BigShinyThing

Not long after the 911 attacks, the US Government initiated a new research agency — the Information Awareness Office (IAO), to fund projects in advanced surveillance, including what came to be known as Total Information Awareness (TIA), a program so controversial that it was soon quietly scrapped.
Controversial? No-one seemed to anticipate that a secretish government project aimed at ‘total’ surveillance might make US citizens a bit twitchy. Hence, one assumes, no-one thought twice about the spectacularly Masonic identity chosen for the IAO. The logo was finally pulled, with the following explanation taking in its place on their website:

[...]because the IAO logo has become a lightning rod and is needlessly diverting time and attention from the critical tasks of executing that office’s mission effectively and openly, we have decided to discontinue the use of the original logo.

The original logo of course lives on in the hearts and minds of conspiracy theorists everywhere…

This blog post about how Paris Hilton rose to global fame is so perceptive that we’re just going block quote it.

Here is a copy of what Paris said after her recent arrest for DUI.

“I had one margarita (and) was starving because I had not eaten all day,” she said. “Maybe I was speeding a little bit and I got pulled over. I was just really hungry and I wanted to have an In-N-Out Burger.”

Did you notice that?

If not read it again and think.

See it now? (the unpaid product placement).

That’s the real reason Paris Hilton is really famous. Because she is the queen of links.

When Paris first came on the scene with her own user generated sex video she used that attention to create a career. Here’s how she did it.

Though she hired a publisist to get her on Page 6 She never really talked about herself. She talked about other people. She would mention the designers of her clothes, the club she was going to, who made the sweater for her dog, all without any guarantee of any return. She just threw out links.

It didn’t take long for designers and club owners to realize that Paris Hilton was a walking billboard. So they embraced her. She paid attention to them, so they paid attention to her.

The most valuable commodity today is attention. And there are many ways to get it. From sex videos to stupid pet tricks to talking bad about Muslims. The real trick is what you do with it once you have it.

What makes Paris brilliant is that she used the attention she had and gave it to others thereby garning more attention for herself. And it’s been profitable.

Here’s what’s amusing to me though.

Whenever she tries to promote herself, it falls flat. Books, records, movies, etc. don’t work for Paris. Because she’s actually a platform. Like Digg and YouTube.

Paris Hilton has gotten so good at garnering attention for others people are now using the fact that she doesn’t visit as a marketing tool.

In a world where any attention is valuable Paris can’t lose.

So, if we stop paying attention to her — and we’re all complicit, from Perez Hilton to Banksy — maybe, just maybe, she’ll go away.

From Chartreuse via WOW.

If you click the TMX tag things start to get a little sinister. YouTube should look into getting a link straight through to TMX Elmo - 10 Year Anniversary on Amazon…

With thanks to Andrew who is clearly Very Busy.

We’ve said before that the corporations and content owners who will survive in the convergence age are the ones that set their content free to proliferate. Warner Music have today demonstrated that they utterly understand this. As Warner proudly exclaim on their press release:

Warner Music Group becomes the first media company to embrace power of user-generated content. YouTube to deliver innovative new architecture to help media companies harness the financial potential of user-generated content.

What Warner have done is hand over all their entire library of music videos as well as behind-the-scenes footage, artist interviews, original programming and other formerly proprietary content. In doing this Warner have given YouTube users creative carte blanche with both the footage and their music catalogue to remix, mess up and distribute as they please. WMG has thus become the first music company to exploit YouTube as a distribution channel — as the press release goes on to state:

More importantly, [Warner] becomes the first global media company to broadly embrace the power and creativity of user-generated content through a wide-ranging agreement with the category leader, enabling its artists to connect with a vast new audience in an entirely new way.

So far so thrilling. But how (I hear WPP, Viacom, Fox et al cry) does anyone — the artists, Warner, YouTube — plan to make money out of this? Here’s the science bit:

WMG will have the opportunity to authorize the use of its content by the YouTube community by taking advantage of YouTube’s advanced content identification and royalty reporting system, set for release by the end of the year. YouTube and WMG will share revenue from advertising both on WMG’s music videos and user uploaded videos that incorporate audio and audiovisual works from WMG’s catalogue. WMG’s music video library and special artist content will be made available simultaneously with the launch of YouTube’s content identification and royalty reporting system.

Some guy who runs the company, with a nice turn of phrase which we plan to nick, adds:

Technology is changing entertainment, and Warner Music is embracing that innovation. Consumer-empowering destinations like YouTube have created a two-way dialogue that will transform entertainment and media forever. As user-generated content becomes more prevalent, this kind of partnership will allow music fans to celebrate the music of their favourite artists, enable artists to reach consumers in new ways, and ensure that copyright holders and artists are fairly compensated.

We wish Microsoft and Viacom all the best in playing catch up.

You’re a media empire but you’re losing hearts and minds to the blogsophere particularly in that ripe and juicy segment of the media known as gossip. You were used to breaking all the celebrity news (after all you had a direct ‘in’ to their people) but now bloggers like Perez Hilton are beating you to it. What do you do? Get your video-paparazzi (the secret weapon) and follow every d and z-lister until you get a money shot. And boy does it work. You even broke the Mel Gibson/anti-semitic drunken outburst story. Now those fiendish bloggers are linking to you and everything is right with the world. For now.

Our current clip of choice? DD-lister Tara Reid gets denied entry to a club whilst Paris Hilton glides by. Watch and marvel. Note to TMZ though. You need to get with the clip culture and give us a nice bit of hackable code (a la YouTube).

Almost 80% of the young people who took part in the research said they felt safer having a mobile and that they had a better social life as a result. On average, participants said that they send or receive up to 10 text messages a day — three times more than their parents.

The research forms part of the Carphone Warehouse’s Mobile Life Survey, which asked over 16,000 people about the role of mobile phones in their lives.

Other stuff that we found interesting in the report:

• For people 18-24 years old, their mobile phone matters more to them than television suggesting that the ad industry had better crack on with marketing via mobiles and content owners need to continue to explore stuff like mobisodes.
• When asked if they have ever used, or would consider using, the camera or video facility on their mobile phone to snap a celebrity [behaviour that is actively encouraged by gossip mags and blogs] or other newsworthy event, more than a third said they would. Half of people said they would use the camera or video facility on their phone to record evidence of a crime, 50%, or to actually record a crime, 47%. Because of this, mobile phones are rapidly becoming society’s self-inflicted panopticon. Sod worrying about who’s watching the watchmen, we’re too busy watching [and recording] each other.

Story courtesy of the BBC.

What with all the ruckus over ‘fat’ models and terrorism-chic shoots, we thought we’d celebrate New York fashion week with another fashion silliness: models falling over. In our arse-over-tit gallery, some poor girl for Proenza Schouler this week and an iconic collapse, mobile phone warrior Naomi Campbell for Vivienne Westwood ten years earlier.

And — as we mentioned earlier — the bloggers have certainly earnt their keep at New York fashion week. Whilst the Proenza Schouler tumble has been airbrushed out of American Vogue online, blogger gloat has given the label a nice little spike on Technorati: see below for a graph which shows the number of blog posts that contain "proenza Schouler" per day for the last 30 days.

With apologies to Einsturzende Neubauten.

There’s the snatched inteview with Anna Wintour on Almostgirl’s blog and our favourite-bloggers-in the-world-ever, the Fug girls, reviewing the collections for New York magazine. Now the Wall Street Journal has noticed that bloggers are ‘in’ this season. And it’s all above board (or ‘under the tent’ in WSJ’s parlance). About 40 bloggers have been given press passes by IMG, the company that runs New York Fashion Week, and according to Vice President of IMG Fern Mallis, “it’s an evolving category”.

No kidding. Back in the day [other industries take note] the fashion industry would have repelled all borders against the blog contingent, who hardly engage in the endless advertiser-kowtowing that the glossies have come to be defined by. Now the fashion houses — and in particular the poorer, smaller companies — have woken up to the marketing opportunity that such blogs represent. Plus there’s the simple fact that this year there are 191 shows in New York, up 25% from five years ago, and the mainstream press can’t or won’t cover them all. Julie Fredrickson of Coutorture has a nice interview with Cathy Horyn of the New York Times which explains how the whole ‘bloggers do fashion week’ deal came about.

The fashion houses have also got strategic. Alison Brod, a New York publicist who represents designer Jill Stuart, now has an employee focusing exclusively on blogs, tracking their impact on sales, among other things. Meanwhile a year-old company called Glam Media plans to launch a new fashion blog-ranking system which will use criteria such as ‘most viewed’. ‘most linked to’ and ‘most commented on’ to discern which are the A-list fashion blogs out there.

As always, some people are canny enough to know exactly where their fans are. Jay McCarroll, winner of Bravo’s reality series Project Runway, has invited fan blog BloggingProjectRunway to report on his first fashion week show.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that those pesky bloggers will write anything nice/positive/commercially viable about the shows that they attend. If indeed they write about the clothes at all. No matter. As long as the show (and by association the brand) is being written about at all, Job Done.

Note. Don’t expect to see this happening in Milan/Paris any time soon.

Photo of journalist and blogger banned from the Jeremy Scott show, Patty Huntington, courtesy of her paper, Sydney Morning Herald, via Gawker.

Hackney council has been awarded £300,000 in damages after filing a suit for copyright theft against Nike. Back in May we wrote about how the sportswear giant had appropriated the city council’s logo without permission for a range of sportswear.

The payout is based on a percentage of global sales figures for the range, which included trainers, footballs and T-shirts. Nike has apologised and has also agreed to pay Hackney borough’s legal costs as part of the agreement announced today.

Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, described it as a “great result” for the council.

“This is extra money to spend on sports activities in Hackney, and shows that it was worth standing up to Nike,” Pipe said.

This was always about more than cash — there is a serious principle at stake here. Just because we are a public organisation, it does not mean that big corporations can take what they want from local people without asking.

Source: Brandrepublic.

The original music video channel is losing out to MySpace and must have been shaken to its soles by the news that YouTube is planning a bottomless music video archive. The music video success story of the 80s and 90s, MTV has done pretty well in the noughties with cheap-but-effective formats such as the Pimp My Ride and Crib formats, but can it survive the convergence revolution?

According to the Wall Street Journal, MTV has failed to migrate its viewers online. Its much flaunted online property, MTV Overdrive, attracts fewer than four million unique visitors a month, a minute proportion of MTV’s 82 million monthly US viewers. In contrast, MySpace gets nearly 55 million unique visitors in the US a month and YouTube draws 16 million.

The really devastating implication of this for MTV and other broadcasters is that its brand can’t seem to save it. In the shiny new world of fan-created and fan-consumed content, users couldn’t give a toss about who delivers their stuff — just that they get it. The other problem is how to keep up with a youthful audience shooting and distributing their own stuff faster than an MTV with its studios, producers, licensing, artist management and the rest.

MTV’s stumble has lessons for major media companies watching the explosion of video on the Web. In the closed confines of cable TV. where competition is limited, MTV has protected its niche by portraying itself as the iconoclastic outsider. But the Web is a free-for-all, and the roster of competitors grows every day. MTV, now part of the establishment and late to the game, wrongly assumed its famous brand name and product would have the same resonance online.

And — as many big media players have also found out to their horror — their big corporate structures and strictures won’t protect them either. The anarchic aspect of sites like YouTube and MySpace is precisely what makes them havens for teens. MTV and other Viacom properties are subject to the kind of censorship of content that saw CBS fined $500,000 for Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction‘ in 2004.

One 15 year old quoted by the Wall Street Journal reasons: “MTV is supposed to be ‘music television’, but they don’t really have the music part, they have a lot of reality shows.” And as we know, if you’re not speaking clearly and honestly in the new emergent world, then no-one’s listening. And, as a teen, if your options were MTV vs. the Land of Do As You Please which would you choose?

Yellow Arrow is a long-running international media project which explores urban narrative through physical tagging of locations, text messaging and the Internet.

Not content with a nice brand, global reach, and thousands of participants, Yellow Arrow has recently launched Capitol of Punk, an ambitious, city-wide exhibition/media trail in Washington D.C., tracing the places and people of the city’s harcore punk scene. They are also very keen to work on a UK-based project: if any of you have opportunities or ideas, please get in touch!

YA’s Project Director, Jesse Shapins, kindly granted BigShinyThing this exclusive email interview.

BST: First of all can you tell us what the Yellow Arrow project is and how it works?

SHAPINS: Yellow Arrow is a new way of exploring cities. It began 2.5 years ago as a street art project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since then, Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities globally and become a way to experience and publish ideas and stories via text messaging on your mobile phone and interactive maps online. The project offers curated tours of specific cities and the ability to browse thousands of single points of interest submitted by people. We call this first dimension Yellow Arrow CityTXT Tours and the second The Yellow Arrow M.A.A.P. The “M.A.A.P.” acronym signifies that Yellow Arrow itself is a new map, and specifically means “Massively Authored Artistic Publication.”

The project is built around the general philosophy that every place is distinct and engaging if seen from a unique perspective. With this foundation, Yellow Arrow enables every place to become an attraction. Stories are always tied to unique details such as back-alley murals or unique street markers, as well as classic locations like the Empire State Building in New York or the Reichstag in Berlin. Overall, the aim is for Yellow Arrow to provide a frame and platform to see the world in a new way.

The first CityTXT Tour takes place in Washington D.C. as part of our recent Capitol of Punk project. To begin a CityTXT Tour you send the keyword for the location (e.g. Mall) to the number 67067 and then you begin receiving a series of messages that guides you through the streets. People publish to “The Yellow Arrow M.A.A.P.” by placing uniquely-coded stickers at locations of their choice and then sending a text message from their phone with the story they would like associated with that place. When someone else sees the sticker, they send the unique code and then receive the author’s original message back.

In more general terms, we see Yellow Arrow as evolving a true 21^st century publishing platform that merges conventional editorial publishing and user-generated content. The structure leverages the power of community publishing set forth by new media, while maintaining elements of a traditional publishing model to support cohesive curation and foster high-quality content.

How many MAAPers do you currently have and what is the traffic like? How many countries do you now cover?

There are MAAPmakers in 35 countries and 380 cities internationally. The largest communities are in Northern Europe and the United States, but arrows have been placed in Kenya, Mexico, Argentina, China, India, and Russia among others.

Is it completely self-supporting financially? You sell the stickers and merchandise, but does that pay for the SMS traffic etc?

Yellow Arrow is one of many initiatives we have. Counts Media has invested heavily in the project and the dedication has been to the integrity of the brand and content. On the other hand, The Yellow Arrow M.A.A.P. is streamlined so that expenses are very low.

Now that American Idol has made Americans engage with text messaging, have you seen an explosion in interest and are you planning to publicise the project more in the UK where text messaging has been popular for years?

It’s no coincidence that initial creators of the project all spent extensive time in Europe. That’s where we were introduced to text messaging. When we first started the project here in the US, what seemed very natural to us was definitely very new to even more advanced technology circles in the US.

Now, though, text messaging has definitely taken off here and we don’t have to explain really how it works anymore. We’ve been very excited about that. We’ve never considered this a technology project. It’s always been a cultural project, and the most unique technological aspect is the creative application within the overall philosophy of Yellow Arrow.

We already have a small MAAPmaker community, and like everywhere, would be very excited to see it grow and have more curiosities on the map from the UK. And we’d be thrilled to create a CityTXT Tour anywhere in Britain. Maybe some completely conventional tourist destination like Newcastle or something [smiles] But seriously. I love the cities of the UK and think there is a huge opportunity to create some great projects there with the right partners.

Do you think that accusations of creating (street)space junk and litter may hamper the project as it proliferates? Do you have a contingency plan if it does?

We’ve been asked this question now for over 2 years and to date there has never been a complaint or a problem. There is a clear culture established in the community that encourages stickers to be placed carefully either with permission or in places where stickers and street art already proliferate.

That said, the Capitol of Punk project is the first instance where you can experience Yellow Arrow without any existing physical marker in the landscape. You can download the PDF map online that has all of the location information and keywords for the tour starting points. This definitely points in a direction where Yellow Arrow is a completely digital experience.

Can you tell us a little bit about Counts Media and its relationship to the project/locative media in general?

Counts Media was founded by the well-known New York experimental theatre artist Michael Counts in 2005. The company grew out of the past work that Michael had done that placed audiences at the center of the experience and took them on a journey through space. Yellow Arrow was one of the first projects the company took on. We see the future as a convergence of information and entertainment across multiple channels, and we work to produce experiences that from the beginning are conceived with specific elements multiple media channels. So, it’s not about writing a book like the “Da Vinci Code” and then making the movie and the game. It’s about creating entertainment that spans different media from the start.

No media company today can deny the importance of “reality programming” due to the mass access to digital media production. From this perspective, our opinion is that place is a very interesting lens through which to engage reality. By approaching reality through place, you necessarily engage collective stories and history. And if place is a key subject, locative media are a natural means of making this content available and interactive.

Here in the UK everyone is getting very excited about the potential of mobile content (especially with regards to marketing) but very few people seem to have a grasp on an actual exciting and engaging deliverable. Counts Media seems to have an idea — can you illuminate?

In our mind, the future of mobile content is in many ways the same as the history of content to date. People are engaged by interesting stories — both fiction and non-fiction. Of course an SMS novel or an SMS documentary is different than a standard book or feature length film. The format is different, so things like the length and pacing have to adjust. And the potential for interactivity is much greater, so content should be designed from the beginning with the experience of the user in mind. But the same general principles of compelling stories and inspiring ideas apply.

It also seems to us that you are creating a new medium of urban stories — it could also be seen as a wiki. Are you concerned that it will be hi-jacked by crass commercial messages (i.e. ‘McDonald’s this way’) attempting to gain a bit of street cred or — like YouTube — do you have the attitude that it’s all content/helps you on the way to world domination. Is there a masterplan (that you can tell us about… )?

I’d say our approach incorporates both Wikipedia and YouTube. This is illustrated by the multiple dimensions of editorial publishing and user-generated content. We see the major value of Yellow Arrow as bringing together these two models, such that the philosophy, brand and community drive high-quality content. This is then supported by the technology, that both enables the delivery and submissions of content. There will surely be crass location-based marketing and it might use a system similar to Yellow Arrow. However, if we stay true to the values of providing a new way of exploring cities and a frame for seeing the world in a new way, I’m confident that the community and marketplace will respect and support that.

On that same point, do you think your brand strong enough to resist the incursion of commercial brands entering the same space?

We hope so. And our brand is commercial, in that we aim to make money to further our goal of enabling a new form of travel and publishing that enriches people’s relationship to the world around them.

Finally, can you tell us a bit about your current project and how it has been received in the Washington DC area?

This project is something we’re really excited about.

Both in the U.S. and internationally, Washington D.C. is known for the White House (and therefore home to good ‘ol Mr. Bush), for the hundreds of national monuments and thousands of politicians from all over. But Washington D.C. is also home to one of the seminal movements of American music: D.C. hardcore and punk. The music scene is deeply tied to the city and a powerful embodiment of creative localism. We thought it fit very well within the philosophy of Yellow Arrow to showcase this music scene that emerged in the late 70s there and still continues on today.

We asked musicians and others involved in the music scene to tell stories about places that meant something to them. For the past year, we’ve been collecting these stories and anecdotes to create short documentary videos and the text message tours.

The tours include quotations from D.C. luminaries such as Ian Mackaye, Ian Svenonius and Marion Barry. To take the tours, people download a PDF map on the site with the starting points and specific instructions.

People can also watch the 10 documentary videos that give insight into the stories of each location. The videos feature original music from the scene and extensive interviews with musicians. People can view the videos on the website or download them directly to an iPod as a video podcast in iTunes.

And people have asked “Why is D.C. the “Capitol of Punk” instead of “Capital of Punk”? Our choice was intentional. We do not proclaim that D.C. is the “capital,” in the sense of the global center of punk music. “Capital” implies power. The word “capitol” specifically refers to a building, and in particular in Washington, it refers to the “Capitol,” the place where the nation’s congress meets. In this sense, “Capitol of Punk” is a metaphor for the city of Washington as a place where the musical cultures of punk collide and grow. By extension, this is a provocation for thinking about the collision of ideas and values that takes place daily in the “Capitol” building. As with everything in D.C. and true to the democratic values of Yellow Arrow, politics are unavoidable in this project.

We’ve written before, and as believers, that a future of narrative involves transmedia: the tactical use of multiple media to build and spread a many-faceted story, or to sketch a fictional world. Transmedia, at its best, promises to punch through the screen, tear up the page, and engage audiences in a fluid, immersive experience somewhere between traditional story-telling and alternate-reality gaming.

With a few notable exceptions, transmedia is as much media-geek theory object as it is template for successful fictionalising — but it’s a hot topic getting hotter by the day. This week’s case study is the story of YouTube star-in-the-making LonelyGirl15, whose transmedial existence is described in loving detail by New York magazine. Word on the Internet is that her site is set up to promote a film. Or not. Whatever. The sign’o'the times is the degree to which the fantasy has been bought into and built on by others online:

Ironically, her most prominent critic—a YouTuber named ­Gohepcat, a film-geek hipster in mirrored sunglasses and a cowboy hat—has become a mini–YouTube star in his own right. And because anyone on YouTube can post responses or theories about Lonelygirl (and plenty have), her story now has its own metastasizing, David Lynch–worthy cast: Not just Lonelygirl, Daniel, and their ­monkey puppet (don’t ask), but the ­Javert-like Mirrored Cowboy; her defender, Nerd With the Headset; a nemesis called Lazydork; and Richard Feynman. (Yes, Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. He doesn’t appear personally—it’s a long story.)

There’s always been a section of the fan community willing to dive into co-creation, but post-Reality-TV, post clip culture, everyone wants their 15 click-throughs of fame. LonelyGirl15 is just the kind of cultural attractor to encourage them on their way.

If you haven’t read Convergence Culture yet, now’s a good time to get it on order: the wave of transmedia is still gathering speed, and when it hits the mainstream, it’s going to hit hard.

[Thanks to Andrew for the tip-off].

UPDATE: The LA Times has an interview with the LonelyGirl15 film-makers. In a nutshell, like the charming ‘How to be a chav’ Film, the work is the creation of aspiring film-makers:

“We did this with zero resources. Anybody could do what we did,” Flinders said Tuesday. The sum total of the equipment they used to create a sensation on the Internet, as well as perhaps the web’s biggest homegrown mystery: “Two desk lamps (one broken), an open window and a $130 camera.”

Goodfried said Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills got involved about a month ago — well into the lonelygirl15 story — through a friend who works at the agency. “We went in there one afternoon. I walked around the place, and met some cool young guys that got the idea and said they would help us,” he said.

Star of the seminal documentary about the New York ballroom scene Paris is Burning and legendary Vogue-er, Willi Ninja also appeared in Malcolm McLaren’s pre-Madonna attempt at popularising the scene, Deep in Vogue. Only the other day, thanks to YouTube, we found a lot of proof that Vogue-ing wasn’t dead (see below). Now sadly one of its grande dames is.

Business Week reports that developers at NEC have devised a new robot sommelier that can correctly identify wines and cheeses:

When it has identified a wine, the robot speaks up in a childlike voice. It names the brand and adds a comment or two on the taste, such as whether it is a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz, and what kind of foods might go well on the side.

[NEC spokesperson] Shimazu said the robots could be “personalized,” or programmed to recognize the kinds of wines its owner prefers and recommend new varieties to fit its owner’s taste. Because it is analyzing the chemical composition of the wine or food placed before it, it can also alert its owner to possible health issues, gently warning against fatty or salty products.

The commercial application of such a robot may be to verify the authenticity of expensive wines on auction, or for automated inspection of food quality.

The machine isn’t perfect, however:

When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

Shades of RoboCop! There’s no mention of what happened to the mis-identified reporter and cameraman, but the accompanying story is short on pictures. We fear the worst.

A few years back, I visited family and friends in Tasmania, which is — full disclosure — the land of my birth. An island of rugged beauty, exceptional beaches, and primaeval rainforest, much of Tasmania drifts in a strange cultural haze of 1940s home counties tranquility: sleepy little towns where the social hub is the RSL lawn bowls or cricket club. The capital city, Hobart, has more cosmopolitan aspirations. Built overlooking a lovely harbour, nestled in the shadow of a looming mountain, it’s quite a bit Cornwall, and just a little bit Seattle. There is very fine eating and drinking to be done in Hobart. You should visit.

So, with gourmet thoughts in mind, it was exciting to go shopping with friends to a farmers’ market just out of town. Local food, grown in the cleanest air on the planet, in the finest soil in the Southern Hemisphere. What delights, what rich variety would we find? We entered the vast shed, and started to explore.

I headed for the greens. There were two kinds of lettuce on show: crisp, clean Iceburg, and a Cos of some kind. The Iceburg was labelled, in shaky block capitals: LETTUCE. The Cos: FANCY LETTUCE: Tasmanians don’t waste words. We bought some Fancy Lettuce and headed over to the bakery. There we found some nice white loaves: BREAD. And some baguettes. Labelled, oh yes!, yes indeed: FANCY BREAD.

Anyway.

Earlier this week, we members of the BigShinyThing team were — full disclosure — invited guests (FANCY! FANCY!) at Ikea’s London launch of its ‘upmarket’ STOCKHOLM range.

This sign, spotted at the launch, sums up the ethos of the new range: it cleanly positions a newly design-conscious but still-affordable asthetic within the Ikea brand. “Watch out Habitat“, this sign says to us, “you with your airs and graces“. Nice move, neatly executed. “FANCY quality” indeed. Who needs it! Not the Tasmanians, not Ikea, and not you!

Last year it was things POSH getting an ironic drubbing from the advertising world. This year, all that which is FANCY seems fair game: pretension is obviously so out with brands at the moment. And it seems like just yesterday that FUNKY and COOL were actually being sold as aspirational! How 1990s! Just fancy!