Social-Creature

Boston Latin School, my alma mater, is the oldest (and longest existing) public school in the country. 141 years older than the country, in fact. Ben Franklin went there before he moved to Philly. Alumni include Sam Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Bullfinch, you get the idea. There’s an admission test, [...]

On September 8,2011, Nike announced they would be releasing a limited number of pairs of a new product. As the shoe’s official site explains: In 1989, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield was asked to design a shoe for the second chapter in the Back to the Future series. He created the power-lacing, self-illuminating, Nike MAG. Riding [...]

The ‘Source’ in the Distance Last week, my friend Kris Krug flew down to the Gulf of Mexico on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, a week-long project to document the crisis in the Gulf and bring a first hand report back to the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. Kris, a photographer, web strategist, and self-described “cyberpunk [...]

Writing about the aftermath of the public outcry against Tropicana’s packaging redesign earlier this year, which ultimately led to the OJ cartons reverting back to the original art, I mentioned Mountain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” campaign — an interactive, story-based online game which resulted in 3 new Dew flavors designed and developed virtually entirely by fans. Tropicana, [...]

This is a terrific initiative by Estee Lauder, seamlessly combining live + digital. From AdAge: The venerable Estee Lauder cosmetics brand has found a seemingly natural way to connect with social media: offering free makeovers and photo shoots at its department-store cosmetics counters coast-to-coast to produce shots women can use for their online profiles. The [...]

Back in February, in the aftermath of the public outcry against Tropicana’s packaging redesign which ultimately led to the cartons reverting back to the original art, I suggested that Tropicana had the opportunity to do something completely different with orange juice: Now that there’s a buzz about Tropicana’s openness to fan-feedback in general, and about [...]

Maybe this is a good idea if you’re deliberately trying to speak to that coveted douchebag demographic, but otherwise, this just comes off sounding like the advertising equivalent of thinking that knocking the popular kid will somehow earn you friends at school. You just end up sounding like a jerk. Who Okay-ed this? If you [...]

As consumer spending and ad budgets continue to decrease, it’s not unreasonable to think we may be entering a “post consumption economy,” as Ed Cotton of Influx insights describes it: This latest downturn, recession, depression, or whatever you like to call it has gotten people scared. There’s simply no way to see ahead to work [...]

In case you happen to have missed it, Tropicana changed the design on their cartons last month, and in the process discovered that “Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging,” as Stuart Elliott writes in the New York Times: PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure [...]

Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone in the room is using a Mac except one person? Ever notice what happens when suddenly everyone starts to get on that person’s case about the fact that he’s the only one not on a Mac? I have, and it kinda looked a little bit like [...]