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I saw this awesome image last week on Buzzfeed, and I (of course) immediately thought of digital marketing stuff.
As far as I can tell, on the internet, this is a brand’s best case scenario.
You’re this big, beautiful, slightly terrifying beast. Do something cool so your fans want to give you a high-five. And naturally, return the favor.
Photo by Marco Queral.
Not a whole lot to say about this, other than that I need to read more David Foster Wallace. I suppose what makes this interesting is that digital things are giving us an even clearer lens into populations that we previously didn’t know much about. And it’s a reminder that primary sources are the real stuff; watered-down prognostications from the marketing department (in this case, the television media) aren’t always to be heeded.
“It’s not just the athletic artistry that compels interest in tennis at the professional level. It’s also what this level requires — what it’s taken for the 100th-ranked player in the world to get there, what it takes to stay, what it would take to rise even higher against other men who’ve paid the same price he’s paid.
“Bismarck’s epigram about diplomacy and sausage applies also to the way we Americans seem to feel about professional athletes. We revere athletic excellence, competitive success. And it’s more than attention we pay; we pay; we vote with our wallets. We’ll spend large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we’ll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.
“But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll pay lip service to these sacrifices — we’ll invoke lush cliches about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the privations, the prefight celibacy, etc. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think.
“Note the way ‘up-close and personal profiles’ of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life— outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.”
Via this blog, via Truehoop, from a collection of essays called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”. Note to self: this is what a real writer sounds like.
I’m totally in love with this new music video by Wieden + Kennedy Portland, on behalf of Foot Locker and Nike. So many brands have turned to hip-hop to get their message across, but very few have done it so well and with such a nuanced, layered approach. The actual song isn’t half bad; when you’re not dealing with professional rappers, there’s no better style than early ’90s rap. The rhythm’s slower, and the emphasis is more on delivery than vocabulary/verbal trickery. And getting an actual producer from the era (DJ Quik) never hurts. Durant, Lewis, Williams and Iguodala actually sound pretty decent. I’m not a big fan of the print, but the music video’s pretty fly, and I dig the message: play with style.
Nice work, W+K.
First, one I saw outside Equinox this very morning. It’s a Cinelli Vigorelli, cut from Columbus Aluminum. It’s a bad-ass track-only frame. Here it’s been kitted for the street with a vintage Campy crank, Velocity Deep V rims laced to Phil Wood hubs, and white-painted stem and handlebar. Thoroughly modern save the crank. In my eyes, this is at the pinnacle of street-machine cool. It’s like a cafe racer: stripped down from its full race shape, capable of high speeds and certainly not really built for NYC streets. Very cool.
Next, the 2010 BMC SLR. Hot. Photo yanked from CyclingNews. BMC has also teamed up with Hublot recently to create the following, the “All Black” bike.
This is quite literally bicycle pornography.
And then there’s this concept bike, from Seattle-based design company Teague. They sought to re-think the idea of a commuter bike, complete with style, function, and an understanding of what makes bikes great already. Thus, it’s not over-complicated in its approach, looks great, and probably would live up to its billing in real life. The main triangle is a C-channel, which would trap water on rainy commutes. I’m not sure how stiff it could be, but with enough money it could definitely be made rigid with today’s composite technologies. And while I’m not yet sold on integrated electronics, they’re becoming a reality in the ProTour peloton, so I suppose we’ll see them trickling down to our everyday bikes. Pretty cool stuff. Check out their paper on it here to see all their design thinking.
Jon Kolko – Design Synthesis from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
Definitely worth a watch.
I found this just after I moved to NYC as I was traipsing about the design-related portion of the internet, and found it plainly fascinating. I’m trying to use it to help me frame “What I Do” so that I might explain it better to others. I’ve always had a difficult time (a) understanding exactly what the process is that I follow, mentally and (b) trying to explain that to others. Currently, my job is less about process than it is about output (yay!), but I can envision a time when that might not be the case and/or I’d like to help some junior people step up their game. It’d make good blog fodder at the very least.
If you don’t have 20 minutes to watch the video, here’s a brief overview. Mr. Kolko, if you’re out there reading this, and I’m wrong, please help me out:
These concepts are fairly self-evident and sometimes purely mental, but if you’re like me, you’re always looking for ways to introduce rigor into your personal creativity. By practicing Insight Combination (following the steps, doing the work, etc.), I imagine I could become a bit more consistent in my work product.
I suppose the thing I found most interesting was the idea of “abductive reasoning“, whereby our minds take two seemingly disparate experiences/data points and attempt to form a logical connection, in this case with the goal of creating an idea. This is pretty commonplace within the creative industries, as we’re constantly pushing ourselves (and being pushed) to innovate upon a previous campaign/effort/site/ad/whatever. Deductive reasoning would tell us to do only that which was successful previously, or only those things that have been successful for similar products marketed to similar consumers.
I hope to write a bit more on this topic. Any thoughts on this? Do you guys out there use formal creative processes, or do you just let it happen? I’m curious.
I love this. And not just because I love Ice Cube (see below, where my cousin painted ‘Cube on my aunt & uncle’s living room wall) but also for the production quality, the ease-of-use and general look of the site, and their plainly awesome embeddable player. I am a big ‘ol sucker for little details.
EDIT: Just wanted to also mention that I love just how CALIFORNIA the P-Rod ad is. Love it. If you wanna hate on LA, go out there and drive around on a summer day with that song playing. Drive down the 110, drive to Santa Monica, whatever. And then tell me how you feel. Those are some of my best memories.
Nice work, Adam. Nice work, Nike.
It’s a directly proportional relationship. Let’s all not talk about the same things at once, shall we?
Kevin and Karen Panke Wedding Extra-Vaganza from guambomb on Vimeo.
The fine video work of Mr. Eric Camacho. Such a rad wedding. Lots of sweet moments in the video. Nice work, E.
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I hate to be a malcontent, especially given that this is ostensibly a marketing blog, but this sort of thing is about a million times more interesting than the marketing drivel that gets posted to the web every day. I honestly couldn’t care a whole lot less about most of the thinly guised “Self-Help for Social Networks” that I see with increasing frequency, and I don’t think I could care much more about the science behind what’s going on in this video. Humans have some interesting pre-installed software in their heads.
Via Jason Oke.