Tag Archives: ministers of design

A Burning Hot Marketing Spot: How Burning Man Moved from Counter to Corporate

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Burning Man, the festival in the Nevada desert, oft-presented as the ultimate celebration of counter culture has undergone a bit of a transformation. The “playa” has now, for better or worse, becoming the playa-ing ground of some big-time tech players.

Once a year, tens of thousands of people (dubbed “burners”) gather in the Nevada Desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, and all things DIY.

Along with the hippies, however, also came the CEOs and the venture capitalists. Now, you might be wondering, how can a place that is supposed to be devoid of any sort of cash or barter transactions become host to business wheeling-and-dealing.

Among the 68,000 attendees are some unexpected names – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. It is not a rare sight to behold wealthy techies arriving, via private jets, to luxury desert camps fully staffed with cooks, masseuses, and assistants.

Burning Man’s founders are not exactly fearful of these new playa-ers–after all, they often fund the massive art installations and the festival’s nonprofit pursuits.

“What we’re seeing are many more of the Fortune 500 leadership, entrepreneurs and small startups bringing their whole team,” said Marian Goodell, Burning Man director of business and communications.

But what other way to describe what is taking place than “gentrification?”

“Anyone who has been going to Burning Man for the last five years is now seeing things on a level of expense or flash that didn’t exist before,” said Brian Doherty, author of the book “This Is Burning Man.”

For those with money to spend, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help. “The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,” says Tyler Hanson, a “Sherpa.” “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.”

So, if you can grit your teeth and close your eyes (not just to the sand in the desert), Burning Man might just be the next frontier for some surreptitious networking and deal-making…you know…like the cool kids do it. Hippies meet hipsters; hipsters meet hippies.

Tinder Takes a Swipe at “Dating Apocalypse” Characterization

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Tinder, the dating app, took umbrage at a recent Vanity Fair article that pointed a finger squarely at the app for precipitating a “dating apocalypse” and replacing romance with hook-ups and…well, insipidness.

The piece by Nancy Jo Sales posits that Tinder has created a culture of one night stands, hook-ups, and a general commodification-cum-free-for-all in the world of relationships.

Not exactly controversial news there, however, more noteworthy is Tinder’s Tweetstorm response to the article–one more reminiscent of a jilted lover than of a brand with Tinder’s global reach. Case in point: “Little known fact: sex was invented in 2012 when Tinder was launched.” Neither funny nor particularly much of  a zinger. Or even more pathetically: “Next time reach out to us first @nancyjosales… that’s what journalists typically do.” Umm, actually, no, Tinder–journalists interview users of the app, not the company…typically. As she aptly pointed out, “@Tinder not clear: are you suggesting journalists need your okay to write about you?”
Even worse: “It’s about meeting new people for all kinds of reasons. Travel, dating, relationships, friends and a shit ton of marriages.” We get it, Tinder, you are so hip, you can drop the s word in an official Tweet, but the “come at me, bro” is hardly business speak.
So, in the battle of Vanity Fair vs. Tinder, I would argue that Tinger’s pathetic swipe at the magazine fell shortly. If they were a romantic interest, no one would have swiped right on them. Seriously.

Sensing their own Tweetstorm was about to create a storm of a different kind, they offered this spineless apology: “While reading the recent Vanity Fair article about today’s dating culture, we were saddened to see that the article didn’t touch upon the positive experiences that the majority of our users encounter daily. Our intention was to highlight the many statistics and amazing stories that are sometimes left unpublished, and, in doing so, we overreacted.”

Moral of the story: get better social media directors, Tinder.

VICE’s New Channel for Women Aims to be the New Face of Feminism

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VICE, the magazine and online platform that has long be THE platform for all things subversive and hip (and arguably, wryly hipsterish), is launching a new channel Broadly, described as a “women’s interest platform that will feature original, reported stories on pretty much everything from a female perspective with online videos and articles.” By women; for women.

Tracie Egan Morrissey, a veteran editor at Jezebel, brought the idea of a site telling stories from a woman’s perspective to Vice cofounders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi last year. “I pitched them this idea,” she says, “and they hired me on the spot.”

At launch, Broadly has “Ovary Action,” a show about the war on women’s reproductive rights; “Style & Error,” a show about women’s fashion, like the iconic power suit; and an interview series called “Broadly Meets,” featuring prominent women like Rose McGowan and Virginie Despentes.

To avoid the terrible trolling that usually besets anything even remotely related to women on the web, Broadly will have no comments section: “When women are speaking online, it’s such a lightning rod for every angle—other feminists are telling you you’re not doing feminism properly, MRAs are coming in and calling you a fat whore,” Morrissey explains.

Vice tends to skew to a rather masculine audience, even if a lot of the readers are female too, but with swagger-ific coverage of things like the Atlanta Twins, porn stars, and Action Brosnon, it’s not exactly Gloria Steinem’s oeuvre either.

“Young women—millennial women—are really smart, are really well educated, and they want this kind of news,” Morrissey adds. “It’s fun to be distracted on Twitter with bullshit here and there, but covering abortion rights and the things happening to women right now is really, really, really needed.”

So how does Broadly intend to deal with the dreaded “feminazi” label or even more the point, the commodification of feminism as “girl power.”  “I think if you’re a woman, and you’re not a feminist, then you’re an idiot,” Morrissey says.

So, here’s to Broadly–the broad news sources for us broads. With its grrl power, rather than “girl power,” ethos, Vice’s “better half” looks to be off to a riotous start. Follow Broadly on Twitter at @Broadly.

Girls With Gluten–Chew On This Grain of Thought

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Sales of products with a gluten-free label have doubled in the past four years. Market research firm Nielsen estimated that sales of products with a gluten-free label have doubled in the past four years, rising from $11.5 billion to more than $23 billion. Marketing efforts have certainly played a role–Chobani Greek yogurt and Green Giant vegetables, for instance, added “gluten free” labels onto products that never contained gluten.

Survey data gathered by Packaged Facts in July and August of 2014 showed that more than a third of consumers said a gluten-free/wheat-free label claim is an important factor when they are shopping. A quarter of the survey respondents also said they had purchased or consumed food products labeled as gluten-free in the three months prior to the survey.

Packaged Facts estimates the market for gluten-free foods will exceed $2 billion in 2019.

Yet, less than 1 percent of the population has celiac disease. Approximately 6 percent are gluten intolerant, yet almost 30 percent of American adults are trying to avoid gluten. With Gwyneth Paltrow and Zooey Deschanel extolling the virtues of a grain-free lifestyle, it is no surprise the public is eating it up as the key to better health. It’s generally not. Consider that a Glutino Original New York Style Bagel has 26 percent more calories, 250 percent more fat, 43 percent more sodium, 50 percent less fiber and double the sugar of a Thomas’ Plain Bagel.

And then there’s the cost. The Glutino bagel costs 74 percent more than the Thomas’ bagel. Nabisco’s Gluten-Free Rice Thins cost 84 percent more per cracker than Nabisco’s Multigrain Wheat Thins. As one researcher put it, “The[se] foods can be significantly more expensive and are very trendy to eat, but we discovered a negligible difference when looking at their overall nutrition.”

So, will this gluten-free obsession ever crumble!? Girlswithgluten.com are working against the (gluten-free) grain to separate the wheat from the chaff. Their Instagram account is replete with girls gloriously indulging in all things doughy and delicious. Then there are others who tag themselves with the #hotgirlseatingpizza. About time somebody subvert America’s latest diet obsession and revel in utter gluten glory! Their clever t-shirt slogan “Free Gluten” should be able to bring this group some well-deserved bread.

The Humble-Bumble Beginnings of a Bee-Loved Brand

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A little more than a week ago, the bearded beekeeper and co-founder of Burt’s Bees, Burt Shavitz, passed away. “Burt Shavitz, our co-founder and namesake, has left for greener fields and wilder woods,” the company wrote.

It all started with candles. Shavitz had a honey-making business in Maine when he teamed up with Roxanne Quimby in 1984, who used his leftover beeswax to make candles that she sold at a craft fair.

The candles were a hit — they made $200 at their first fair and $20,000 after a year, according to the company. The pair launched a business together, soon expanding to personal care products like lip balms and soaps.

The brand’s signature and best-selling product, its beeswax balm, was introduced in 1991.

Hold on…how did a bee-loving, business-hating Maine hippie start one of the most beloved cosmetics brands?  Burt Shavitz was not interested in lip balm or moisturizer and definitely not big business. His passions were bees, his golden retrievers, nature…

In the documentary Burt’s Buzz, Shavitz says, “There was no company. My bees were the company. My truck was the company. My chainsaw was the company.”

Then in the summer of 1984, he gave a hitchhiker named Roxanne Quimby a ride. What followed…well, a history of thumbs up and thumbs down. Quimby essentially created the business.

Shavitz and Quimby eventually parted ways and not happily, after the business moved from Maine to North Carolina and grew exponentially. In 1999, she bought him out for $130,000, according to The New Yorker. She later sold most of her share to a private equity firm for more than $140 million. She reportedly gave Shavitz $4 million. “If Mr. Shavitz had held onto the stake he traded to Quimby for $130,000, it would have been worth about $59 million,” the New York Times wrote in 2008.

Burt’s Bees was sold again to the Clorox Company for nearly a billion dollars in 2007. Today, the products are sold in over 50 countries. Shavitz was compensated for the use of his image on the label, and he was paid to make special appearances to promote the brand.

“In the long run, I got the land, and land is everything.  Money is nothing really worth squabbling about. This is what puts people six feet under. You know, I don’t need it.”

In his typically wry way, he commented on the company takeover, “Except for the fact that they’re from Clorox, they’re nice people.”

The reluctant face of Burt’s Bees was an intensely private man: “A good day is when no one shows up and you don’t have to go anywhere.”

And this is the story of Burt, who made sharing the hard work of his bee friends some of his beeswax.

Chobani’s “Love This Life” Campaign Courts Controversy

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Chobani’s latest ad, part of their “Love This Life” campaign, is certainly high on the cheesy content (apropos for a dairy brand, no?). When I first started watching it, the message I got was “this poor soccer Mom has such few sensory enjoyments in life that she is supposed to be thrown into near-orgasmic paroxysms of delight upon the consumption of yogurt…in some exotic locale straight out of Eat, Pray, Love.” No, seriously–see for yourself. Yet, the “stunning reveal” at the end of the ad–that the ever-ubiquitous snoozing husband is, in fact, a wife is meant to somehow make this edgy!? Confusing, yes; controversial, hardly. It’s yogurt, for Pete’s sakes. Hardly transformative.

Yet, of all of the other “Love This Life” ads, I would say this one is probably the least confusing. Take a look at the 90-second anthem spot, created by Oppermann Weiss. “This is a modern American story,” Chobani CMO Peter McGuinness told Adweek. “It’s a family, and we don’t know what happened with them. Something happened that involved the kids. And then they work through it as a family. And they come out of it stronger and better and closer.” Ummm, OK…I would probably describe this more like a riff on Blue Valentine–a tinge Southern gothic and not even a smidgeon…yogurty. So, how is it that this ad is supposed to convince me to buy Chobani!?

“The point is, Chobani doesn’t see a pretend world—the world of most yogurt commercials. It sees the real world. And when viewers see the authentic, real-life moments in the ads, they may be more inclined to believe the realness of the brand.

It’s an approach that almost turns Chobani into a lifestyle brand—if you buy the lifestyle here, you well may buy the products, too.” Eureka! The so-called lifestyle brand–if I am able to relate to the “realness” and “authenticity” of the lifestyle portrayed in the ads, I am to immediately assume that also translates to Chobani’s “real” and “natural” products. Interesting.

What is a lifestyle brand, you might ask. Lifestyle Brands, associate themselves firmly with a particular way of life. They deliver strong social benefits through which a consumer will be able to subconsciously answer the question, “when I buy this brand, the type of people I relate to are…” They create a sense of belonging or disrupt the status quo. So, Nike aligns people who want to push their limits. Club Med connects those who wish to communicate; The Body Shop, those who value nature.

A lifestyle brand will almost always originally connect with young consumers and represent change. Brands such as Apple, Virgin, and Nike initially grew from a youthful community before convincing more people that adopting them would amplify their personal ethos or identity.

So, to get back to the same-sex couple in the ad. They are a part of “modern American stories.”

“For us, it’s why not [feature a same-sex couple]—not why,” said Chobani CMO Peter McGuinness. “There’s nothing new here, per se. Inclusion and equality has been and is foundational and fundamental to the company.”

Fair enough. In conclusion, gay couples are just as vulnerable to cheeziness and schmaltz, apparently. Sorry to be such a cynic, but see the ad and tell me that it is not cringe-inducingly saccharine (despite the seemingly low sugar content of that particular yogurt). I would dair-ily appreciate your thoughts.

One Cookie (Campaign) That Didn’t Crumble

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In last month’s issue of Real Simple magazine (my go-to source for D.I.Ying by household cleaners…kidding not kidding), I chanced upon an ad that grabbed my attention for a lot longer than a second–a true marketer’s dream, indeed. “First the cookie. Then taking on new adventures.” The picture underneath was of a blissfully in love African-American couple, who appeared to be riding a bicycle with a wicker basket in front. Idyllic; check. Perhaps the French country-side…or Portlandia would have been apropos settings.

Innocuous enough, yet I was thoroughly perplexed by this ad. What do cookies have to do with new adventures!? A confusion-causing conflation!

On a practical level, yes, one probably needs to fuel one’s body for new adventures. I, for one, however, would not plan my vacation adventures around the presence or lack thereof of cookies. Clearly, I am in the “I Threw It On The Ground” minority!

The cookie ad was for DoubleTree by Hilton hotels and it has yielded some pretty sweet results for the chain. DoubleTree has been giving a warm chocolate chip cookie to every guest upon check-in since 1986. “At DoubleTree by Hilton, we believe that no matter where you are or what you are doing, cookies have the power to make you smile. It’s the reason we’ve welcomed guests with a warm chocolate chip cookie for more than 25 years,” said John Greenleaf, global head, DoubleTree by Hilton.

The cookies are so popular that one can even order them online. For May 15, the National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (yes, there is such a holiday!), DoubleTree gave a cookie to anyone who visited a hotel, with or without a reservation.

Ketchum has been the PR brains behind this sweet reward-reaping program, generating an ever-evolving campaign that included things like a Cookie Careavan, which traveled country-wide and various impression-yielding hashtags like #cookiecare and “Where in The World is the DoubleTree Cookie?” Facebook campaign. In 2012, there was the “tell-me tree,” where people could tweet the things they most want to get when traveling using the #littlethings hashtag.

What is the confection connection? Why is this campaign so successful?Are cookies really that important to people when traveling!?

“It’s something that seems to transcend all cultures — a chocolate chip cookie,” according to John Greenleaf, the global head of DoubleTree. Consumers look at DoubleTree’s signature cookies as a symbol of the brand’s “care” culture.

No matter how poor or how superb a guest felt about a particular DoubleTree Hotel, s/he often talked about the cookies.

Apparently, this is one small touch that yielded no small crumbs for DoubleTree by Hilton.

The Production Of Value–What Happens When Banksy Roils The Art World’s Waters Yet Again

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Last Sunday, a booth appeared in Central Park selling “signed, 100% original” Banksy pieces at $60 each. Banksy is currently “on residency in New York”; his work is popping up in his trademark spectacularly subversive fashion–a creepy stuffed animal “slaughterhouse delivery truck” in the Meat Packing District, for one.

Art collectors loudly bemoaned the fact that they missed the chance to acquire the much-coveted pieces that routinely fetch six figures at a ridiculously discounted price. And Banksy, as he is wont to do, got to make fun of the idea of what constitutes art and the pretentiousness of the “art market,” where value is conferred by exclusivity. Would we recognize art if it is not labeled as such? And what happens when graffiti, an art form that in its very execution flies in the face of concepts such as ownership and private space, gets a price tag and starts participating in the very machine it seeks to obviate?
Banksy might as well be one of the world’s most reluctant “successful gallery artists.” The Sunday Central Park stunt was a spectacle, a performance art piece like the many he has done before, and it flew in the face of the notion that exclusivity confers value. Sure, Banksy is now, willingly or inadvertently, in the business of selling rebellion. But that doesn’t mean that taking the “art world’s” money has caused him to sell out. Sunday’s stunt was Banksy’s thumbing his nose at the fact that we need art critics to tell us what art is and how much it is worth. Banksy has often made fun of the elitism, pretentiousness, and outright absurdity of the curating art and placing it in a museum. The art market, like any other capitalist cultural reproduction tool, works to equate ownership of art with culture and the mark of the “cultured,” as James Clifford explored in his seminal article On Collecting Art and Culture.
 According to the video from last Sunday, more than four hours passed before the first sale was made, to a customer who bargained to get two paintings for $60. Later, a woman from New Zealand bought two. Finally, a man from Chicago stopped and said, “I just need something for the walls” of his new place. He bought four. 8 paintings sold in total.
In other words, if it is not labeled as such, would we know a Banksy? Does knowing that it is a Banksy somehow raise the value of the art just because it is now branded and hence ownable and usable as an identifiable and identity-conferring status symbol? Does art’s subjectivity not mesh particularly well with its object-ivity? You tell us.

A Geography Of Internet Popularity: Popular Sites On A World Map

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Researchers Mark Graham and Stefano De Stabbata, at the Oxford Internet Institute, mapped the most visited sites in different parts of the world. The map shows each nation’s most popular website, with size of the nations modified to reflect the number of Internet users there. Google’s domination is almost universal, reigning in North America, Europe, and parts of South Asia. Facebook, the world’s most popular site, is most popular in North Africa, parts of the Middle East, and the Pacific coast of South America. Yet, even in those countries, Google still retains the second spot. As De Stabbata and Graham explain, “Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google).”

Baidu domines China and some neighboring countries. Noteworthy, Yahoo is top in Japan and Taiwan, perhaps in part to its longstanding partnership with Japan’s SoftBank and its purchase of Wretch, the Taiwanese social media site, which Yahoo is shutting down at the end of this year.
Yandex, a search engine, is Russia’s most popular site.
The countries where Google is the most visited website account for half of the entire Internet population, with over one billion people. Thanks to the large Internet population of China and South Korea (more than half a billion users), Baidu is second in this rank, and Facebook, with 280 million users, places third.
DeStabbata and Graham suggest that “the territories carved out now will have important implications for which companies end up controlling how we communicate and access information for many years to come.”

Dunbar’s Number–Why Your 1000+ Friend-Having Friends on Facebook Are Really *Not* Paying You Any Mind

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Revolutionary evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has the answer to the question of how many friends do you need. The Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University earned the coveted honor of having a number named after him when he posited that 150 is the number of people we can maintain a meaningful social connection with.
Robin Dunbar arrived at that number by conducting a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the British. Amongst some of the findings of the study were that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The chief finding, however, was the number of cards sent out always seemed to converge around the number 150. Over the past two decades, he and other researchers have arrived at 150 as the magical Pi-like number of social relationships. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” Dunbar explains. “Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
Dunbar’s work has been of tremendous interest to social media architects who initially conjectured that this number could very easily climb in the baseball-card-version-of-friends world of Facebook and its ilk. Facebook conducted research on this: while the median friend count on Facebook is 100, for most people (84%), the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count. “Facebook has muddied the waters by calling them all friends, but really they are not,” Dunbar states. He regards Facebook’s main impact on social circles as an ability to preserve long-standing or long-distance friendships that might otherwise decay rapidly. The downside, he suggests, is hanging onto old and remote friendships prevents us from making new non-remote ones: “Since friends exist to be shoulders to cry on (metaphorically speaking!) and shoulders that are physically remote aren’t much use for crying on, this might not be ideal.”
The scope of Dunbar’s work is significantly larger than the rather reductionistic concept of 150 and he has continued to conduct research and expand his study of human social interaction. And while Dunbar’s number has been critiqued, it has managed to withstand the test of replication, remaining relevant event  two decades later ( for example, research conducted in 2011 on Twitter found the average number of people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200). Dunbar agrees that people have different social networks for different purposes, but he qualified the term “friend” as a person we have an emotional connection with, independent of his/her utility to us: “Someone like your boss, or the person you borrow $50 from to pay the drug dealer, these people are meaningful in your life, but they’re not meaningful to you as relationships.”
The ultimate question remains not how many friends one can have on Facebook but how many friends one actually pays mind and heed to. As Dunbar explains, “Yes, I can find out what you had for breakfast from your Tweet, but can I really get to know you better? These digital developments help us keep in touch, when in the past a relationship might just have died; but in the end, we actually have to get together to make a relationship work.” Dunbar was first inspired to conduct this sort of research when he examined the grooming patterns of apes–what differentiated the humans was not just brain size but, much more importantly, the capacity for language. This capacity, funnily enough, is what is hyper developed in the world of social networking, yet Dunbar would argue words are hardly the glue of a strong emotional bond. Real meaningful interaction, research shows, still remains face-based and not word or baseball-card-collection-based.