember when people just took pictures on special occasions???), so it’s great to see Kodak recognizing that and supporting our need to capture every moment. In sync with what’s on a lot of our minds today, Kodak released the bi-partisan winners of its request for 2008 presidential election photos. The email also alerts readers to a photo of the day (just in case monthly wasn’t enough for you). Of course you can sign up for the RSS feed if you like the daily inspiration to come right to you. It’s hard to deny the occasion that this nearly 2-year campaign has become, so I like how Kodak is using it to lead picture takers into a longer-term engaging experience with the brand. October 29, 2008
 Life is back from the dead. And Marilyn is forever.Tagged as: O.P.E.N., digital millenials, engaging, networked, social webPosted by: Nita Rollins Life Magazine is a brand colossus, in many ways the quintessential Boomer brand. Defining photojournalism in the 20th century while also defining the 20th century, its portraits framed the ahistorical absolutes of courage, despair, charisma and power as much as the persons of a certain historical gravitas. The viewer’s pursuit of accidental revelations of character kept all those modernist literature-stoked latent/manifest dichotomies in productive tension. I know because I used to sit spellbound before the stacks of Life my cousin had collected in his post-Harvard hovel. With my two-page spread-sized memories intact, and an avowed deference for the tradition of the defining public image—in stark contrast to the people’s indefatigable showcasing of social networking candids—I am the perfect witness to a Boomer brand entering the ecosystem of the open web. It’s not Life’s digitization per se that makes this an interesting transition for a brand twice defibrillated in its 64-year history—we barely raise an eyebrow over Google’s all-in-a-day’s-work project to digitize the world’s books, for heaven’s sake. It’s the letting loose of Life’s curatorial authority, its single-photo storytelling precision, into the jungle of laissez-faire cut-and-paste social web content that begs for commentary. The ‘coming soon’ web site promises over 10 million photos will be made available for viewing, or, as parent company Time put it: “…the most important collection of imagery covering the events and people of the 20th century…[will be] available for free for personal use”—at least, for viewing and sharing. More than 97% of the collection has never been seen by the public. Such an inconceivable darkroom trove of “outtakes” (albeit by the likes of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks)! What could be more appropriate for our era of flourishing amateur photography and citizen journalism than converting Life’s vault into an editorial roundtable, a photographic piñata? Unsettling, perhaps, for its Boomer devotees who remember when larger-than-Life was hard to come by? (Winston Churchill as a screensaver—really?) But probably, ultimately, exhilarating for all comers. That is, if Life truly adapts to the digital channel. And from what I’ve gathered, the revenue model is strictly 20th century—mainly advertising-based. (As Time also owns Getty, site visitors coming to look and learn will be exposed to the latter collection and might buy.) Based on the advance press, there is but one concession to the social web’s intensely OPEN relationship with images—you can create Flickr-style personal collections. There are ways to counter the constant battering of our journalistic institutions (hint: they’re digital), and, in this instance, to drive cross-generational traffic to Life.com. (Yes, this begs for a post on washingtonpost.com.) For Life, in my opinion, the most important of these is a social platform for storytelling, the kind that would enable community voting on the best photo/journalistic albums—those with stirring commentary that keeps history alive. Kodak has an employee blog that has done wonders for their place in the imaging community, as they like to call it. Limited edition downloads of Life covers for poster-size printing wouldn’t be a bad idea either, even if I did steal it from the current collaboration of Absolut and fashion designer Helmut Lang. For all those copyright-minded among you, there are always the Creative Commons alternatives. Quite simply, more exposure, more usage=more life for Life.com. To make sure I’m not blindly enthusiastic about this digital brand makeover of Life, particularly as an Engaging and Networked brand, I conducted some quick research of a certain person who has graced Life’s covers several times, and who is the very definition of iconic inexhaustibility (if you don’t believe me, read American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic). Has the social web tired of Marilyn Monroe? Can icitizens find enough to do, interactively speaking, with the silver screen goddess? Does she make sense any longer to digital millennials, for whom continuous virtual self-presentation precedes self-knowledge? Are you kidding? 16,738 thought to upload some version of Marilyn Monroe on Flickr. Metacafe has 144 largely homemade Marilyn Monroe videos. iStockPhoto has several Marilyn impersonators doing their best to keep the subway breeze blowing up her white pleated dress, figuratively speaking. And Google says Marilyn Monroe matters to someone 13,400,000 ways. I found a particularly appropriate cultural artifact trolling around someone’s personal Picasa photo album: Marilyn Monroe coaxed once again into life through a collage of Life’s covers.
I also found a Marilyn Monroe image rarely seen (perhaps never before published?) on Flickr and will leave you to contemplate both its hold on the viewer and the icitizen comments that follow.
October 23, 2008
Last night I was driving from Cleveland to Columbus and listening to the trusty iPod. I’m a huge fan of all types of music, but lately I find myself listening to podcasts (and watching vodcasts) almost exclusively. One of my favorite podcasts is BusinessWeek’s Innovation of the Week. If you aren’t already subscribed, I suggest you check it out. This week the host interviewed NASA’s chief knowledge architect, Jeanne Holm. Jeanne described NASA’s commitment to their constituency and the methods that they use to reach and interact with them. From Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts and even weekly meetings in Second Life, NASA knows where their “customers” hang out and makes it easy for them to interact with the agency. They author and maintain many forums and blogs, even one entitled appropriately enough, Open NASA. From the blog’s About Page: “We come from a perspective within NASA of transparency, accessibility, risk, honesty, merit, and participation. We have insight into what is and could be happening inside the U.S. space program– but so do you, and it is something to be shared and discussed.” A lot of corporations could learn something from their O.P.E.N. approach. Come to think of it, so could the rest of our government. But, I’ll wait a couple weeks to write that post. October 15, 2008
Take a look at the image above…it’s a screenshot taken by Xbox Live gamer Dragunov765 while playing Burnout Paradise, a very popular driving game for the Xbox 360. Yes, that is a paid in-game advertisement displaying an Obama for President campaign message. From the New York Times: “Are political ads in video games a good idea? In terms of eyeballs, I’d have to say yes. Roughly one-third of American households own an Xbox 360, Sony PS3 or Nintendo Wii. In terms of effectiveness, Brandweek recently detailed a survey undertaken by its fellow Nielsen Games division in which 11 percent of gamers said they bought a brand after seeing it advertised in a game.” The article goes on to say, “of course, buying a brand of shoes or soda is a totally different prospect than buying a politician’s brand in the polling booth.” But you have to give the campaign credit for knowing their audience segments and reaching them where they spend their time. In case you are wondering, here is what the McCain camp is up to. October 7, 2008
Apparently someone’s asking…In this playful online experience from Smart UK, all these doubtful questions (and more) are tossed right out there for consumers to see and answer–in a smart way that’s quick, easy and fun. Mostly, it’s a video, a total sales video trying to convince you to buy the car. But, they’ve made it interesting in part by putting consumers’ doubts right in front. They even have mouse trails of other consumers throughout the experience–so, for example, as you’re trying to guess the biggest item in the scene that could possibly fit in the smart fortwo, you see the items other viewers have thought about (read: moused over) guessing. Lately I’ve seen some creative and non-traditional approaches to selling cars (you have to try Saab’s Turbo Gene Test), but I love what smart is doing to Engage consumers by hitting their concerns head-on (seriously, with a wrecking ball in the Safety section), and leaving them both fans and believers. October 3, 2008
Anthropologie’s Pioneering Web Site for its Pre-Commercial WomenTagged as: O.P.E.N., creative, engaging, new consumer journey, retailPosted by: Nita Rollins Few apparel and accessory brands have created worlds so thoroughly inhabitable, so completely unto themselves, as Anthropologie. The world of Anthropologie is where women play dress up their whole lives and dream of men but don’t really care if they ever show up. An asexual innocence pervades the rooms and visages of Anthrowomen, which is endowed with a nesting instinct that makes sartorial style an extension of one’s domicile. References are not to the catwalk but the artist’s canvas, the cupboard’s shelf liner, the arts and crafts potholder, the apron of your cookie-baking memories. The stores combine clothes and chest knobs with studied flea market intrigue—although I always thought they could take this premise further and thoroughly break up the categories. And navigating through the web site’s current “Black and White” in “Points of View” shows you just how clothes make the room—as well as the woman. Laying on the bed, hanging on the curtain rod, slung over the shabby chic straight back chair are black and white garments sometimes absurdly hard to decipher (is that wool or silk? Is that a top?), but there is much pleasure in swirling around a room where backdrop enhances foreground and vice versa. Generally, the print and the products on the site are too small to see, particularly those on the dress forms, and too swallowed up by the white background (which blends with many of the garments’ pre-washed quality) to actually make an informed buying decision about them. The zoom utility, you quickly realize, isn’t a luxury. But you excuse a lot of dead ends and inscrutable nomenclature (Where, do you suppose, “Adorned” will take me?) because everything seems designed to be a little Lost & Found in Anthropologie’s world. In particular, navigation of Anthropologie.com is increasingly off the beaten nav bar/drop-down menu path; it has a whimsicality that is near genius, except for a few oversights that cause excessive reliance on the back button. Throughout the entire “Adorned” section you find navigation redefined in Anthropological terms. In “Look Closer,” pretty objects are made preternaturally detailed under the movable microscopic pane, and take on an archeological intensity. The “Masterpieces” section features pre-Raphaelite beauties painted with artful smudges of blush or eye shadow. They also blink, which is to say the models are live, more or less, as they are posing as mannequins—or impersonating portrait sitters. This section fascinates—and reminded me of the likewise blinking digital portraits adorning the walls of Ian Shrager’s Clift Hotel Redwood Room. The “Spectra” section was a combination of Barneys’ floating products and the scattering effect of Visual Thesaurus. “Wonderland” lays the product over fairytale (magical mushroom) graphics, and, indeed, the entire site reworks the pristine white space of ecommerce with a collage aesthetic, with remnants, notions, paper scraps, lyrical word lists of studied desultoriness, like the following: Zephyr mist vast leaden loam moss Molten moonless salted frigid earthen light Gloaming volatile magnificence cold calm Iceland. I’m a deep admirer of the Anthropologie brand, and think the navigation and collage aspects of the web site are important digital shopping innovations disguised as whimsy. But by way of postscript, and as a true confession, I have to say I’m not much of a consumer of the brand. Those Anthro models find themselves in places that generally don’t show up on my fantasy map. (I’m more Manhattan rooftop restaurant than roadhouse. ) But I’m deeply intrigued by the pre-commercial Eden (all hand-me-downs and heirlooms) beckoning its targeted consumers. And given the prominent role the catalog plays in the found-object world of the web site, if I could ever find those Anthrowomen on the grid, I’d be tempted to send them their first Sears & Roebuck catalog. Before helping them log on to Anthropologie.com, of course. September 28, 2008
 Open Up the BackchannelTagged as: O.P.E.N., digital millenials, engaging, networked, social webPosted by: Dan Shust
We have been seeing similar experiences sprout up for the debates and other select events, but why not just open the backchannel permanently? Let us chat while we watch, participate in fun competitions, etc. I’d love to see the major networks get behind an idea like this. What a great way to enhance the viewing of a live sporting event, episodic drama, etc. It could even make a really horrible show fun. (Remember MST3K?) Advertisers would love it because chatting encourages live viewing (the anti-DVR?). Additionally, they could collect some very interesting user opinion data surrounding their ad campaigns. What do you say NBC, ABC, CBS, HBO? Open up the backchannel and I might even watch Knightrider. August 14, 2008
 Courage…Branded by NikeTagged as: O.P.E.N., creative, engaging, on-demand, retailPosted by: Dennis Bajec
This video micro-site gives me the chills. Especially when you see the likes of MJ, Arthur Ashe, Prefontaine, & Oscar Pristorious all in the same video. The levels of engagement are neatly defined as Watch. Discover. Discuss. At any time in the experience you can play the video starting at the point each athlete appears in the commercial. Nike sells the concept of competition like no other brand. |
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