social-creature

(photo: Mick O )

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“They say the music business is in trouble. No! The business of selling CDs is in trouble; this is a religion.”
- Michael Rapino, CEO, Live Nation

I was in the weekly Southern California marketing meeting at House of Blues the morning it was announced that Tower Records was going out of business. [...]

Note: This is actually way better if you’re first seeing it during a Dollhouse commercial break on Hulu, without the spoilers of the youtube video title and static screen (below) giving away what you’re about to see.
In the course of just 30 seconds the ad takes you on a ride of intrigue and suspense that [...]

Have you noticed the slate of WWII resistance movies lately? There’s last year’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, which depicts the actual attempted plot devised by a cadre of senior German officers to assassinate Hitler. Earlier this year saw the release of Defiance, also based on a true story, with Daniel Craig and Liev Schriber portraying [...]

Suddenly everyone wants Social Media.
While traditional media budgets have kept shrinking in the wake of the recession, according to recent Forrester Research, “53% of marketers are determined to increase their social media budget, and 42% will keep it the same, a total of 95% of marketers are bullish on social media marketing.” Just two years [...]

Britney Spears has a new album out today, and guess what it’s called:

That’s right!

Britney Spears’ new album is called Circus, and this is incredibly interesting to me.
Once upon a time, I used to be the production manager for a circus called Lucent Dossier–

This troupe is actually part of a whole larger Circus performance subculture that [...]

I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.
The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when [...]

It’s pretty interesting that at this year’s MTV Video Music awards the biggest controversy came from Brit comedian, host Russell Brand messing with the Disney-sponsored teen pop boy-band the Jonas Brothers for wearing Purity Rings.
Purity rings, or chastity rings/promise rings originated in the U.S. in the 1990s among Christian affiliated sexual abstinence groups. The rings [...]

“Deal with it. Rock’n roll.”
- The Rules of Attraction, by Bret Easton Ellis

While I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, it came to my attention that hipsters had managed to really piss Adbusters off. If you don’t happen to know what “hipsters” are, or if perhaps you are assuming it’s just [...]

“Companies: How to Make Millions By Switching to A Green-Colored Logo”
- Headline in The Onion’s “Obligatory Green Issue”

I’ve been thinking about this, the third in what’s evidently become a series of posts inspired by Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, by Rob Walker, since I read the [...]

Just came across a great article in Fast Company about Obscura last night. Many of the Do LaB’s collaborators and friends from the El Circo collective work with this San Francisco multimedia design lab that Fast Company likens to “an alternate universe dreamed up by someone who’s been mainlining Pixy Stix.”
[Obscura] create[s] visual spaces and [...]