In honor of All Hallow's Eve, aka Halloween, combined with the giant skull craze (that's the craze which is giant, not the skull), I thought I'd share with you a few spooky items on the market.
Each adorned in some capacity with a skull.
That's 74 different things with skulls on them. Seventy-four.
From clothes, to pillows to chocolates.
For people, pets, babies and burning.
Click on the item of your choice above to learn more about it and for a link for purchase.
New versions of WOKmedia's ‘Made in China’ series of furniture.
The work, featuring traditional Chinese furniture embedded with hand-carved wooden toys and finished in white lacquer, is a result of their extended stay in China as part of a collaboration with Contrasts Gallery of Shanghai.
This series of work debuted at Design Miami last December.
They describe it as "Seemingly innocent children toys act as a kind of space invaders emerging from a world hidden inside our childhood memories. Specifically invading antique Chinese furniture, starting to threaten their traditional past."
and as "Revealing a surreal and terrifying landscape of derailed trains, drowning babies, crashing planes and wild dinosaurs."
Limited edition series of WOKmedia's ‘Made in China’ collection.
Each piece is unique, featuring traditional Chinese furniture embedded with hand-carved wooden toys and finished in white lacquer.
above: ‘GRR’
above: ‘BOW-WOW’
Above: ‘BOO-HOO’
Above: ‘CLANK’
Who is WOKmedia?
Shanghai Production
WOKmedia
Rujin Road 500 (South)
Shanghai
Wood floors or carpet?
Why choose one when you can have a carpet that looks like a wood floor?
Here are 6 different examples by six different designers.
In vinyl. Or silk. Or leather. Or hand-tufted wool.
Click on the above rug for more information and a link to purchase.
prices vary wildly.
See more of my Fancy Friggen Flooring & Radical Rugs list at ThisNext.
Art Farm
(Fortune) -- It's not just the Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500) shopper who's feeling pinched.
Worried about the health of the economy, affluent shoppers are increasingly thinking twice before splurging on new handbags or designer clothing, analysts and industry executives say. Their hesitation is sending ripples of concern through the lower rungs of the luxury market once thought impervious to a slowdown.
Nordstrom (Charts, Fortune 500) and Coach (Charts) are among the upscale companies that have warned of weaker-than-expected sales in recent weeks, suggesting that the heady growth of recent years may finally be hitting a wall of consumer anxiety tied to a topsy-turvy stock market and a mortgage crisis that is threatening to engulf the middle class.
Pam Danziger, the founder of Unity Marketing who interviews 1,000 consumers every three months for her luxury tracking study, said that the "mass affluent," or those with household incomes $75,000 to $150,000, curtailed luxury purchases by 20 percent in the most recent quarter. "That's the biggest drop we've seen since we started collecting this data in 2004," Danziger said.
If the slowdown continues, luxury retailers could be hard hit. To appeal to a broader demographic, companies from Tiffany to Valentino have courted mass affluent shoppers with new lines at lower prices. The mass affluent account for 23 percent of households, compared to less than 2 percent for those with incomes upwards of $250,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
These households, with incomes of $75,000 to $150,000, make up 23 percent of the population, and it's "the marginally wealthy who are feeling a bit less well off," said Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a research group that studies behavioral habits of the rich.
Even the rosiest scenarios expect luxury sales, which now total $226 billion worldwide, to slow slightly from the torrid pace of recent years. Bain & Co. predicts nominal sales growth of 7 percent to 9 percent, slightly less than the 9 percent growth of 2006. At the same time, much of that growth is now coming from emerging markets in India and China, not from the United States.
"While it would be inaccurate to say there is a major slowdown, the luxury market has cooled a bit from the peak levels we had seen," said Stephen Sadove, chief executive of Saks (Charts).
Sadove pointed to a strong correlation between luxury shoppers and the stock market, particularly among men. "In early September, when there was turmoil in the markets, we saw slower sales in our men's business, though it has since bounced back," he said.
Coach spooked investors on Tuesday when it said it was seeing fewer than expected shoppers in stores in California, Florida and the Northeast. The company is a bellwether for the mass affluent, having helped create the category when it reinvented itself several years ago as a status brand minus the sticker shock.
After years of double-digit sales growth, Coach investors are beginning to worry about a slowdown. The stock is off 32 percent in the past six months. As of midday, the shares were trading at $36.88, near their 52-week low of $36.15.
Above: chart shows COACH stock price history for the past 6 months
Though still priced well below designer handbags, Coach has quietly gotten more expensive, a fact that may make it "less accessible to a certain demographic challenged by higher fuel costs and lower housing values," wrote Todd Slater of Lazard Capital Markets in a research note yesterday. Slater estimates that the average Coach bag has seen a price increase of 30 percent over the last few years, with $400 handbags now accounting for a quarter of the company's overall sales.
Another retailer that has courted the mass affluent shopper is Nordstrom. The company recently cut its third quarter earnings guidance after September sales came in below plan and inventory piled up on store shelves. Michael Boyd, a spokesman, said women's apparel was among the weaker areas, although sales of designer clothing and handbags remained strong. Nordstrom shares are also trading near their 52-week low of $37.80.
To be sure, not all luxury retailers are feeling the pain. As Danziger noted, the super rich continue to snap up $20,000 Louis Vuitton handbags and $200,000 Cartier watches. And Cartier's parent, Swiss luxury goods firm Compagnie Financiere Richemont, which recently reported a 20 percent sales increase at its specialty watch division, said its biggest concern was not a softening economy, but its ability to keep up with demand.
Above: 2007 Louis Vuitton magazine ad with Scarlett Johanssen & handbag bearing their signature monogram
While there have been signs of softness at the lower end of the luxury spectrum, analysts disagree over how much of it is the result of tighter purse strings versus unusually warm weather, which keep shoppers away from malls.
"I don't see a big change in spending for households with income of $100,000 and above," said Michael Silverstein, a senior vice president with the Boston Consulting Group and co-author of "Trading Up: The New American Luxury," which chronicles how middle class buying habits have shifted to more upscale products.
Silverstein points out that, despite the recent market roller coaster, stocks are still buoyant, unemployment is low and corporate profits are at record levels. All three factors should keep the mass affluent spending, he says.
But other observers warn that those on the cusp of real wealth may not prove quite so resilient.
"To think that this customer is immune to the ups and downs of the economy is simply not correct," said Danziger, of Unity Marketing. "They may not be defaulting on their mortgages, but there's a good chance their homes are not worth as much as they were last year - and as a result they don't feel as rich." 
Sky HD, the high def digital TV service of the UK has come out with a series of limited edition designer boxes by five hot UK designers
Five different styles by five different designers, you can enter to win one, or buy one now.
Designs by Basso & Brooke, Giles Deacon, Preen, Gareth Pugh, and Jonathan Saunders
Nicholas Lovegrove and Demian Repucci have come up with this fun and funky twist on traditional delft dinnerware.
In the classic blue and white, gritty new york imagery and graffiti pepper the porcelain plates, making a wonderfully modern version of classic Delft porcelain.
Above: detail
New York Delft Tableware
The classic tradition of Dutch Delft craftsmanship hits the streets of New York City. Presenting the ‘New York Delft’ Porcelain dinnerware collection. Each place setting is made of fine porcelain and has five pieces; a dinner plate, side plate, soup bowl, cup and saucer. Sold as a set. Or, cups and saucer sets at lovegrove repucci.com
And it comes with different claddings (the surround) so it can suit your interior.
Above: The Stûv in white
How it works
The Stûv 21 makes use of a simple law of physics : natural combustion : air circulates in a double wall (1) around the hearth, heats up and escapes through purpose-built vents (2). One can also route some of that hot air to an adjacent room. So there is no fan, no noise, no risk of a breakdown, no electrical connection. The glass door remains clear : the air required for combustion sweeps the inner face (3) and prevents soot from making it dirty.
Integration into a low volume
Partial raising of the glass door allows the Stûv 21 to be integrated into a low horizontal space.
Limiting the travel of the glass door means the hearth height can be reduced by 15 to 25 cm depending on the model, and the stove can then be inserted into a low horizontal volume and thus break away from the traditional vertical shape.
It can also be inserted into an old fireplace.
Two research firms that track the computer market said last week that Apple would move into third place in the United States behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell on Monday, when it reports product shipments in the fiscal fourth quarter as part of its earnings announcement.
“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a telephone interview last week. “It is outpacing the industry.”
On Friday, Apple will start selling the new Leopard version of its OS X operating system, which has a range of features that in some cases match those in Windows Vista and in others surpass them.
Mr. Jobs said that Leopard would anchor a schedule of product upgrades that could continue for as long as a decade.
Above: The apple site has a live count-down until the release of the anxiously-awaited Leopard Operating System
“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”
That pace suggests that Apple will continue to move more quickly than Microsoft, which took almost seven years between the release of its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.
Vista has had mixed reviews, and corporate sales have been slow so far. Mr. Jobs declined to comment on Microsoft’s troubles with Vista, beyond noting that he thought Leopard was a better value. While there are multiple editions of Vista with different features at different prices, the top being the Ultimate edition, Apple has set a single price of $129 for Leopard.
With Leopard, Mr. Jobs joked, “everybody gets the Ultimate edition and it sells for 129 bucks, and if you go on Amazon and look at the Ultimate edition of Vista, it sells for 250 bucks.”
Microsoft has said that it will release an update, or service pack, for Vista in the first quarter of 2008. But it has also said that it intends to offer a service pack for Windows XP in the first half of the year. That, analysts said, could further delay adoption of Vista as computer users wait to see how XP will be improved.
Microsoft has also hinted that its next operating system, code-named Windows 7, would not arrive until 2010. At Apple’s current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then.
Apple has not been flawless in its execution. Early this year, it delayed the introduction of Leopard for four months. Mr. Jobs attributed this at the time to the company’s need to move programming development resources to an iPhone version of the OS X operating system.
Several analysts said they thought that Leopard would have only an indirect effect on Macintosh sales.
As for Vista, it has clearly not pushed up demand for new PCs as much as computer makers hoped. Last week, the research firm Gartner said PC shipments in the United States grew only 4.7 percent in the third quarter, below its projection of 6.7 percent.
That contrasted sharply with Apple’s projected results for the quarter. Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on expected shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1 percent share of the domestic market.
Apple has outpaced its rivals in the United States, particularly in the shift to portable computers. While this is the first year that laptops have made up more than 50 percent of computer sales in this country, Mr. Jobs said that two-thirds of Apple machines sold in the United States are now laptops.
Apple has also outperformed rivals in terms of market share by revenue, because its machines are generally more expensive.
According to Charles Wolf, who tracks the personal computer market in his industry newsletter Wolf Bytes, Apple’s share of home PC revenue in the United States has jumped in the last four quarters. In the second quarter, for example, the Macintosh captured a 15.8 percent share, almost double its share of the number of units sold.
He added that Apple had a significant opportunity now in terms of visitors to its stores. Apple is now reporting 100 million annual visitors, and Mr. Wolf estimated that 60 million to 70 million of them were Windows users drawn by the iPod or the iPhone, who could potentially shift to Macs.
Above: A typical in-mall apple store
Although Apple may be able to grow briskly by taking Windows customers from Microsoft, the two companies face a similar problem: the industry is maturing and there have been no obvious radical innovations to jump-start growth.
Indeed, many of the new features in the Leopard operating system version are incremental improvements. But Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.
“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.
He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.
In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.
Above: Apple's iphone
There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.
The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.
“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”
Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury
oct 8, 2007 - oct 8, 2007
The first logo (seen above) by Smart Design was simply the capital letters NYC, followed by slightly higher capital letters spelling TAXI. The words were set in a custom typeface based loosely on the computer-generated block letters once found on driver’s licenses. Smart Design moved the fare information panel from the front door to the rear door, where passengers were more likely to see it, and added a pictogram showing a person hailing a cab. It moved the medallion number to the rear of the cab, also to improve its visibility and added a streaming trail of rectangles to recall the historical Checker.
Bump No. 1 occurred when city officials said that the all-type logo was not flashy enough. Trying again (above), the designers placed a bold T set in the middle of a black circle, something evocative of public transit. (Particularly if you’re from Boston.) Davin Stowell, the chief executive of Smart Design, recalled the concept. “Let’s make it iconic and big,” he said. “Everybody knows what it is. You don’t need the words.”
Bump No. 2 occurred when it dawned on city officials that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority intended to use the T designation for the future Second Avenue subway. Lest any confusion arise, Smart Design was asked to restore the words to a prominent position in the logo, which now had the original “NYC” and “AXI,” flanking a shrunken version of the T in a black circle.
Bump No. 3 occurred when NYC & Company, the city’s official marketing and tourism organization, unveiled its own NYC logo, a bulky ligature designed by Wolff Olins. “A number of agencies have incorporated it,” said Matthew Kelly, a spokesman for the Bloomberg administration. “That consistency is good from a customer service perspective and we plan to continue broadening its use.” With that, Wolff Olins’s NYC was substituted for Smart Design’s NYC. And the new taxi logo was born.
If Mr. Stowell is disappointed in the hybrid result, he doesn’t let on publicly. Speaking of the mission to elevate the design quality of the yellow cab, he said, “I still feel good that we raised the bar significantly from where it was.”
Following are the taxi logo critiques from eight designers invited by the NY Times to critique:
Michael Bierut, Pentagram
“I think the content is all very sound and I agree with virtually every decision made in the editing and organization of the fare panel, from the elimination of the headline TAXI FARE (it is on a taxi, after all) to the simplification of the fare structure.
“I have to admit, the form is more of a problem for me. I am a little confused by the overall aesthetic of the new graphic, which seems to be intentionally crude and lumpy, more Checker than Crown Vic, I guess. There is also a blunted trailing off of the other checker pattern which seems particularly halfhearted to me. And that attempt to combine the NYC logo which is being used elsewhere with T in a circle (why?) and that (again) bluntly rounded off and oddly-spaced A-X-I just seems a little ham handed. Maybe it looked good on paper, but I don’t find it convincing on the side of a cab.
“For all that, though, these are all deliberate decisions. So someone clearly designed it, which is a cause for applause.”
Michael Rock, 2×4
“I think that an essential aspect of New York is the brutal juxtaposition of the rough and the smooth, the professional and the amateur. The yellow cab was always the perfect embodiment of that sensibility: it was an essentially an open-source, D.I.Y. corporate identity in that almost any four-doored car, simply painted yellow and stenciled on the door, could became an integral part of the whole. The beauty of the system was its almost ridiculous simplicity. This attempt to professionalize the image of taxi ends up just another incongruous element in a system that defies professionalization.
“Any attempt I made to do it would suffer the same fate. I would just bring back the stencil.”
Oscar Bjarnason, Systm
“First impressions: I like the fact that they are trying to make the T in a circle an emblem of some kind. A bit like the subway signs. Would be a good move to have something simple that you could just see for one second on the move and think, ‘Taxi.’
“Having said that, there could be some misunderstanding when the Second Avenue subway line opens. That line will use the letter T. Maybe not a problem but maybe something to look into.
“The first thing that I saw when looking at the new logo was ‘NYC AXI.’ The T got lost somehow. The T and AXI are too separated for my taste. The NYC letters seem a bit to bold and straight and not in line with the rest. NYC is sharp and pointy. T AXI is smooth and soft. I know that NYC is some official New York City logo but I don’t think it goes well with the T AXI type. Maybe the idea is that T AXI drives smoothly through the rough city. But all of this makes the whole thing a bit complicated.
“I see on the Smart Design Web site that the NYC type was different from what is used now. I’d guess they changed it due to some New York brand issues but in my opinion the NYC T AXI looks better as it is on their site.
“Conclusion: I’d go with something simple. Maybe a typographic solution with some hint of the new NYC logo embedded.
“In my opinion, you don’t need to have the NYC logo on the cars as well to make something that should be simple more confusing. A simple type that you read instantly and the yellow cars should be iconic enough.”Sam Potts, Sam Potts, Inc.
“A few observations about the official logo from a designer’s p.o.v.:
“It’s really three parts that don’t relate, either conceptually or formally (or spatially or typographically).
“The central T is obviously a reference to the subway — too obviously if you ask me — but that is strategically a mistake, as the T.L.C. is separate from the M.T.A. Why equate them visually?
“To have the ‘NYC’ touch is, to me, poor craftsmanship, especially with such a blocky typeface. Additionally, as this goes whizzing by, clumped-together letters just get clumpier.
“Having said that, my first reaction to this was, ‘There’s a logo for the taxis?’ In fact, the logo is a secondary element in the branding of the taxis — I imagine very few notice the logo but everyone knows what the yellow signifies. I’d even say that the Crown Vic is a more powerful brand identifier (in the parlance) than whatever logo they had or adopted.”
you can see Mr. Potts Alternative designs here.
Jonathan Corum, a graphics editor at The New York Times
“New York City taxis have long displayed three pieces of information: a list of fares, the words ‘NYC TAXI’ and the medallion number.
“The most prominent feature of the new design is a large, awkward ‘NYC (T)AXI’ — everyone knows it’s a New York City taxi, so there’s no need to shout it. There’s also no need to have every taxi look the same.
“My proposed redesign would highlight the most important piece of information: the medallion number. Encouraging riders to remember (or at least notice) the number of their cab is a simple and cheap public safety measure, and would likely speed the return of lost property. A large medallion number would also be much more legible at a distance, or when the cab is moving.”
Rob Giampietro, Giampietro + Smith
“The new NYC TAXI logo is ugly and unsuccessful. Before I get to why, however, we should all be grateful that none of its many contributors Smart Design, the Taxi and Limousine Commission or New York & Company and their designers at Wolff Olins considered changing the taxi’s signature yellow color. The reason cuts to the heart of what actually constitutes a taxi’s ‘identity’ and what doesn’t. An identity is something we use to identify something out in the world. McDonald’s golden arches help us to identify the fast food chain from the highway. The fact that it’s a McDonald’s of Greater Cincinnati isn’t really part of its identity. We probably know we’re in Cincinnati and all we care about is getting something to eat.
“The idea of a logo for NYC TAXI fails along the same lines. It’s an NYC TAXI because it’s yellow and we hail it in New York. It’s not an NYC TAXI because it says NYC TAXI on it, no matter what form those letters might take. Many designers, if faced with this brief, would question the need for this particular logo in the first place. The logo probably matters more to the Taxi and Limousine Commission as a sign of driver compliance than it does to people hailing a cab. It’s secondary to the customer’s experience, so its placement, size, and form should indicate as much.
“Still, the logo exists, and merits a more visual critique. Its committee of designers must have discussed the legibility of the logo from across the street moving at high speeds, and they have seemingly addressed this problem by making the letters NYC TAXI bolder. Here the new logo fails again. The design of highway signage has shown that legibility from a distance depends on the spaces inside letters remaining as open as possible. The upper floor of an A or twin bowls of a B shrink as we move further back and continue to shrink as these letters are made bolder. In the worst case, letters become more like blobs, each indistinguishable from the next, and this happens to a certain degree in the NYC TAXI logo.
“What helps us find bold text in a field of unbolded text is the change in tone from light to dark. On highway signs and taxicab liveries, where there are very few words and none of them unbolded, boldness doesn’t help it hurts. The yellow color is bold so the letters in the logo needn’t be.
to read the article in its' entirety, click here.
Design: Meike van Schijndel for Bathroom Mania.
'Kisses!' is the first Bathroom Mania! product that is for sale! The urinal is engineered to European standards; please review the specifications to ensure the urinal can be installed at your location.
Two variants are available: a top- and a wall-inlet. Check to see which variant meets your wishes best.
Worldwide delivery has started and the first owners all say: Kisses looks fantastic!
Material: Ceramic.
Colours: Red, White and Salmon.
Dimensions: +/- 380x415x600mm (wxdxh)
Inlet: EU 35mm, back- and top inlet available.
Outlet: 50mm, outlet will be inside the urinal and can be connected to both a back- as well as a bottom-siphon.
In A Rogue’s Gallery, MARIA E. PIÑERES captures an eerily doll-like Michael Jackson and a seemingly helpless Lizzie Grubman among many others. All are depicted in the police station after the initial brush with the law, yet before the indignant publicist denials and the ensuing round of post-release talk show appearances. In her new work, PIÑERES goes one step further from her previous series. Homespun grandmotherly needlework, already turned on its ear, is taken into the world of stars which have crashed and burned, darkly glowing through the atmosphere, onto the decidedly non-lunar surface of central booking.
Above: Sid Vicious
Both the dazed Nick Nolte and snarling Sid Vicious are given true VIP treatment: vertical diptychs featuring kaleidoscopic serial imagery of their respective mug shots with hallucinogenic multicolored backgrounds—a conscious mirror image of the windmills of her iconic subjects’ addled minds. We see a variety of emotions in these faces, rather then blank slates: guilt or embarrassment sometimes, but, more often, defiance, smugness, sweetness and, most often, rebelliousness.
Above: Bobby Brown
This is PIÑERES’ second one-person exhibition in New York. Her work has been shown in one-person and group exhibitions at DCKT Contemporary and, recently, in group shows at both Sara Meltzer Gallery and John Connelly Presents.
Above: Little Kim
above: Eminem, 2004
Consumer behavior as a route to effective marketing was a central focus of the largest gathering ever of an influential trade organization.
The 1,200 people who attended the 97th annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, held here from Thursday through yesterday, heard speaker after speaker address the growing popularity of what is known as behavioral targeting, as opposed to basing pitches on consumer attitudes, opinions or perceptions.
The ability of new media to monitor what consumers are doing — like keeping track of which Web sites they visit — is fueling the interest in behavioral targeting. Several speakers also described how they were using traditional media to more precisely aim advertising at consumers based on behavior, through steps like tailored television commercials.
The Microsoft Corporation is investing in “well-targeted advertising,” said Steven A. Ballmer, chief executive, “as aggressively as we’ve ever invested in anything.” Its acquisitions include the $6 billion purchase in August of aQuantive, a leader in online advertising.
“What’s the joke about the egg and bacon breakfast, ‘Who’s more committed, the pig or the chicken?’” he added. “We’re the pig at the breakfast; we’re committed to the future of digital advertising.”
Rather than fearing the arrival of technology companies like Microsoft into the ad business, Mr. Ballmer said, marketers ought to realize “there’s an exciting future for all of us.”
“The more we know about customer behavior, the more every ad is relevant,” he added, and relevance improves the chances that a consumer will pay attention to an ad.
For example, as more TV sets are “fed with intelligent signals that come over the Internet,” Mr. Ballmer said, advertisers will be able to deliver personalized marketing messages based on online searches. The fact that his wife has been searching online for tile for their beach house could lead to a commercial for Italian tile turning up amid the beer and car spots as they watch TV sports together on a Sunday afternoon, he said.
A commercial like that would not typically be expected during a Seahawks game, he added, “but it’s in context — not in the context of the show, but in the context of her behavior.”
Roger W. Adams, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Home Depot, described how his company regarded its Web site as “a learning laboratory” as it spent more time and money “on understanding our customer better.”
One finding was that “the underlying component of the emotional connection to the brand is the power of ‘I did it,’” he added, “as the ownership of your home becomes very personal because you created something” after buying materials for do-it-yourself projects at a Home Depot store.
“We’re experimenting with a lot of behavioral targeting, online and offline,” Mr. Adams said in an interview after his speech, in moving away from a “one size fits all” approach using ads in mass media like TV and print.
As a retailer, he added, Home Depot has the advantage of access to “individual customer purchase history” as it seeks to customize ads.
“There are different messages in different media for different consumers,” Mr. Adams said. “It’s incredibly complex, but that’s the way it is.”
For instance, he said, Home Depot has achieved positive returns by segmenting its campaigns for the Hispanic market, creating ads for “acculturated Hispanics” — those who are second- or third-generation Americans — that differ from ads for consumers who almost always speak Spanish.
Robert C. Lachky, executive vice president for global industry development and chief creative officer at Anheuser-Busch, discussed in an interview how his company, like Home Depot, is segmenting its customers.
Anheuser-Busch is taking “a bit of a deeper dive,” he added, going beyond factors like age, gender and ethnicity to aim at customers through “use occasions.”
For example, a beer drinker might order a domestic light beer while watching a baseball game at a sports bar and a full-flavor import while on a date at a nice restaurant.
Anheuser-Busch sought to tap into the power of the Internet this year with an ambitious online project that offered entertainment programming at a Web site named bud.tv. But visitor traffic fell far below initial predictions, and the content is being rethought.
The programming “had nothing to do with our brands,” Mr. Lachky said during his speech. “Branded content is what the consumer wants, and it’s what we’ll use that space for.”
For example, a video clip called “Swear Jar,” which was recently added to the Web site (and is shown below), shows how a company’s employees start to enthusiastically lace their conversations with obscenities after learning that the money being collected every time they curse will go to “buy something for the office, like a case of Bud Light.”
The previous highest turnout for the association’s annual conference was last year, when nearly 1,000 people attended. The sharp gains since 2002, when attendance bottomed out at around 250, followed a change in leadership at the association, which has 400 member companies, and the recruitment of widely known speakers from giant companies.
•
This year, the roster also included Wendy Clark, senior vice president for advertising at AT&T; James R. Stengel, global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble; and Al Gore.
Mr. Gore spoke on Saturday, a day after he learned he would share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on raising awareness about climate change. But his speech was not about global warming, politics or the awards he has received, which include an Emmy and an Oscar.
Rather, Mr. Gore, who was greeted with a standing ovation, wore his hat as the chairman and co-founder, with Joel Hyatt, of Current TV, a cable network and Web sites (current.tv and current.com) that offer younger viewers the chance to create programming and commercials.
Mr. Gore played for the audience examples of Current TV programs and “V-Cams,” or viewer-created advertising messages, for sponsors like L’Oréal, Sony, T-Mobile and Toyota.
Mr. Gore was invited months ago to address the conference, which carried the theme “Transforming the Marketing Landscape.”
Still, said Robert D. Liodice, president and chief executive of the association, it was Mr. Gore’s choice to stick with his speech, titled “Consumer-Generated Media: The New Marketing Paradigm,” rather than discuss global warming or the Nobel Prize. The four questions Mr. Gore answered after his remarks were also limited to marketing.
Forgive me George, because I will forever be a fan of your slat bench, the Nelson Platform Bench, as it's formally known.
However, Simply Italian's maple and stainless steel legged slat bench is clearly an hommage to yours with a few proportion and material differences. (manufactured by Cumin).
And they did a pretty darn nice job.
This has got to be up there with the weirdest items on the market.
For $853 USD you can wear this 'nose necklace' around your neck and actually put it on and look like Bozo with a gold nose.
Hmmmm...
The Associated Press
PARIS -- Intruders entered the Orsay Museum early Sunday and punched a hole in a renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, "Le Pont d'Argenteuil,'' the French Culture Minister said.
A surveillance camera caught a group entering the museum, located on the Left Bank of the French capital along the Seine River and housing a major collection of Impressionist artists like Monet.
An alarm sounded and the group left, but not before damaging the painting, an aide to Culture Minister Christine Albanel said by telephone.
No arrests were immediately made.
Albanel told France-Info radio that the painting could be restored, but she deplored what she said was an attack on "our memory, our heritage.''
"This splendid Monet painting (was) punched right in the middle,'' the minister said with emotion.
According to the aide, a 10-centimetre tear was made in the Monet, perhaps with a fist. The official, not authorized to speak publicly of the matter, asked not to be named.
It was not immediately clear how many people were in the group that broke into the museum.
Monet led the 19th century Impressionist movement, experimenting notably with light and colour in works now deemed priceless.
"Le Pont d'Argenteuil'' shows a view of the Seine at a rural bend, featuring a bridge and boats.
Albanel told France-Info that she would doubtless seek improved security in museums and stronger sanctions against those who desecrate art. "This is not tolerable,'' she said.
The break-in occurred as Paris held its annual all-night festival, which brings thousands of people into the streets for music, exhibits and fun.
Above: A nearly 4-inch tear is seen in renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, "Le Pont d'Argenteuil," at the Orsay Museum in Paris.
These projects were selected following a workshop run by Alexis Georgacopoulos, head of the Industrial Design department of the ECAL, and Augustin Scott de Martinville, a professor at the ECAL.
“The idea initially was to look again at the traditional image of porcelain, which tends to be associated with tableware, by integrating it in different ways into the day-to-day environment,” explains Alexis Georgacopoulos. Students rose to the challenge by designing a range of varied and original objects: finely sculpted dominoes, a vase consisting of stacked plates, a chandelier with eight hundred small porcelain discs exploiting the material’s transparency, an enamelled cone in which to enjoy an ice-cream, four vases transformed into loudspeakers around an ingenious acoustic system… With humour, elegance, poetry and bravado, each piece questions lifestyles while subtly integrating the manufacturing constraints of porcelain.
The mission of the Fondation d’entreprise Bernardaud, set up in 2003 by Michel Bernardaud, is to renew the way porcelain is perceived. Based in Limoges, it invites designers of all nationalities from around the globe to re-invent this material, to generate bold interactions, to explore new territory and ultimately to find new uses for this material. “We have been delighted with this collaboration which combines innovation and know-how and greatly appreciated the fact that the ECAL, one of the most prestigious design schools, wished to conduct a study of this still largely unappreciated material…” explains Hélène Huret, the Fondation’s director.
“Carte Blanche”
Private viewing was Tuesday 17 April 2007 from 7pm “Au Grand Hôtel et de Milan”,
Sala Verdi, (1st floor), via Manzoni 29, 20121 Milan.
Exhibition ran from 18 to 22 April 2007 (11am to 8pm).
This exhibition is supported by the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO) and the Economic Development unit of the Vaud Canton
High-definition images available from the sites www.ecal.ch or www.bernardaud.fr, and on CD-ROM on request.
Information:
Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne
4, avenue de l’Elysée
CH-1006 Lausanne
Tel +41 (0)21 316 99 33
Fax +41 (0)21 616 39 91
E-mail pierre.keller@ecal.ch
Web www.ecal.ch
Apparently, the Passion Pictures animation studio ripped off kozyndan's after requesting samples of their work and never called them back. Dan just wrote me an email about it to confirm that this is pretty much the story, at least from their side.
I hear this happens often in advertising, but that doesn't make it fucking right. I guess it's not Sony's fault, but they should at least get their money back or get Passion Pictures to give a fair chunk to the artists. I'm pissed and not sure what I, or anyone else can do about it. Thoughts? [Passion Pictures vs KozyNDan]
Why does that new Bravia ad look so familiar? Oh, right... KozyNDan did it years ago.
Here's what they say:
Its hard to think that people at Passion Pictures did not have this early panoramic of ours in mind when they created this new spot for the SONY Bravia line.
To add insult to injury, someone from Passion Pictures contacted us almost two years ago asking to see samples of our work (including this panoramic) as they were interested in working with us. We sent them samples and then heard nothing from them ever again. (It should be noted though, that the more likely culprit is the ad firm who hired Passion Pictures, Fallon.)
Still, its a clever ad.
Related: the original Bunny Tsunami for Giant Robot
It's not like KozyNDan are so outside of mainstream media that nobody would eventually notice. I still love the ad, but this certainly takes some of the magic away. I've seen it happen so many times at big agencies - there is little regard for the line between inspiration and flat-out plagiarism, and often a complete lack of conscience or even understanding why it's wrong. (Some people call it "business", but psychiatrists call this kind of behavior "psychopathy".)
And comments from Kozyndan himself.
Wanna look tough?
Like an ex-felon or gang member without permanently marring your skin?
Or without the pain of having a needle repeatedly pierce your knuckles?
Then get these gloves that have love and hate tattooed on the knuckles for you!
Then when the cops show up, you can just take them off and voila! Back to your old, non-gang-member self.
By William Warren for Design Against Trend
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