BigShinyThing

A master class in targeting. Hoxton bar Dreambagsjaguarshoes loans out its bar as a media space to promote major studio films to the very demographic that frequents it. Other times of the year the bar hosts art exhibitions but when cult films like Donnie Darko and comic book adaptation Sin City are released, the bar provides the perfect space to market them. This doesn’t just entail tacking up a few posters, the entire space is given over to the look and feel of the movie: walls are painted with artwork and sculptures of major characters loom at the bar.

Photo courtesy of Cluster.

A month after I posted this, the owner of dreambagsjaguarshoes, Teresa Letchford, was profiled in The Observer. She sees her portfolio of businesses (her and her partner also own a fashion boutique and coffee shop up the road called No One) as ” … a live magazine - complete with fashion, film and social pages.”

Ad agency apes street art by stencilling ads around ‘hot’ areas in London like Old Street to promote a Brazilian liquor.

Street artists notice — mainly due to posts of the ‘graffiti’ on street art sites like Wooster Collective and blogs like The Londonist). A BBC2 documentary, ‘Inside Saatchi and Saatchi’, which showed the making of the campaign might have alerted them too…

Street artists expose agency’s lame attempt at nicking their look and paint over/paper over the images. Gain coverage in The Times.

Read and learn:

‘Saatchi Tags London with Fake Art to Hawk Brazilian Liquor’

There’s a lovely irony in graffiti artists ‘tidying up’ advertising by papering over it. Or by crossing it out (see picture). The Saatchi’s image is also exposed by the fact that it doesn’t actually say anything — it’s just a stylised picture of the Christ. Compare it to, say, street art by Banksy which always expresses something — more often than not deeply political.

Time magazine are trying to pull a similiar stunt in New York at the moment, watched with increasing amusement by Gawker.

The single version of that vile Crazy Frog ringtone is set to top the UK charts this week, outselling the previous favourite for the top spot Coldplay by as much as four to one, according to HMV.

The surge in sales for Crazy Frog means it will eclipse Coldplay’s ‘Speed of Sound’, the first single from their long-awaited third album ‘XY’, as well as remove Oasis from the top spot with ‘Lyla’ their single from forthcoming album ‘Don’t Believe the Truth’.

Gennaro Castaldo, spokesman for HMV, said:

Music purists might not be too happy at the prospect of the Crazy Frog outselling Coldplay, but it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise when you consider its huge novelty appeal and the massive amount of exposure it’s currently getting.

Last week, it emerged that the television ad of the ringtone had drawn more than 400 complaints from viewers who found it too irritating. But while adults might find Crazy Frog intensely annoying, children and teenagers have embraced it.

Gut Records, which is releasing the single in the UK, says it has already received 400,000 orders.

Since its launch, the Crazy Frog ringtone has been downloaded by more than 1m people in the UK and has made around £10m for the firm behind it, Jamster.

The tone’s inventor Erik Wernquist, 32, confesses in today’s Daily Star that he hates Crazy Frog.

Erik came up with the character after hearing the distinctive “bding-ding-ding” noise on the internet, where 17-year-old Daniel Malmedahl had posted his weird imitation of a two-stroke moped.

Erik got in touch with Daniel, created the character and featured it on his website - where it was spotted by Jamster and turned into a mobile phone ringtone.

He said:

Some people obviously think this thing is worth paying for. I don’t. I would never have it on my phone. I wouldn’t have it anywhere near me. If it came on TV, I would turn it off. Even before it went on the website, I began to hate myself.

And Erik says it’s not even supposed to be a frog:

Some German ringtone people decided to call it that. It’s not a frog, it’s a guy. An annoying guy.

More than 120 cats now perform at the Moscow-based Kuklachev Cat Theatre which was started more than 25 years ago. The cats perform six different plays, in six separate weekend shows. Each one last about two hours and the tickets cost about $2. After each show, children (who constitute the main audience) are invited to visit the numerous kittens recently born in the theatre. If their parents agree, a child can adopt one.

Says Kuklachev:

Cats are the most astonishing animals I have even known. It’s impossible to force them to do anything. Each has its own personality and you must work with that.

He claims that each play is tailored to the cats’ individual talents and interests: “I observe them, play with them, and they show me what they feel like doing. All of that is what we make the performance from.”

This is me.Big Shiny Thing is a website of weird/interesting/inspirational STUFF gleaned from the street, the web, and good old fashioned print media. Its first role in life was to inspire the creative and planning people at advertising agency HHCL/Red Cell but we set it free on the World Wide Web… You may find it a little London-centric but it’s where I live.

This is the first post.

“Little Girl with Dead Leaves” (1946), was the first ever image recorded by French photographer Edouard Boubat. Fifty years later Boubat said, “I sometimes walk through the Jardin de Luxembourg [again] and I have never seen another little girl dressed in dead leaves.”

This is old news, but i think that Don Chavey is a bit of a marketing genius and the kind that we need.

Looking for all the world like a 1970s porn star, Mr Chavey is the founder of American Apparel. Based on downtown LA, the label sells cotton basics with a strong ethical message. It advertises its products with a high profile pseudo porno (there’s that word again) campaign featuring Chavey and some of his employees.

Key to the American Apparel ethic is the fact that all of the clothes are made in LA, ’sweatshop free’. Sounds like a nice idea but not mass market. Think again. American Apparel has over four thousand employees and has stores in 11 national and 9 international retail locations. Stores are currently opening in 12 cities including Paris, Boston, Chicago, Miami, and San Diego

The company’s mission statement is as follows:

American Apparel is a vertically integrated manufacturer, distributor and retailer of T-shirts and related products. All of our garments are cut and sewn at our 800,000-square-foot facility in downtown Los Angeles.

We are trying to rediscover the essence of classic products like the basic T-shirt, once an icon of Western culture and freedom. Our goal is to make garments that people love to wear without having to rely on cheap labor.

Every aspect of the production of our garments, from the knitting of the fabric to the photography of the product, is done in-house. By consolidating this entire process, we are able to pursue efficiencies that other companies cannot because of their overreliance on outsourcing.

Our downtown Los Angeles factory, now considered the largest sewn-products facility in the United States, is a design lab where creative ideas, efficient manufacturing techniques, and concepts for designing and selling T-shirts are developed and put to the test. The challenge for companies like American Apparel is to establish new ways of doing business that are efficient and profitable without exploiting workers.

While apparel is a universal necessity that transcends almost all cultural and socioeconomic boundaries, most garments are made in exploitative settings. We hope to break this paradigm.

.

UPDATE: We don’t like American Apparel anymore.

The site explains:

Recently relocated from Venice, the Nomadic Museum, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, creates a 45,000-sq.-ft. space from the multi-colored steel shipping containers and recycled paper tubes — used to make the roof.

‘Ashes and Snow’ a multi-media exhibit by artist Gregory Colbert, opens on March 5 in the Nomadic Museum and runs through June 6. The exhibit includes 199 large-scale photographs and a one-hour 35-mm film edited by Oscar winner Pietro Scalia and narrated by actor Lawrence Fishburne

The area known as Kuba first emerged in the late 1960s as a neighbourhood of safe houses in Istanbul. Few people can actually tell you where Kuba is: some Istanbul residents say that it lies in the southern part of the city whilst others doubt that it still exists. Today Kuba comprises a few hundred makeshift clapboard homes that continue to be occupied by nonconformists of diverse ethical, religion and political persuasion united by their opposition to state control

Kutlug Altaman spent over two years exploring Kuba, mapping its physical and pyschological terrain through the lives of forty inhabitants whose stories form the content of his latest artwork. Each tell their story via the simple medium of a television and a dvd, speaking at once in various locations, on a journey which will take them around the world before returning home

From March 2005 the Kuba community’s home has been the derelict sorting office on London’s New Oxford Street which closed in 1995. After London, Kuba will travel to a railway station in Stuttgart, down the Danube toVienna and disembark at a passenger ferry terminal on Circular Quay in Sydney before returning to Istanbul in 2006

In a fantastic example of really taking art to the community, some members of Kuba have been doing a bit of outreach. Soner, Bahri, Emine, Kadriye, IIhan, Makbule, Haklan and Zubeyde have recently left the Sorting Office and travelled to Liverpool Street, Kings Cross, Hackney and West Ham. As seen above, one of the members is currently installed in Dalston Oxfam.

This idea of journey art (as opposed to art exhibitions that merely tour around the place) is also seen in the ‘Nomadic Museum’ which is docked at New York’s Pier 54 at the moment

Kuba is curated by Artangel, who are also behind Longplayer.org

The trial offers another form of alert if a customer has been outbid on an item. When this happens, a flashing text message appears on TV reminding the bidder to resubmit another offer via their computer.

Not news to those of us who are already sad enough to have outbid texts sent to our mobiles but hey. And still doesn’t solve the problem of having to high tail it to the nearest computer before someone else gets that sought-after pair of 70s rollerskate shoes.

It does remind me of the inspired eBay reality TV show, featuring the back stories from items traded. Sadly, it seems to have disappeared with Ebay resorting to trad TV advertising, at least in this market.

The full Mediaweek story is here.

Emusic is for the trainspotters who can’t find their favourite stuff on Napster. The service features low rates (the basic subscription works out to 25 cents per track), high bitrate MP3s (196 kbps instead of the standard 128) that will play on any MP3 player and a 600,000 track selection of music from independent labels

Salon (day pass/registration required) reports that the service has recently got hold of the back catalogue of Sun Records (no Elvis but no great loss eh) including classic tracks by Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins. It also has music writers on the site plus this week’s ‘up and coming section’ features M.i.a. (also not on Napster)

The BBC is to recruit 5,000 homes in the UK to participate in the first trial of its Interactive Media Player or iMP. The only stipulation will be that recipients have high speed internet access.

The corporation calls its service the ‘iTunes for the broadcast industry’ as it allows viewers to download any show from the previous week that they may have missed. Unlike PVRs like Sky+, viewers will not have to signal their chosen programmes in advance, allowing critically acclaimed shows to benefit retrospectively from favourable publicity or word of mouth.

Even more excitingly, the BBC is developing the service alongside the Creative Archive, which aims to make the corporation’s huge library of classic shows available for download. It will plans to keep costs down by taking advantage of peer to peer technology to distribute the content. Instead of storing the material itself, those who sign up will share the weight of the downloads among themselves. Inbuilt digital rights management software ensured that users cannot keep the programmes for longer than seven days, transfer them to disk or send them to friends. It remains to be seen how hacker-proof this will be.

The BBC’s interactive radio player is already live and adds millions to the radio division’s listening figures. Some shows, such as Radio 1’s Essential Selection, have as many ‘catch up’ listeners online as they do broadcast live.

The BBC was burned earlier this year by the trend for illegally downloading shows when the first episode of Doctor Who became available on Bittorrent. Conspiracy theorists suggest that the leak was a deliberate attempt to build hype and credibility for the show.

While live sporting events, popular reality tv shows (though clearly not Celebrity Love Island) and soaps still attract big audiences, broadcasters are expecting viewers to ‘time shift’ more and more programmes and watch them on demand.

There are currently over seven million UK homes with broadband whilst companies such as Microsoft are developing new devices that merge home computers with plasma screen TVs. This would solve the problem of viewers desiring HDTV versions of programming.

BBC executives are already terming the IMP service ‘martini media’ in that it gives the audience the opportunity to consume content ‘any time, any place, anywhere’. It is also perfectly fulfills the BBC’s remit as a public service broadcaster and may well see it yet survive in the age of media convergence.

Maya Arulpragasam (aka Missing In Action) is a 28 year old Sri Lankan who arrived in the UK aged 8 as a political refugee. Her (estranged) father is the founding member of the militant Tamil Ealam Revolutionary Organisation of Students. Prior to her music career she was a successful painter designing album covers for the likes of Elastica. Her album Arular is out now and she graces the cover of i-D magazine this month. She says:

England is great if you’re rich, if you belong there, you can breath through your Bentleys all day every day and never see anything and it’s beautiful. But if you fall under that line you’re fucked. No matter who you are - you can have a nine to five or you can be the local crack dealer but you’re all equally fucked and a huge amount of the population fall under that line and they don’t have that joy in their life. I’ve seen it and it’s getting worse and worse. I wanna know, can we have a better deal? That’s all it is. How do you bring more joy into people’s lives? You have to make your own happiness.

I want the kids who work in call centres to have some fun! I’ve worked in a call centre. They don’t let you be you. They don’t let you have a personality. Every human being’s got the hugest potential. You are capable of doing whatever you want. Why not rip up this country into some shape? Otherwise, what’s our generation gonna have achieved? Why not do it? What have we got to lose?

The brilliant looks-like-it-cost-a-fiver video for Galang is here.

For a global collection of walls with stuff written/drawn on see pictures of walls

New 2D bar codes can hold much more information than coventional ones which are capable of storing about 20 alphanumeric characters. QR code, developed by a Japanese company in 1994, can hold up to 7,089 numeric characters, 4,286 alphanumeric characters and even 1,817 Kanji Chinese characters and full-width Japanese Kana characters in just one symbol. DoCoMo developed its first bar reading phone in 2003 and claims there are now about 20 million phones which are bar reading enabled.

According to DoCoMo:

Food traceability involves putting the address of production history information in bar code form and printing it on foodstuff labels. Consumers check this information by reading the bar code with a bar code reading mobile phone, thereby obtaining the name of the producer, the harvester date, shipping date and so on. In this way, the consumer gets to know immediately the route a certain item of food to get where it is, and can purchase it with peace of mind.

When the service was introduced, it was welcomed by consumers with comments such as ‘I’m glad I can check on the use of agricultural chemicals,’ and ‘It puts me at ease to know who the producer is.’ The system also drew comments from the producer side, such as, ‘Now we are being scrutinized by our customers, we have to make sure our food products have better than ever quality.’

Posted on smartmobs. The science bit is here.

Adweek reports that “As many as 6 million U.S. adults have listened to a podcast,according to a new survey, giving hope that the fledgling technology could catch on with a broader market

Podcasts are downloadable radio programs, often distributed through Really Simple Syndication feeds that can be transferred to digital music players like iPods. Podcasts act as the audio equivalent of blogs, allowing users an easy way to broadcast and share content. According to survey of 2,200 U.S. adults conducted by the Pew Internet American Life Project, about 6 million said they downloaded a podcast

In Pew’s poll, 11 percent of respondents said they owned an MP3 player, putting the total U.S. ownership at 22 million. Of those with MP3 players, 29 percent reported listening to a podcast. Pew said the survey has a 7.5 percent margin of error. The poll found podcast listeners more likely to be young: nearly half of those between 18 and 28 said they downloaded podcasts, compared to about 20 percent of those over 29″

Advertising Age reports that condom maker Durex are already taking advantage of the regulation-free medium as a way of advertising to teens

Gawker have published the press release:

“Beyond the Lemonade Stand is an advice book for children ages 8-12 who are looking to get ahead. It will offer guidelines on how to be successful, ethical, and profitable in business. The book will also contain anecdotes from business leaders, ‘Apprentice’ cast members, and business-savvy kids who all lend guidance to business-minded children already thinking of how to make money, money, money, money.

Middle graders are extremely interested in learning how to make money and with Rancic’s knowledge and celebrity appeal, he is a great role model to children looking for the formula to success in business.”

Meanwhile, in the UK, The Guardian newspaper has employed Apprentice runner up Saira Khan to boost its circulation - the article is here.

The smallprint reads

“Dear reader: our circulation director wants us to try what she’s calling a ‘grassroots marketing campaign.’ Here’s what you need to do. Make some photocopies of this page. Cut slits between the tabs at the bottom. Then, display or distribute the poster in places like corner stores, bathroom stalls, laundromats, beauty parlors, university libraries, stuffed in other magazines, bookstores, health clubs, supermarkets, community stores, phone booths, subway cars, windshields, lunch rooms, video arcades, and telephone poles.”

So go on then…

View the commercial here and ‘cancel’ install language pack to save time and chose the mediaplayer option

A material created for use in disaster relief, inflatable concrete makes a robust and durable concrete shelter for disaster relief are combined within a plastic sack

The sacks can be easily transported to the necessary location. Water is added to the sack on site and the plastic inner can then be inflated to create a shelter. The concrete mix covering the inner sets in 4 hours leaving a structure that has a 15 year life-span, keeping cool during the day and retaining heat through the night

Try to ignore the purpose of these photos (ad running under this poor deer says ‘what would you pay for a good knife?’) and just enjoy the doomed wildlife close up.

Eric Kessels (of ad agency KesselsKramer) has made a book of them entitled ‘In Almost Every Picture’.