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. [...]

During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like [...]

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 [...]

To the extent that any advertising works, the model in place at websites like Hulu and Fancast, that offer commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies, is pretty damn effective. Unlike the 3-minute average TV commercial break, which most people Tivo past or click away for or simply go to the bathroom during, the [...]

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, I [...]

In college, we film students had a certain sense of disdain and smug superiority towards our TV-major classmates. Miramax, along with the whole independent film movement it was spearheading, had just hit it’s apex while we’d been in high school, and the late 90’s / early 2000’s saw the releases of such epics as The [...]

Do you like Reggaeton?
This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California.
If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s:
A form of urban music that became popular with Latin American [...]

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 promotion, which kicks [...]

Back in early 2006, Chevy tried to get on the whole “consumer generated content” bandwagon (or bandSUV, I suppose), with a website which allowed users to easily create their own “ads” for the Chevy Tahoe using provided video and music assets. In theory, the idea was to generate interest in the vehicle through user created [...]

I had already joined the Circus scene when, in early 2006, I was consulting at Wong Doody and heard about a clothing company client they were working with called Edoc Laundry. The clothes had an intriguing concept: there were secret codes in the garments, which, if deciphered, would reveal clues to a mystery story. The wearers of Edoc [...]