November 9, 2010
“Mr. Downey was chosen to speak for Mr. Peanut, Mr. Wixom said, because of his ‘everyman suaveness,’ adding that the actor has ‘a voice that could wear the top hat, monocle and cane and still feel contemporary and cool.’”
Mr. Peanut’s New Look? Planters Went Old School - NYTimes.com
High praise. Or something.
August 28, 2009
April 1, 2009
Holy shit, Facebook KNOWS ME. Must be that mention of “trance” I made on Twitter today. Guess it’s thumbs up for the rave/orgy then. In Ukraine. This is right on so many levels!
UPDATE: Just realized this is an ad for this Vice TV show. Suddenly I feel less amused, and more… targeted. I just blogged an ad. You win this time, multi-headed lifestyle marketing borg.
March 26, 2009
This is how the modern music industry works. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee for monetization. All you can do is become ‘followable’ and possibly ‘respected’/’critically acclaimed’, but that does not mean you have earned the right to ‘deserve to get paid for it.’
I have mixed feelings about this guy (he seems like a douche / he seems fairly bright) but this image and this paragraph are kinda on the money. It gets into some of the same ambiguity and unquantifiable-ness I was talking about regarding music videos, the “meme” economy being a big part of why people are still making them at this point. We’re all just trying to hold people’s attention really, and hoping everything will flow from there. Then again, that’s pretty much what marketing has always been, right?
February 4, 2009
Just got the new XLR8R in the mail and YIKES. Talk about smothering your content with advertising. That looks painful!
That said, the bigger-than-the-magazine ad-free Vis-Ed accompanying this issue is pretty great. Guess you gotta pay to play.
December 11, 2008
click opera - Notes on the Marketing Personality →
“I think we all have to recognize the Marketing Personality as at least a partially-accurate description of who and how we are. It’s certainly drummed into self-employed people that we have to market ourselves as a commodity in competition with other commodities (in other words, people). The faddy changes of my adolescent hero, David Bowie, could be seen as endless product re-launches, vampiric re-vamps of a fading brand. I’ve certainly marketed myself cannily over the years, and may even be doing it right now.”
July 25, 2008
My Boho Career
At one point living a bohemian life meant embracing failure, squandering the opportunities and privileges of your class background, a deliberate self-impoverishment that rejected the conventional ideas of wealth and success in favour of spiritual and aesthetic riches.
Now certain aspects of bohemianism—a life dedicated to aestheticism, exquisite sensations, “experiences”, the exotic; a systematic derangement of the senses; an unstructured and de-routinized lifestyle—have become compatible with an essentially affluent and careerist existence.
Very interesting points here. I’d say that change might have some connection to the rise of lifestyle marketing, and the fact being incredibly hip is now a marketable skill, and can feasibly lead to making buttloads of money. I seem to recall a story in this book in which a Williamsburg hipster sells the jeans he’s been wearing every day — without washing, for years — to Levi’s, so they can clone them. Strange times.
