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No One Told Elmo 3, originally uploaded by EmonomE.
“In front of Lehman Bros. betn. 50 & 49 and 7 Ave.”
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In The New York Times Magazine: Sponsored classes
SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKOFFS
Is a corporate-sponsored marketing course a real academic service, or a fake one?
A couple of years ago, the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition — a trade group whose members include fashion, software, pharmaceutical and other businesses concerned with knockoff versions of their products — decided to take its message to college campuses. Specifically, the I.A.C.C. College Outreach Campaign aimed to enlist students in spreading its message to other students. While intended as a sort of win-win situation that gives students real-life experiences and spreads the I.A.C.C.’s “fight the fakes” message, the campaign has also ended up sparking an entirely different ethical question about the sponsorship of college courses.
Read the column in today’s issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Thingdown
Thumb Drive, via On The Ground Looking Up.
Stone Ice Cubes, via Better Living Through Design.
More Things in the Thingdown after the jump. Read more
Political quiz
Q: Which presidential campaign has “has sent at least one dozen researchers and lawyers to Alaska to pore over Palin’s background,” according to the AP?
A: McCain’s!
Note: Murketing.com is nonpartisan. It’s in my contract.
Via: Chris Orr at The Plank.
Wealth: It’s relative, I guess…
WSJ’s Weath Report blog notes:
[AIG’s ex-honcho] Hank Greenberg’s shares once were valued at more than $700 million.
And now? At the $2.21 price of this morning … Mr. Greenberg’s shares were valued at about $28 million.
Of course, for most people, $28 million would be enough to get by. But to Mr. Greenberg, the shares are now “virtually worthless,” as he said Tuesday on the “Charlie Rose Show.” (At the time he said his total personal holdings of AIG were valued at about $100 million).
[Note: Yes, yes, I realized that in real life he couldn’t actually convert all that stock to cash, particularly given the specific circumstances of AIG. Have a sense of humor, okay? And trust me, this guy lives better than you do, and that’s not going to change.]
Flickr Interlude
obama mocha vs. mccain mocha, originally uploaded by _cheryl.
Seen at genuine joe coffeehouse, austin, tx.
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Mad Men Musings: Changing Times
On the off chance that anybody is wondering why I haven’t added to my Mad Men Musings series — I wrote about almost every episode of the series in its first season, and not once in its second — it’s mostly because the new season, to me, hasn’t really presented a lot of very interesting material related to commercial persuasion, past v. present. That material has faded into the background of plots I find less interesting (will Don’s wife figure out he’s cheating etc. etc.).
There’s one sort-of-kind-of exception to that, though. This is the subplot involving the hiring of “young” creatives, whose basic value to the agency is their hard-wired understanding of youth culture. There’s clearly a parallel to that going on in the commercial persuasion business today. Aside from experiments like the one the NYT wrote about yesterday (“pop up agency” of twentysomethings created within traditional agency), young people are frequently spoken of by marketers as though they are either members of a different species or, possibly, have arrived here from another planet. The idea is that unless you’re one of “them” you can never never really “get” what makes “them” tick. It’s a bit goofy. Not unlike the professional young people hired by the 1962 ad agency depicted on Mad Men. But there are, I think, some interesting differences. Read more
Disclosed: Brief visit to NYC
Tomorrow (Thursday) night, I’ll be very briefly in New York for an American Craft Council panel called The Politics of Craft. This is not an advertisement for myself, as the main attractions are Sabrina Gschwandtner, of KnitKnit, and Liz Collins, knitwear designer and founder of Knitting Nation. I expect both will be very interesting and I’m looking forward to meeting them. I’m simply the moderator.
The real reason I bring this up is to apologize in advance to friends in NY: I will not be seeing any of you. I’m literally just there for the night and leaving very early the next morning. So if you happen to hear about this event and wonder why I’m in town without calling, that is the reason. Catch you next time?
UPDATE 9/24: Here is a link to audio recording of this event, if you are curious.
Flickr Interlude
McDonalds Drive Thru – Orlando, originally uploaded by joiseyshowaa.
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More on scrapper motives
For those of you who read this past weekend’s Consumed about the changing motivations of scrapbookers over time, here’s a follow up: Scrap Smack asks its readers who they scrap for: Do you scrap for relaxation, the creative process, the pure enjoyment of it? Or do you scrap for other reasons? For yourself, for your family, for future generations, for business?”
I scrap for myself, but I must admit when my children drag out their books to show their friends I am proud. I am proud that they want to show their friends what Mommy has done. I am proud when I receive compliments, after all it’s only human to want recognition for a job well done and for talents you may have.
Scrap Smack posts always get a lot of comments, and they’re piling up fast at this one.
Expressions of music fandom in the digital era
Carrie Brownstein says she’s gotten rid of her concert T’s and stickers and posters and the like, and that the faded LP jacket no longer works as a signifier of musical devotion. She writes:
But just because our walls are no longer covered in posters — and our outerwear is free of patches or buttons — that doesn’t mean we don’t want people to know that fandom courses through our veins. And it’s not just fandom we want to prove, but full-on expertise.
These days, we write blogs. We make our iTunes playlist public at the office. (“Dave, I didn’t realize you were such a Yes fan. Every album? Wow! And what’s with all the obscure Brazilian post-punk? Pray tell.”) We use song names in the subject lines of emails and hope the recipient gets the reference. We make mix tapes to be played at parties, we DJ, we download songs as our cell-phone ringtones, and we name our kids after Dylan and Beatles songs. Maybe these things constitute new forms of wear, tear and overuse.
Possibly so. Brownstein goes on to ask her readers for their views on how “we go about proving our love for a band or artist these days.”
But I guess what I see between the lines here is a shift from fandom in the form of devotion to and alliance with a particular artist or artists, to something more like showing off personal taste. A Sleater-Kinney T-shirt just says I like Sleater-Kinney; a playlist filled with obscure stuff you’ve never heard of, including maybe one overlooked/underappreciated Sleater-Kinney gem, says something different. Ideally, if you listen to and like the playlist, then it says I have awesome taste. The goal isn’t to make you a fan of the Sleater-Kinney. It’s to make you a fan of me.
Maybe that’s all obvious. Or equally possible: All wrong.
Just thinking out loud.
Big Money’s BrandWatch
Slate‘s new spinoff, The Big Money, launches today, and the Dow is down like 300 points. Coincidence?
Just kidding. Anyway I bring it up because the site has one feature in particular that may be of interest to those of you who follow branding and all that, The YouTube BrandWatch:
Every week, The Big Money features a corporate-themed video that’s had significant viewership on YouTube: some approved, some unapproved, some mashed-up combinations of the two. And we’ll ask our readers to vote on how the video affects the brands.
The first one is here.
In The New York Times Magazine: Scrapbooks and scrapbooking
SHARED MEMORIES:
The urge to have your creative talent for recording the past recognized in the here and now
This week in Consumed, a look at scrapbooking, and how scrapbookers’ creations (and their motives) have evolved.
Many of the images reproduced in “Scrapbooks: An American History,” by Jessica Helfand, date back 50, 80, even 100 years. Reproduced in color and spread across wide pages, they are treated as worthy examples of creativity. The anonymous scrapbook creators could hardly have imagined such a fate for their work. Whatever audience they had in mind, it surely did not include a design critic ruminating over this “evocative” and “largely overlooked class of artifact.”
In the 21st century, of course, scrapbooking is a multibillion-dollar affair, with specialty publications and businesses serving a huge market of self-documentarians. By and large, their work has little aesthetic resemblance to what Helfand has compiled. And while contemporary “scrappers” may not be thinking about future historians, a good number are thinking about an audience — and it isn’t just the grandkids. …
Read the column in the September 14, 2008, issue if The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The Times’ Consumed RSS feed is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
To make a point about Consumed that you think readers of The Times Magazine would be interested in: “Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10018. The e-mail address is magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer’s name, address and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.”
Flickr Interlude
Skates, originally uploaded by neuphoto57.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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