MURKETING

Bowery branding

New York Magazine ran a story recently on the redevelopment of the Bowery — all the new luxe hotels or whatever. They had a writer spend one night in an SRO, and the next night at one of said luxe hotels. At the SRO, he encounters a guy named Paulie, who is sweeping up:

This isn’t just redevelopment as usual, Paulie says as he sweeps. That’s because the Bowery isn’t just any neighborhood. “It is like 42nd Street. Like Harlem. Names that mean something. Those places you don’t just rebuild. You’ve got to rebrand them. The Bowery is being rebranded.”

I’m amused that even the guy who sweeps up at a Bowery fleabag is comfortable with “rebranding” as a concept.

I was also amused by the story’s subhead, which refers to the Bowery as “America’s greatest skid row.” I think I missed the issue of Conde Nast Traveller where they ranked all the “skid rows.”

Flickr Interlude

Display is rocking
Originally uploaded by poketo

“99 cent store in silverlake.”

Dept. of dubious praise

Assessing some new Converse commercials, Ad Rants says they are:

motivating the person viewing them to get off their ass, go buy some Converse kicks and make their mark on the world lest they end up the loser these [ads] allude to. That’s a good thing.

Well, if you don’t mind my asking: Is it okay to get off my ass and make a mark on the world without buying “some Converse kicks”? Is that allowed? Is it possible? Or is buying “some Converse kicks” just part of the package? One of the steps I have to take to avoid being a “loser”? What does being “motivated” to make “a mark on the world” have to do with shopping for a particular brand of sneakers? And why, exactly, is it a “good thing”?

Imaginary beer brand in the works … but it’s not Duff?

Two quick follow-ups relating to the November 18, 2007 Consumed column on one of my favorite topics, imaginary brands. Brandweek reported recently (I’m still catching up reading) that:

Family Guy will become possibly the first animated show to ever have a beer licensee. In an example of reverse product placement, the Rhode Island-based microbrew will be dubbed Pawtucket Patriot Ale after show patriarch Peter Griffin’s libation of choice. It’s scheduled to appear in liquor stores and specialty outlets next year.

Also, I meant to pass along earlier this startling list of fake companies on Wikipedia. Plenty of inspiration for column subject LastExitToNowhere!

Totally wildly unprecedented change … and its precedents

For whatever reason, I’ve been pondering the big/huge/massive changes that have occurred in my lifetime. Seems like pretty much conventional wisdom that this is the changiest era ever, and often I think it does feel that way.

On the other hand, not all change is created equal. The Web is a big change. Twitter isn’t. Etc. Sometimes it’s hard to keep clear the difference, there’s so much hype about every new new thing these days.

So, as an exercise, I considered the last 25 years. I was around, and relatively aware, in 1982. What are the things that have happened since then that were really, truly, before-and-after, big? The stuff that hardly anybody in 1982 could have seen coming? The things that would really surprise and be outside the imagination of my 1982 self?

I settled on these (in no particular order):

• The World Wide Web. (Is it missing something to just make this a single entry, lumping everything from Google to Facebook to blogs to … everything else into one entry? How big a deal is any single Web-enabled development? And should email be part of this, or separate?)
• The end of the Cold War/collapse of Communism.
• AIDS
• Hip hop (technically existed prior to 1982 but became a giant cultural force after)
• Mobile communications. I’m not sure if this one counts or not. Probably though, right?
• September 11 / “war on terror”

Okay. That’s some stuff, some big & changy stuff. But what about the 25 years prior to that? What could you show to a citizen of 1956 from the vantage point of 1981, that would seem like Big Changes? What about earlier periods?

I decided to make some tentative lists of big changes. I stuck with things that had some sort of public dimension, in the sense that their impact was obvious, not subtle. So for instance, I wouldn’t include something like air conditioning, which I’m sure somebody could make the case has massively changed the way we live etc., but which doesn’t have that sort of public-culture dimension that I’m interested in.

• Vietnam
• Watergate
• Rock music (again, it existed in 1956, but think of the Beatles and Woodstock etc. — it’s a lot)
• The assassinations and riots of the 1960s
• The sexual revolution
• Civil Rights
• Oil shocks/gas rationing etc. of the 1970s (I’m on the fence about this one)

Okay, I kept going. How about 1930 to 1955?

• The Depression
• The Holocaust
• The atomic bomb
• Television

And finally: 1904 to 1929

• World War I
• Jazz
• Radio
• The car
• The airplane
• The movies

So that’s my tentative list at the moment. In some ways I’m now not sure if the most intense 25-year period of change through might have actually been the 1930 to 1955 stretch. The examples there are all pretty massive. Think of a person from 1930 looking at the world of 1955. Isn’t the difference there a lot bigger than 1982 to 2007? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out, and maybe in some cases my picks don’t make sense. This isn’t an intensely researched project, just something I’ve been pondering.

Thoughts?

Last bit (for now) on ‘Handmade 2.0’

As I type this, the story has made it to number nine on the NYT’s “most emailed” list. Weirdly pleasing.

Anyway, my collected del.icio.us links on Etsy are here, on DIYism here, and on reactions to the article here, if you happen to be a del.icio.us freak, as I am.

Back to regular murketing programming later today.

Handmade 2.0: Links of interest

It’s always a little weird to publish a story that I’ve been sort of thinking about for a couple of years. The craft-DIY scene, or phenomenon, or movement, has interested me for a long time, for a bunch of reasons. I guess — I hope — I’ve now covered a lot of those reasons in the Handmade 2.0 story.

I should also mention that there’s a chapter devoted largely to DIY/craft in the book I have coming out next year, Buying In. (Somewhat incredibly, you can already pre-order said book from Amazon, even though the pub date is June 2008.)

I view this story as a kind of sequel to the earlier “brand underground” article that I wrote last year. That piece actually makes offhand mention of crafters, in fact, as well as indie designers (like those written up in this New York Magazine story.) I see the participants in these various scenes as being part of the same broader indie-preneur phenomenon. There’s more about that in the book, where it makes more sense.

I’ve written about participants in the DIY/craft scene both on this site and in the Times Magazine several times before. In July of 2006 I did a column on My Paper Crane (and that was what first brought me in touch with Faythe Levine, who is in the Handmade 2.0 story); some reactions to that column collected here. I’ve also done Consumed columns on DIY-scene-related subjets including soap-makers, Poketo, Kate Bingaman-Burt, and gocco. On this site, the very first Murketing Q&A was with Bethany Shorb/Cyberoptix Tie Lab, maker of cool ties, and I’ve noted corporate sponsorship interest in the DIY idea here, here, here, and here.

Anyway. Here are a few more links:

First, some stuff from the story. Here is what I called Etsy’s running DIY business school site/blog: The Storque. The site of Faythe Levine’s eagerly-awaited documentary Handmade Nation is here. The Austin Craft Mafia is one of the great stories of crafting culture; several members of the ACM are interviewed in the book. Meanwhile, here is co-founder Jenny Hart’s Sublime Stitching. Hart has also been writing a DIY business column for VenusZine, installments of which are here and here. Here is Craft Magazine’s Craftzine blog. The story makes passing mention of Renegade, among other craft fairs. I went to the most recent Chicago version and there was a lot of great stuff I wish I could’ve gotten into the piece. They also have a store in Chicago now. I also mentioned the Craft Congress in Pittsburgh, and I believe some of the organizers of that event also organize that city’s Handmade Arcade fair.

The Etsy store of Circa Ceramics is here; their work is definitely worth checking out, and you might be interested in this interview they did for The Storque. Emily Martin, AKA The Black Apple, might be the best known Etsy seller; she’s very nice and very talented. Here is her blog, and her Etsy store. Finally, thanks to Jean Railla, who in addition to writing for Craft, can be found at her blog Meal By Meal.

Other sites of interest mentioned in the story, often just in passing, because I had so much to cover: GetCrafty.com, SuperNaturale, Craftster, Stitch N Bitch, Church of Craft.

I spoke to an awful lot of crafters who unfortunately I didn’t have space to specifically mention in the story. Atlanta-based Christy Petterson is a maker of jewelry and other cool stuff under the name a bardis, a columnist/editor for GetCrafty, and an organizer of the Indie Craft Experience. Artist AshleyG is another great Etsy success story whose work is really nice. Angel D’Amico makes cool clothes that she sells through Etsy. I quite like the work of Le Photique, another Chicago-based Etsy seller, who makes jewelry. I also want to thank Jenny of craft fair/teaching resource/store Felt Club. The unnamed crafter in the story whose observation that without a market the movement isn’t sustainable made such an impression on me at the Craft Congress, is Rachel Lyra Hospodar, of Medium Reality. Finally, Betsy Greer is one of the truly thoughtful observers of and participants in the new craft idea, and is I believe working on a book on the subject.

There are many others but this is getting ridiculous. Please check out some of these folks if you have time. The sort of unwieldiness of the craft/DIY scene is part of what made it interesting to write about, but also what made it hard to write about.

Handmade 2.0: Is the future of shopping all about the past?

There’s no Consumed column in the New York Times Magazine this week, to make way for a feature story I’ve wanted to write for quite a while. “Handmade 2.0” is about the growth of the DIY/crafting phenomenon, and Etsy, and some thoughts as to what it’s all about.
Here is a short excerpt from the opening section:

Browsing Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is, it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the unsentimental notion of the profit motive.

On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying 300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web 2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. “Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost,” the Handmade Pledge site asserts. “Buying handmade helps us reconnect.” The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.

The whole story is here (and of course in tomorrow’s issue of the Times Magazine, where it might be more pleasurable to read, given the length). I’m putting together some related links that I’ll post tomorrow.

[ PS: In answer to the question: Why does the online version of the story on the Times site not actually link to Etsy? Or to Getcrafty, or any of other things it might link to? My answer is: I have no idea. Please ask someone who works at the Times! ]

Flickr Interlude

Supermarket
Originally uploaded by Ben Pearce

Consumed update-o-rama: Knitted watches and more

1. Re: The October 28, 2007 column on counterfunctional watches, here, at left, is perhaps the ultimate example — knitted watches. $60. Via Make blog.

2. The November 25, 2007 column on Guitar Hero got a fair amount of sour reaction from Guitar Hero fans who seemed to think I wasn’t suitably impressed by the game, or whatever. I found this puzzling. A few days after the column appeared, Slate published a piece by Carrie Brownstein, about Rock Band, a Guitar Hero competitor that I mentioned in the column. One blog (I’ve lost the link, sorry) referred to her piece as a “nice counterpoint” to mine, or something like that.

As it turns out, what she said wasn’t really at odds with what I’d written. Toward the beginning she writes: “Rock Band isn’t about music or about being in a band, it’s about pretending.” And here’s the conclusion: “These days, it might be easier to exalt the fake than to try to make sense of the genuine. But maybe by pretending to be in a band, there will be those who’ll find the nerve to go beyond the game, and to take the brave leaps required to create something real.” I’m not sure how that counters what I said. I certainly agree with it.

Anyway, the other interesting thing about the Slate piece is that Brownstein recounts learning about Rock Band “during a short stint at an ad agency in Portland, Ore., where I was asked to come up with a few ideas to help promote the game.”

This is never really spelled out. Did W+K try to hire Carrie Brownstein? Did she consider working for them, like as a job? Anyway, I’m glad to read that her attempts at coming up with promotional ideas didn’t really work out, and to read that whatever this “stint” was, it was “short.” Also, I recommend her blog Monitor Mix, it’s quite good.

3. The December 2, 2007 column was about Linzie Hunter’s spam-into-art project. Jen Bekman’s 20X200 project has not one, but two new and original Hunter pieces for sale. (More on 20X200 here.)

More updates after the jump. Read more

The Product Is You, No. 10

[The Product Is You is an occasional Murketing series collecting advertising that is aimed at advertisers: Magazines or television networks packaging up their consumers — that is, you, the potential ad target — in ways designed to attract advertisers. Previous installments here.]

A recent CNBC campaign touting its audience to potential advertisers emphasizes (once again) that those audience members are supposedly rich. The point is made repeatedly, juxtaposing the high-end version of some thing (a watch, kobe beef, Faberge egg, fancy car) against the mass version. You, the CNBC viewer, are special. Why? Because you have money to burn. According to these ads, anyway. The ad above and below says that “97 percent of CNBC viewers own securities with an average value of $1,631,000.” Another says the average CNBC watcher has a net worth that “exceeds $2.7 million.” All the ads use the phrase that matters most to potential advertisers: “purchasing power.”

Read more

Ethics, book reviews, blurbs

Romenesko points to the results of a survey on the subject of book reviewing ethics. (Potential conflicts, whether reviewers have to finish the book, etc.) The question that I’m curious about is number 11: “Should a person who has written an unpaid blurb for a book be allowed to write a fuller review of the book?”

An unpaid blurb? Are there paid blurbs?

Hot sauce maker avoids Nike SB’s pickle

A company called Wheelhouse Pickles, which makes sauces and so on — in addition to selling “award-winning” pickles — decided to add a hot sauce to its lineup. They wanted to call it Minor Threat Hot Sauce, and came up with a graphic that riffs off Minor Threat, the famous band.

A year or two ago, Nike SB was heavily criticized, in some quarters at least, for biting a Minor Threat graphic as part of a “Major Threat” skate-tour promotion — an incident that’s discussed and examined in some detail in Anne Elizabeth Moore’s recent book, Unmarketable. (Murketing’s Q&A with Moore is here.)

Unlike Nike SB, Wheelhouse Pickles asked for permission from frontman Ian MacKaye to use their graphic riff.

But the answer was no. According to Epicurious (via The Grinder):

MacKaye and the band members tried the sauce, looked at the proposed art and decided that though they had no problem with Wheelhouse using the entirely appropriate name Minor Threat, they definitely didn’t want anyone thinking that Minor Threat, the sauce, was a product officially endorsed by Minor Threat, the band.

Thus the design below. However, MacKaye is quoted saying that Wheelhouse “makes good pickle.”

I’m sure the Wheelhouse people were bummed not to get use their graphic riff. But all in all, they came out of this pretty well, with an okay on the name, and a kind word from MacKaye. All of which suggests that Nike SB had less understanding of Minor Threat than a small pickle company did.

You owe me money and I am watching you now

A behavioural biologist conducted a study in a cafeteria where people were supposed to deposit money in an honesty box when they purchased hot beverages. Each week, a poster above the box was changed: Some weeks, it featured a picture of flowers; other weeks, a large pair of eyes glared out at patrons. When the eyes were displayed, nearly three times as much money was left in the box. Even the vague feeling of being watched dramatically improved the honesty of patrons.

Weird.

From a Toronto Globe & Mail article, via Online Fandom.

Most wanted logos?

Sometimes when I’m writing a story about a particular brand, I’ll create a Google alert for it, and in a few instances that’s meant that I’ve been alerted to various local crime stories in which suspects’ descriptions included the fact they were supposedly wearing, say, a specific brand of boot, or sweatshirt.

With that in mind, I found this BBC report pretty interesting:

The Metropolitan Police is looking into technology which can automatically identify branded logos on clothing.

Police believe that tracking suspects by their distinctive clothes will help cut down on the manual scanning of hundreds of hours of video footage.

The technology is already used to automatically identify company logos in TV broadcasts of sporting events.

A police official further explains:

Many of these young criminals in particular wear distinctive track-suits and coats with logos and sporting emblems and we’re going to use that facility to search, link and identify criminals.

Plus, think of the data could be collected. What are the top brands of the criminal class? We have the technology to find out!

(Thanks, Braulio!)