social-creature

“Is The Tipping Point Toast?” asks the recent FastCompany article in which researcher duncan watts talks about his findings (and their less than exuberant reception) that expose the billion dollars a year marketers spend targeting “influentials” as a waste of money.
i am constantly repeating the phrase that “we buy the brands and products that we [...]

“We read to know we are not alone.”
- C.S. Lewis

in retrospect, it’s not so surprising that while i was studying film in college i was also producing art and music events as an extra-curricular activity. i joke that producing a movie and producing an event are pretty much exactly the same process, except with [...]

seriously, just stop.
it’s not cute, it’s not hip, it’s not clever, it just makes you sound antiquated. this is not the 90’s and there IS no more viral. it’s over. deal with it.
“and then we’ll just use a viral blahblahblahblahblah”
i’m sorry, what did you say?
“yes, i said, ‘and then we’ll just use that thing [...]

first, you need to watch the trailer for sony pictures’ across the universe: here. if you cannot be trusted to come back here afterwards, however, you can just watch the shittier-quality youtube version:

ok then. now that you have been adequately briefed, we can begin.
i first saw the trailer for across the universe on quicktime.com in [...]

(not everyone’s a great photographer. da’s ok.)

one of the projects i’m currently working on involves cleaning some wreckage from a web 2.0-style mess that was never resolved, and is coming back to haunt the client. it’s not huge, but it’s a template, i think, for ways in which web 2.0 messes get made in general, [...]

in light of the previous post, a friend suggested i redevelop the ad for the enlightenment card to make it more relevant to a consumer identity that would actually find the product appealing.
i only had five minutes tho, so here’s the best i can do:

as a marketer you realize that it’s not so much that you’re really setting anything up for sale, it’s that everything already IS for sale, and you’re just helping it along. so it’s not so much that i’m bothered by the selling of “enlightenment,” (there’s been buddha statues on-sale for millennia, and what are THOSE [...]

you know… sometimes the point isn’t about how many people see your ad, it’s about actually changing people’s behavior.
if it’s a matter of getting them to drink diet pepsi vs. diet coke, or getting them to shop at target vs. walmart… no one’s gonna die.
it’s not really a matter of life or death.
however, when the [...]

perhaps it’s just typical to find SOMETHING to dislike about the business 2.0 article about how “burningman grows up” but i can’t help it!
i bet there’s probably even distinct camps of dislike about it, in fact.
camp #1 are the people who dislike that their special countercultural identity-defining ritual is being profiled somewhere so mainstream, and [...]

even funnier on the heels of the post about the nature of subconscious cultural aesthetic values, is this bit from ikea perfectly exemplifying what i like to call a “lifestyle slur“:

“Brightens up your grad’s dorm. Unlike a creepy gothic roommate, who can be a bad influence.”
….. all it takes to ward off the influence [...]