My friends over at Skin.Graft Designs just discovered some way shady thief has been blatantly recreating exact replicas of their original clothing designs and selling them on Second Life.
Skin.Graft Designs Originals:
Sinistyle Designs counterfeit knockoffs:
Skin.Graft Designs Originals:
Sinistyle Designs counterfeit knockoffs:
This is the first I’ve ever heard of anything like this, though I’m getting the feeling it might be happening a ton.
If you are a designer in the same community as Skin.Graft, you might wanna check out the rest of Sinistyle’s “inventory” to make sure yours designs aren’t in there too. I know I got a saddlebag belt JUST like this from a vendor at Lightning in a Bottle this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the stuff Sinistyle is selling is 100% knockoffs.
So lame.
In case you’d like to look fabulous in your FIRST life, feel free to get in touch with the wonderful folks at Skin.Graft Designs.
HBO has created a monster with the promotional campaign for True Blood, a new TV series from the creator of Six Feet Under, set to premiere September 7th.
AdAge (which has a nice little video about the campaign here, but no way to embed it elsewhere) explains:
While they’re only one part of the larger campaign launching HBO’s “True Blood,” viral promotions by New York’s Campfire agency for the vampire series are a real stand out. Among other things, a message written in ancient language symbols was mailed to prominent bloggers and science fiction geeks known to be interested in vampires. When a few with language degrees cracked the code, they found an address for a vampire website.
That would have been kinda neat on it’s own, and whatnot, but things have progressed far beyond that one vampire website now. If you start following the True Blood trail, it becomes a bottomless pool of content.
You’re more likely than not gonna see a billboard for Tru:Blood, “Synthetic Blood Nourishment Beverage” somewhere. It’s gonna look something like this:
or this:
and by the time you’ll have come to this one:
you might have started thinking that perhaps this is just the latest niche energy drink to hit the market, targeting a demographic with some sort of really spectacularly alternative lifestyle . Which is precisely the point. HBO’s particular vision of the dead-end of mass culture involves the undead too, apparently. Just another niche in our united niche culture, with their own kind of lifestyle needs. According to HBO’s official website for the True Blood show:
Thanks to a Japanese scientist’s invention of synthetic blood, vampires have progressed from legendary monsters to fellow citizens overnight. And while humans have been safely removed from the menu, many remain apprehensive about these creatures “coming out of the coffin.” Religious leaders and government officials around the world have chosen their sides, but in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps, the jury is still out.
Local waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), however, knows how it feels to be an outcast. “Cursed” with the ability to listen in on people’s thoughts, she’s also open-minded about the integration of vampires — particularly when it comes to Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), a handsome 173-year-old living up th–
Uh-huh. Whatever.
Cuz at this point, how could any storyline the show’s creators might concoct compete with the multi-dimensional online world that’s been developed around the premise of the first paragraph? (Unless they know something Lost doesn’t, maybe.)
So, there’s the True:Blood beverage site. There’s BloodCopy, a news blog which “chronicles the amazing days we live in as vampires attempt to integrate with humans.” There’s the American Vampire League, an advocacy group “Leading the fight for equal rights for vampires,” cuz guess what? “Vampires were people too.” As you’d expect, there’s obviously a religious opposition group, Fellowship of the Sun. And, of course, no party to which politics and religion are invited would be complete without sex. Which you can now find, with a vampire, at Love Bitten, “The world’s best Human/Vampire dating site,” Are there runner-up Human/Vampire dating sites? Considering that half the merch on the Tru:Blood site is already sold out, there ought to be.
Meanwhile, the series hasn’t even premiered yet!
What people are buying and participating in has pretty much nothing to do with a TV show, and to look at it as just a “viral marketing” campaign is a complete misunderstanding of what’s going on here. This is a full-on Alternate Reality Game:
An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.
Notable prior forays into the ARG world have included promotions for A.I., HALO 2, and Nine Inch Nails’ latest album, Year Zero. But why stop at a campaign, when you can create a culture? In a sense, this kind of “narrative” that takes place in the “real world,” and involves various media to tell a story–which the actions of “participants” certainly do affect–is probably an effective way to think about the contemporary fate of any brand. Every brand. This just happens to be an opportunity to turn the brand itself, and its narrative, into a new form of 21st Century-compliant entertainment.
HBO could be the first network to take the leap. Even the TV series itself could really just function as part of a larger narrative. Perhaps they’re already planning something that prescient. Who knows? If not HBO, then no doubt that line will be crossed by someone eventually. And when it is, there’s no going back.
While trying to track down a quote from Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, I came across a LinkedIn profile for Sean Bateman. In case you’re not acquainted with Sean Bateman, one of the main protagonists of the Rules of Attraction, here’s his LinkedIn profile:
SeanBateman
Student at Bennington College
Albany, New York Area
Education
Bennington College
Connections
2 connections
Industry
Music
Sean Bateman’s Summary
I’m a Senior at Bennington College, though we mostly refer to it as Camden and pretend that it’s in New Hampshire. I live at Booth house, with a Frog roommate and a House Pigs house band. Sheer sensations.
My brother demanded I sign-up to “explore business opportunities”, but I’m not into that. I have ulterior motives, and her name is Lauren Hynde. I’m in the Computing Center, where Lauren once hung out, but she’s left, gone, history, vapor. The only problem is I still dream about her, and she’s all blue. It always ends up this way. No Big Surprise.
Every time I looked at at her I was struck by great-looking she is. And standing close to her, even if it was only for something like a millisecond, I overloaded on how great-looking that girl is. She looked at me in what seemed like slow motion. I could rarely meet her blue-eyed gaze back. She’s a little too gorgeous. Her perfect, full lips locked in on that sexy uncaring smile. She’s constructed perfectly. She used to smile when she noticed me staring and I smiled back. I’m still thinking, I want to know this girl. Being around her was sort of.. I don’t know what sort of is.
I’ll take all this down if she wants. I’ll deal with it. Show must go on. Rock’n’Roll.
Sean Bateman’s Specialties:
I plug in my Fender and play girls songs I’ve written myself and then segue into “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I play it quietly and sing the lyrics slowly and softly and they’re often so moved that they start to cry and
Sean Bateman’s Education
Bennington College
Music, Rock’n’Roll, 2004 — 2008
Majoring in Rock’n’Roll (before I was a Lit major, before I became a Ceramics major, before I become a Social Science major). I may switch to Computers. Whatever.
There some things that I will never do: I will never buy cheese popcorn in The Pub. I will never tell a video game to &@#$ off. I will never erase graffiti about myself that I happen to catch in bathrooms around campus. I will never play “Burning Down the House” on a jukebox. I will never be one of the last people hanging out at a Camden party. Those people remind me of kids being picked last for teams in high school. It’s weak. Really improves one’s sense of self-worth.
Activities and Societies:
Hanging out (The Carousel, Commons, The Pub, The Brasserie, Burger King, Dining Hall, Ann Arbour is where it’s at).
Additional Information
Sean Bateman’s Interests:
Coffee without cream (to feed my impending ulcer), girls (classy yet sexy), smoking, riding my motorcycle into town, watching people argue about Nazis, Planet of the Apes (I recently signed into Netflix), watching TV in the commons, playing my Fender for girls, music (Velvet Underground, Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Iron Butterfly, Zep, The Animals)
Sean Bateman’s Groups:
Sometimes I check out the AA meetings in Bingham
Netflix is absolutely an anachronism to 1987, when the book was published and one of the most important activities of the day was returning videotapes, plus the Sean Bateman of Ellis’s book was definitely not in college between 2004-2008, as this Sean Bateman appears to be. But who cares? The overall character tone, and many major and minor details are completely true to the original–not to mention hilarious in the context of LinkedIn–and even to the story behind the book. The college the characters in The Rules Of Attraction attend, Camden, is, in fact, based on Bennington (which is Ellis’s Alma Mater), and Sean is totally into Lauren Hynde. I’m even positive there’s a chapter in the book that Ellis straight up just ends on the word “and” like “Sean Bateman’s Specialties” section does above, so this Sean Bateman, who supposedly graduated Camden this year, nevertheless still even comes across like Ellis’s Sean Bateman who graduated 20 years ago, and if you dig a character, isn’t that all that really matters?
As soon as I got over how amusing it was that Sean Bateman had a LinkedIn profile I remembered that the character in Ellis’s American Psycho is Patrick Bateman, Sean’s older brother, and since Sean mentions his brother demanded he join LinkedIn, it came as no surprise, that–check this out!–Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho is on LinkedIn. His profile actually is a lot more serious, and not as funny as Sean’s, so I won’t bother re-posting it, but if you happen to be a huge American Psycho nut, go over there and knock yourself out. He’s interested in “getting back in touch” evidently.
Social media as a platform for “characters” is as ancient as Friendster (man, whoever was responsible for the unbearably hilarious “San Francisco” profile back in like 2002, you were a complete riot!) and with the arrival of Lonelygirl15 and cewebrities like Jeffree Star, web 2.0, is veritably rife with “characters,” fictional and stranger-than-fictional. And, of course, there is the widespread social media “fan-fiction” of sorts, where people create unofficial profiles for characters they love, like the aforementioned LinkedIn profiles. But I’m thinking about something different from all this. I’m thinking of characters from character-driven stories on traditional media (books, movies, TV) living on in social media. I mean, really living there. Inhabiting the social media space with the same seamless familiarity that characters from novels cross over to the big screen. Communicating with us in their own voices, and with their own personalities that we have come to know and love, but in a new medium.
Michael Patrick King, director of the Sex and the City TV show and movie, would often talk about how great it was that they could really make the show authentically of New York because they could shoot scenes in actual existing restaurants and venues around the city (yes, I did watch the director’s commentary on a bunch of episodes, so?) The result was, indeed, a world that felt unmistakably New York, and establishments that no doubt were only too happy to reap the benefits of publicity in exchange. As an example of what’s possible with creating a living profile for a fictional character, an official Carrie Bradshaw profile, one written in her voice, that would generate content which would comply with the show’s bible and story arcs, could, for instance, feature a blog post mentioning a new restaurant she’d been to as a supplement to the show’s narrative. Suddenly the profile becomes not just promotion for the show, but, in fact, it’s own kind of channel. Creates the opportunity to start thinking about stories and character development in a completely new, almost infinite dimension that, of all the prior formats, perhaps only comic books came anywhere close too before, but this medium comes with something absolutely unbeatable: the opportunity to interact with these characters as well! If we are down to be friends with bands we love on Myspace, I’d bet we’d be into keeping up with characters we love too. Say, Bruce Wayne on Twitter? Or… Zoolander on Facebook? James Bond on BrightKite? Juno on Xanga?
Not that I’ve looked too far into this, I mean, maybe there are already plenty of major fictional characters out there living their daily lives on social networking sites, (I won’t be surprised if they’re Hannah Montana or iCarly or something) but I’m now totally fascinated by this whole idea. If anyone does know of examples of this actually being implemented: Fictional characters from stories in traditional media being (officially) brought to life with their true voice and personality, living and digitally breathing alongside us on social media, let me know.
To make remixing easy, the separate ‘stems’ from the song are available to purchase from iTunes. The ‘stems’ available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. You can mix them in any way you like, either by adding your own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.
The public will listen and vote for their favourite remix (voting ends May 1st). You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be counted as ‘mix votes’ back on radioheadremix.com. Radiohead will listen to the best remixes.
Once upon a time the product and the ad for the product were completely separate entities. Then content itself began to do double duty as the promotional unit. Now it’s the direct personalexperiencewith the content that can become its own promotion. It’s not just Radiohead pushing their song anymore. Everyone who creates a remix of the song, creates their own personal experience with it, is now involved in generating more exposure for it.
Culture no longer fits all that well into the role of a packaged good (if it ever did). Now there is more and more opportunity–and reason–to approach cultural content as a raw material, one used in the construction of expression.
Hope people have been seeing the billboards that I have put up around town. I think its important everyone knows how much Sarah Marshall SUCKS! How she does look fat in those jeans! How my mom never liked her! How over her I am!
So, I used the money that I spent on her engagement ring to buy every available billboard around town. (That’s right Sarah I was going to propose to you. I was just waiting for the right time. I guess that time is never O’clock in the month of Nev-ruary).
Sarah, I really hope you are un-happy for the rest of your life – that you understand how totally over you I am.
That said, you should call me if you want to talk, I can have these things taken down.
While driving home I saw a billboard that read “You Suck Sarah Marshall”. At the bottom of the message I saw the URL www.ihatesarahmarshall.com so when I got home I jumped on my computer and checked out the website. [It’s] a blog that is currently being written by a loved obsessed 26 year old guy who is YouTubing videos about how infatuated he is with his hot TV star girlfriend.
Well, as it turns out this website is the launch of a new marketing campaign for a movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall“. I have no idea if this movie is any good although it is brought to us by the guys who gave us the 40 Year Old Virgin. On a quick side note I can not recall seeing the R rated warning on the billboard but if I had I would have known right away it was a movie.
The point of this post is to point out the way this movie is being marketed. They are utilizing a combination of vague yet somewhat shocking billboard ads to drive people to a Google Blog thats incorporating YouTube videos as a way to create buzz. It should be interesting to see how it works out.
And answer #3 goes like this:
At OMMA a few weeks ago the theme was “Welcome to the Machine.” All the panels and presentations were framed around the question: How to prepare for the kind of dubious advertising that would be in store in the “Machine”-mediated future? (At least that’s what I think the theme was supposed to mean.)
The model for creating advertising has, in general, been pretty conglomerative. The media department buys the adspace, the creative department puts stuff in the adspace, the “new media” department does….who knows what, and the whole process is as compartmentalized as an assembly line. You know, it’s funny. There’s now hypersonic sound technology, which can be used to literally beam audio ads DIRECTLY at individuals in its path, yet we still insist on referring to the internet as “new media.” And that kind of segregated perspective may be part of the problem.
In strict media buy terms all that’s going on in the IHSM campaign is a grip of outdoor and a domain name, you could even say that ihatesarahmarshall.com is a kind of “microsite” I suppose, or maybe an “adverblog,” but are any of those elements individually responsible for the effectiveness of the campaign? While there’s certainly no shortage of ads out there that make a play on our curiosity, the IHSM billboards are the first that immediately struck me as possesing a deliberate, blatant, “What the hell is that about? Oh, I’ll just check it out on my iPhone,” quality.
There’s now more and more people carrying the internet around in their pocket. What does that mean in terms of how we approach Mobile, Online, Experiential, Outdoor, or Out-of-home media–all together! Then multiply all of that by the coefficient of search.
Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently went to Japan and noticed an interesting trend in advertising there: search boxes have replaced URLs.
Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!
An ARG–which stands for Alternate Reality Game–is defined as:“An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.” Which could also serve as both a philosophical definition for marketing in general, and a more advanced version of what the I Hate Sarah Marshall campaign has started to touch on in a very basic, accessible way. The opportunity is now there to create advertising that works not by managing to take our attention hostage for an instant, but because it’s able to move between media the same way that our attention does.
“Integration” may be getting primed to become the next “viral” when it comes to overabused industry buzzwords, but it’s more than just a trendy new widget. The next phase is not about defeating some monolithic “Machine.” It’s about figuring out: How do we create messages that cater to the way technology lets us interact with all different media? Meanwhile, the paint-by-numbers, assembly-line approach is still trying to figure out which department’s responsibility it is to come up with the answer.