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Six Apart buys Apperceptive and announces an advertising network for bloggers in order to diversify their offerings.
The idea for SA is to move beyond an increasingly commoditized blog publishing software business, and into adding advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies.
Update: Here’s more from Six Apart on the changes.
The Droste effect is when a product’s packaging features the packaging itself.
At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals. This particular phenomenon, known as the “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process — (and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator) — were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package with in a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.
(via andre)
Spine tingling “The World is Just Awesome” advertisement for the Discovery Channel. (via avenues)
Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple commercial = drunk Jeff Goldblum. “Internet? I’d say Internet.” Great stuff, indeed. (via cynical-c)
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash’s original concept for the commercial is clever:
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums — camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it’s such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
(via truehoop)
Or, “with all the dogmatism of brevity”, Ogilvy & Mather show us how to create advertising that sells. (via coudal)
Update: The link to the image was being blocked so I fixed it by pointing to a local copy.
Update: This post is now fifth when you google “Alison Stokke”. (thx, jack)
The NY Times launches TimesMachine, an alternate look into their vast online archive. It’s basically an interface into every single page of the newspaper from Sep 18, 1851 to Dec 30, 1922. The advertising on these old pages is fascinating.
Update: For whatever reason, the Times has taken TimesMachine offline.
Paula Scher argues that the design of advertising has gotten a lot better in recent years but that the graphic design community isn’t paying too much attention.
I’m not sure that the graphic design community as a whole is paying any attention to this. I don’t see very many speakers from the advertising community invited to speak at design conferences (except for the very few who lead branding groups at agencies and in some circles they are still considered the enemy). I don’t read about it on design blogs, and I’m not seeing books published about it. I’m not seeing advertising, in any form, turn up in any design museum exhibitions, not at the Modern, not at the Cooper-Hewitt. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has an annual designer award category for Communication Design and I’ve never seen an advertising person nominated since the award’s inception.
(via quipsologies)
Nice TV ad for the Madrid Metro…a view of the city from underground.
Duncan Watts’ research is challenging the theory that a small group of influential people are responsible for triggering trends as explained in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one—and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”
I’ve previously covered some of what Clive talks about in the article.
Gelf Magazine, curators of always-entertaining Blurb Racket, list their picks for the worst blurbs used by movie advertisements in 2007. For instance, in reference to Live Free or Die Hard, film critic Jack Mathews actually said “the action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon” but was quoted by 20th Century Fox as saying that the movie was “hysterically … entertaining”.
Posters and billboards modified to look as though the people in them have been decapitated. (thx, colossus)
An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner. While you digest the awesomeness of that, it’s interesting to note how consistent Apple has been under Steve Jobs in their message and approach…the emphasis on non-traditional business uses of computers in the Lisa ad and the whole iLife philosophy go together quite well. (via the house next door)
Dave Winer’s perceptive comments on the future of advertising:
Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. There’s little point in saying something until the time is right, then you just have to say it once, and the idea takes over and does all the work.
That sounds overly optimistic to me but there’s definitely something of substance there.
Remember Dove’s Evolution video of a fashion model going from drab to fabulous with the help of makeup and Photoshop? They’ve got a new video out called Onslaught in which we see the barrage of images that are directed at young girls each day. BTW, Dove’s parent company makes all sorts of products that may contibute to the problem that Dove is attacking here. (via debbie millman)
No more Times Select. The NY Times finally admits what everyone else knew two years ago and stops charging for their content. Additionally, all content from 1987 to the present and from 1851 to 1922 will be offered free of charge.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com.
How did that change not happen for the Times when it happened to the entire rest of the web 3-4 years ago?
Goldenfiddle’s got the new Wes Anderson-directed AT&T commercials.
Photos of a 7-11 set up as a Kwik-E-Mart to promote the Simpsons Movie. (thx, jon)
Cute ad for Deutsche Post…two envelopes playing Pong with a heart.
Digg policies from Lifehacker and Gizmodo, which state that the only Digg-worthy posts of theirs are those with “original content, new reporting, treatment, or photos” because “it’s not fair when we get the Digg for someone else’s work.” This seems inconsistent on the part of Gawker Media. One of their main innovations (if you’d like to call it that) regarding the blog format was the idea of linking to things in such a way that readers don’t need to actually leave the site to get the full (or nearly full) story. Why let all those readers (and the associated ad revenue) go to some other site to read the story…they might never return. Due in part to Gawker’s influence as first mover in the pro blog space, this practice is unfortunately standard procedure for most similar blogs.
The difference between marketing, PR, branding, and advertising.
Nice micro-movie/commercial for VW. A YouTube version is also available (with poorer video and audio quality).
Big-seed marketing. Instead of relying purely on viral marketing or mass media marketing alone, big-seed marketing combines the two approaches so that a large initial audience spreads the marketing message to a secondary audience, yielding more overall interest than either approach would have by itself, even if the message isn’t that contagious. “Because big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread.”
Update: Full paper with data is here. (via atomiq)
Children 8-12 years old view an average of 21 TV commercials for food. 2-7 year-olds view about 12 ads per day. (via 3qd)
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