Friday September 30, 2005
I Knew Carson. And You, Carson, Are No Carson
Onion writer Joe Garden—as we’ve mentioned here before—continues to consolidate his base as he campaigns to take over Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2009.
It’s early days, but Joe (perhaps having learned from the mistakes of a certain senator from Massachusetts) is aleady going on the offensive. Alexandra received this provocative pamphlet from the candidate just last night.
“In 2009, esteemed Last Night host Conan O’Brien will leave the show he redefined in order to assume the duties of host of The Tonight Show,” reads the copy inside. “Many people will remember the last time there was a transfer of late night talk show power. It resulted in the famous Late Night war, hurt feelings, a book and a mediocre TV movie. This cannot happen again.”
Posted by jim at 01:48 PM ||
Just Like Oil-For-Food, but with Books and Blog Traffic
HarperCollins recently mistook me for some sort of “blogger of interest” and sent me a copy of the new Neil Gaiman novel Anansi Boys. The book is currently atop the NYT Bestseller list. At first I thought I might read it, but since I didn’t read American Gods I must now admit that I probably will not. So I’m going to give it away—sort of.
Welcome to the Encyclopedia Hanasiana Ad Hoc Affiliate Program (EHAHAP). Here’s how it works. The book goes to the first person whose site or blog refers 27 visitors to www.hanasiana.com as judged by SiteMeter. (Links that were up before this post are not eligible; and for clarity’s sake, your referral should include some indication that you are pursuing the prize. If you want, just add the referring page’s URL to this post’s comments.) The book retails for $26.95, so that’s a buck a click, and I’ll pay postage in the lower 48. And, unlike AdSense, I don’t care what you tell your readers to get them to click. I’ll notify the winner via email as soon as there is one.
Posted by jim at 12:48 PM ||
Thursday September 29, 2005
Bullshit Wants to Be Free
Didn’t get an invitation to post comments at Gawker.com? You’ll probably live. In the meantime, you can rant all you want about Gawker’s gossip at Gawker Talker, an open-source Gawker Discussion System (GDS) I just built. You’re welcome. Just get there before the lawyers do.
Posted by jim at 06:38 PM ||
Wednesday September 28, 2005
Don’t Call it a Comeback
As a lay expert on doomed reality shows, I just wanted to take the opportunity to warn you off of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, the second episode of which airs tonight. It is not doing well. It will be moved to the weekend or to the middle of the night, and that will only break your heart.
How badly is the show doing? Well, according to Mediaweek, its ratings (5.1/8) were even worse than CBS’ Stewartspoitation flick Martha Behind Bars, starring the plainly insane Cybill Shepherd. And its ratings (5.4/9) were awful, thanks to a late-running football game that pushed it deep into the night. Enjoying Martha’s humiliation is officially more popular than Martha herself. Talk about brand equity coming back to bite you.
Posted by jim at 04:01 PM ||
All Play and No Work
Mediaweek reports today on a new study out of Ball State University that finds that people spend more time consuming media than working. The study also reveals that “contrary to popular belief, young people aged 18 to 24 spend less time online than any other age group except those aged 65 and older.”
Kids these days.
Posted by jim at 09:59 AM ||
Tuesday September 27, 2005
Buzz Worthy
Animator David Daniels recently debuted a recut version of his classic short film “Buzz Box” at the Cinema Texas Short Film Festival in Austin. The original film, which debuted in 1985, was conceived as a total visual assault that mimics the blast of images projected daily by the media. As Daniels says, it’s a “hyper-hypo-micro-epic-opera of seduction and abuse, unraveling one’s threadbare sense of what’s real and what’s flash-hype in the spit-bucket of Ameri-ca-ca.”
What’s truly unique about it, however, is how it was made. Daniels used an unusual—and very time-consuming—stop-motion technique he calls Strata Cut. He demonstrated it to me a few years ago by hacking at pieces of clay with a butter knife at a Chinese restaurant in Midtown, and I’m still not sure I can explain it. Basically, it involves constructing large logs of clay with images embedded in them. The motion is produced by photographing these logs, over time, as thin layers of clay are repeatedly sliced off one end.(This diagram might help.) The effect is at once fluid and jarring.
Daniels went on to design Peter Gabriel’s video for “Big Time” and to work on M&M’s animated characters at Vinton Studios in Portland. He’s now a partner in Bent Image Lab also in Portland. The recut version of “Buzz Box”—dubbed “Buzz Box Re-Mix (Tabloid Terror)”—not only observes the film’s 20th anniversary, it has been updated for the Bush era. You can download the full nine-minute film, or one of its five chapters, here, courtesy of Daniels.
Posted by jim at 11:23 AM ||
Prince of Darkness
We went and saw The White Stripes at Coney Island on Sunday night. While I’ve always liked the band, I was somewhat skeptical when they hit it big with White Blood Cells. After covering bands like The Oblivians in Memphis in the late ’90s, the sudden popularity of the Stripes presented me with a Nirvana moment. Here was a genre of underground music that had been going strong for years and was now suddenly being “discovered.” The Oblivians’ pinnacle, for example, came with the genre exploding Play 9 Songs with Mr. Quintron, which was released in 1997, the year The White Stripes released their first single. Jack White even acquired his first red Montgomery Airline guitar (now a signature) from the Oblivians’ Jack Yarber. Claims of White’s originality were irritating, in other words.
Sunday’s show, however, was incredible. While the duo’s no bass lineup long ago discarded rock convention, White’s organic performance seemed bent on reinventing the band’s songbook as well. He played, at various times, the guitar, the piano and the marimbas. He screamed and whispered. He stomped and writhed. Often he seemed completely overcome.
While The White Stripes were once lumped in with the spate of “The” bands that appeared on the scene a few years ago, it is clear now that Jack White will be making records for a long time to come. The contrast with opening act The Shins was instructive. The New Mexican combo executed their songs competently, if a little too perfectly. They sounded like their records. They will be doing something else for work one day.
But Jack White was born to do this. After the show, I searched my memory for comparable performances. Was it like The Oblivians in their prime? Like Jon Spencer on the Orange tour a decade ago? No. The only analog I could come up with was Prince, that other purveyor of Northern State Rock and Soul, who I once saw swoon off a piano bench, overcome by his own rendition of “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” as the crowd screamed and urged him to regain himself and continue. Jack White’s performance was like that—and the crowd was more than happy to urge him on.
Posted by jim at 09:14 AM ||
Corporate Rock Still Sucks?
The fear of “selling out,” an obsession that ruled the formative years and musical tastes of many people who are around the same age as actor Christian Slater, has finally become passé, according to a new survey conducted by Billboard. The findings?
63.5 percent of respondents said an artist’s participation in a TV commercial for a product did not affect their attitude toward the artist. What’s more, 23.4 percent said such TV spots actually built their interest in the artist. Only 13.1 percent said an artist promoting a product turned them off to that artist.
“Being marketed to has become a badge of cultural acceptance; hearing your favorite song in an ad is a sign that your lifestyle is worthy of being exploited,” was how I recently put in it an article for Radar. To show you just how much attitudes have changed, my younger self—circa 1985—would have probably put it this way: “86.9 percent of people are total fucking posers.”
[via AdJab]
Posted by jim at 01:29 AM ||
Monday September 26, 2005
Get Your Phil
George Saunders’ new political parable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, has a killer website—with t-shirts and temporary tattoos. Oh yeah.
Be sure to check out the gallery of provocative illustrations by Ben Gibson.
[via kop’-ē-kăt’]
Posted by jim at 01:44 PM ||
Let the Commenting Begin!
Against my better judgment—and longstanding tradition—I’ve added the ability to leave comments on this blog. (Thanks, HaloScan!) So if you’re a regular, or an irregular, speak up and be counted. (And, perhaps, heckled.) Or you can just use the comment areas for jotting down little notes and lists. Whichever.
Posted by jim at 07:49 AM ||
Saturday September 24, 2005
Strangers with Candy
Over at Stay Free!, friend of Hanasiana Carrie McLaren takes on the business model of Adcandy.com and its “open source” pretensions. Adcandy, which just got a largely uncritical hug from Wired News, plans to solicit advertising ideas from consumers and charge companies for access to them—whether it be for creative or market research purposes. Carrie is right to point out that calling this “open source” is quite a stretch, and Wired should have known better than to fall for it. I would only add this: Adcandy’s business model will not work.
As Carrie says, “there is no indication that the masses gives two twigs about Adcandy,” but the only people who might care less are advertisers. We’ve been down this road before, and recent history is strewn with sites that have tried to bring together online focus groups and deliver them to marketers, only to find out that, um, yeah, thanks, they’ve got the consumer insight thing taken care of. It’s what they do for a living!
The original AdCritic was based, in part, on this flawed model, and who can forget Ads.com? (You can buy the domain if you want it.) You forgot it? Here’s a refresher:
Ads.com has gone belly up. … Founded by former RealNetworks executive John Atcheson, Ads.com planned to make money by charging corporations to list their Web sites next to the commercials and by reselling consumer information.
Adcandy might build it, but they won’t come.
Posted by jim at 07:07 AM ||
Friday September 23, 2005
Be Careful What You Ask For
AdAge.com reported last week that the threat to advertisers posed by DVRs like TiVo has been exaggerated. The threat to me, however, is real.
I am not proud of it, but I’ve watched such recent reality flops as Wickedly Perfect and The Cut—starring Tommy “My Upper Lip is a Landing Strip” Hilfiger—all the way to the bitter end. I blame my DVR.
You know you’re the only person watching a reality show when it suddenly moves to a different night, particularly to Friday or Saturday. Both these shows were subjected to such humiliation, and I might have lost track of them entirely—forgotten all about them and gotten on with my life—but my DVR found them and there they were, waiting in the queue for me. After setting my machine to record all new episodes of The Real World, I haven’t been able to shake the series, no matter how boring and unsympathetic the participants have become.
I call it “DVR Lock.” I should write a book about it or launch a blog about how it will change everything. Nah. But I do think DVRs will change the way we watch television in unexpected ways. Sure I skip commercials and almost never watch shows in real time, but decisions made this week—premiere week—may well haunt me until May. First there was “appointment television.” Then we “surfed.” Now DVRs have brought about the age of “assigment television.” We sign up for a show and the homework keeps on coming.
You might say, justifiably, “Just because you recorded it doesn’t mean you have to watch it.” I will answer with a parable.
When I was in college, I ran into an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a while. He looked like hell. His skin was grey. His eyes were bloodshot. His clothes were wrinkled. I asked him what was was going on.
“I live with these three guys,” he said, “and we have a kegerator in our our apartment.” A kegerator, if you don’t know, is a refrigerator that has been modified to store kegs of beer, complete with a handy tap on the outside. I understood. He had been drinking hard for weeks. “Why don’t you take a night off?” I suggested. “Dude,” he said. “We’ve got a kegerator.”
Dude, I’ve got a DVR.
Posted by jim at 02:14 PM ||
Poo Poo Patter
Adland today links to AdCorp, Inc., a short film that stars Andy Dick as a branding guru trying to come up with the name Bed, Bath & Beyond. Good for a laugh.
It also reminded me of this thing I wrote five years ago to amuse myself—an imaginary account of the pitch that led to “Bad Andy,” Deutsch’s ill-fated Domino’s Pizza spokesthing. Here’s how it went:
The Scene: A conference room somewhere within Domino’s corporate headquarters. The client has just finished watching a series of spots featuring a Muppet-like gremlin called “Bad Andy.” In the spots, Andy causes all kinds of trouble for earnest Domino’s employees, making it difficult for them to make pizza. The tagline: “Good pizza. Bad Andy.”
The fantasy pitch, already in progress, appears after the jump.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: So?
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER: Great work. Really great work.
CD: Great.
CMO: You really nailed it.
CD: Thanks. We really went there.
CMO: We can tell. But we do have a few questions.
CD: Shoot. (nods crazily)
CMO: Now. The pizza’s good. We’ve established that.
CD: Yep. The pizza is very good. “Good Pizza.”
CMO: But Andy is bad.
CD: Very bad.
CMO: But since Andy seems to be involved in the making of the pizza, won’t that make the pizza bad?
CD: I’m not sure if I …
CMO: Because he’s bad, and he’s messing around in the kitchen. Wouldn’t that affect the quality of the pizza?
CD: Aaaahhh. I see what you’re saying. But you see that wouldn’t happen because the pizza is good. It’s Andy that’s bad.
CMO: Right, right. But say you started out with good pizza. Then you added Bad Andy, as you have here. Wouldn’t that taint the goodness of the pizza?
CD: But the pizza is good.
CMO: Right, of course, we all agree on that.
CD: It’s Andy who’s bad.
CMO: Sure. … Let me put it another way. What is Andy?
CD: Well, he’s a puppet. A sort of a monkeyish …
CMO: Is Bad Andy poo?
CD: Poo, sir?
CMO: Yes poo. We’ve heard some concern from the franchisees that Bad Andy is poo, or made of poo, or something. You know there’s been a lot of that going around—anthropomorphic poo-things—on TV and at the movies. I don’t think I have to tell you that if Bad Andy were poo, that would be very bad for us.
CD: Bad Andy is not poo.
CMO: And Bad Andy does not represent poo?
CD: No.
CMO: He’s sort of poo-colored.
CD: Yes. He is brown, but I can assure you that he is not, is not made of, and is in no way meant to represent or otherwise allude to, or even bring to mind, poo.
CMO: I’m glad to here you say that. What is he?
CD: Um, well, he’s kind of a mischievous soft-sculpture monkey-thing.
CMO: Outstanding. I think we’ve got a winner.
Posted by jim at 12:47 PM ||
Three Little Dots
Whoever stars in it—Donald or Martha—The Apprentice is so over. Both debuts drew a combined 18 million viewers, 5 million fewer than the season premiere of Lost. … Christian Slater’s year is looking up. … A kid homebrews an HP ad. … Advertising Week 2005 kicks off Monday with the “Procession of the Great Icons.” How embarassed are you?
Posted by jim at 12:44 PM ||
Thursday September 22, 2005
Lebron James, Idiot Widget
As you might have heard, the internet is hot again, at least with advertisers. Branded content, viral, and other forms of non-traditional advertising are also hot. And, as you might expect from all that heat, we are in the midst of a new media advertising bubble. Every brand has to be online and viral and providing content, whether it makes any sense or not. Does Kleenex really need a fancy website with Flash games? How many people go there? And why? (Answers: Apparently not many and who knows.)
Here’s my new favorite example (courtesy of Alexandra, who picked up the mail-in somewhere): Bubblicious’ LeBron James Voice-Activated Software. This is how it’s supposed to work. You send two proofs-of-purchase and $1 in the mail to Bubblicious and, in 3 to 4 weeks, they send you—via email, praise God—a code that allows you to download a widget that makes LeBron James “the point guard on your computer.” Using Windows’ voice-activation software, you teach LeBron some verbal commands and he runs around opening and closing programs for you. It’s Clippy all over again.
Who will bother? Bubblicious-chewing basketball fans who are computer-savvy enough to get this software to work, yet somehow not savvy enough to realize that using snail mail to acquire a Cracker Jack-grade widget is super lame? One wonders if anyone at this meeting had ever been on the internet—or met a tween. I’m guessing that the number of kids who tore themselves away from their Xbox blood sports long enough to put a stamp on an envelope in pursuit of this branded geegaw was rather low.
Posted by jim at 11:16 AM ||
Beware of Backup Dancers
As if procreation and that hokey commercial for Fantasy weren’t evidence enough, the history of backup dancer-based relationships does not bode well for Britney and Kevin.
What I’m trying to say is that I have a new gag up at Radar Online today.
Posted by jim at 08:28 AM ||
Wednesday September 21, 2005
Target Practice
A recent survey by Burst! Media found that only 29 percent of respondents think online advertising is targeted at them. While 46 percent of 25- to 34-year olds believed ads were aimed at them, a majority of both younger and older respondents thought the online ads they were seeing were for someone else, a finding from which Burst! CEO Jarvis Coffin manages to draw the exact wrong conclusion. He writes:
The results of this remind us that consumers are aware that they are being marketed to. Clearly there are substantial groups of audience outside the 25-34 age segment that are available online, but are either being approached with the wrong products and services, or being approached in the wrong way.
Actually, it sounds to me like they’re being approached in the right way—that is to say, secretly. No one likes to have their life reduced to a cliche by buying products that are targeted at them. In fact, consumers’ sole remaining source of rebellion might be buying things that are targeted at other demographics. (Thus, the success—for example—of Wieden + Kennedy’s Miller High Life campaign, which drew in hipsters by appearing to court their Teamster uncles.) 29 percent is a good start—but isn’t the goal really 0?
Posted by jim at 10:18 AM ||
No Emmy for Carmen
In a promo for Arrested Development’s third ratings-defying season, Jason Bateman promised to give one of the show’s Emmys to Carmen Electra if 15 million people watched Monday’s premiere. The result? Not even close.
Arrested attracted just 4.58 million viewers, according to Mediaweek’s Programming Insider. That was only good for #5 in the timeslot, behind Monday Night Football (which did get 15 million viewers), The King of Queens, Surface and 7th Heaven.
Ah well. At least imoscar.com really exists.
Posted by jim at 01:35 AM ||
Tuesday September 20, 2005
Often Speaking, Never Saying Anything
You’ve seen him on the beach, and you’ve seen him on TV. Now self-styled ad icon and muscle mary Donny Deutsch—who we were led to believe would be running for mayor right about now—has a book coming out. Often Wrong, Never In Doubt: Unleash the Business Rebel Within, due Oct. 4, is apparently a foul-mouthed self-help how-to about how to make buckets of cash.
But at least it has an original title, right? Wrong. Rather, Donny Rebel has done the literary equivalent of cribbing someone else’s tagline—or, in this case, a lot of other people’s tagline.
The “often wrong, never in doubt” chestnut is usually attributed to Russian physicist Lev Landau, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in 1968. Landau is quoted as saying, “Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.”
But Deutsch is not even the first business mogul to appropriate the motto. General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz famously claimed it in a well-known 2002 memo, while others who regard it as their personal credo include hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein, former TV judge Mills Lane and the dude who edits the Manhattan User’s Guide. The phrase has become so popular that it is frequently used (often derogatorily) to sum up the swagger of George W. Bush—a comparison Deutsch, who worked for Clinton, would probably not enjoy.
As rebel yells go, “often wrong, never in doubt” is about as outside the box as, well, “outside the box.”
Posted by jim at 03:46 PM ||
Home Improvement
As you can (perhaps) see, I’ve done a little light housecleaning. I’ve made my email address more prominent so figures from my past can more easily settle grudges and/or notify me of cash awards. And I’ve added a fancy, one-size fits all Feedburner feed so readers who are obsessed with me (Hi, mom) can pull this site into their RSS readers more easily. If you’ve been subscribing to my feed, switch to this one. If you haven’t been subscribing to my feed, add it to your reader this second. It will be fun.
Posted by jim at 11:47 AM ||
Sunday September 18, 2005
Mitch & Me
My parents visited Brooklyn recently, and they brought with them a load of Hanasiana—memorabilia from my past, some of which I would like to forget.
Among the salvaged objects: a pair of flowered ladies’ jeans (that I actually wore once or twice) on which I wrote all the lyrics to The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?” in a sappy attempt to express my bottomless teen angst, and this grainy picture of me posing with future Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, taken on an educational trip to Washington. “To my friend Jim Hanas with best wishes,” reads McConnell’s inscription.
But we weren’t really friends. He was just playing politics.
Posted by jim at 05:10 PM ||
Friday September 16, 2005
Three Little Dots
My home state’s embarassing license plates—one of the first things I ever blogged about—are going away. … Would it be bold to say that David Grann’s New Yorker profile of Rickey Henderson is the best portrait of an ebbing athlete since Gay Talese took on Floyd Patterson? Yes it would be. But I’m saying it. … Convicted felon and disgraced ad exec Shona Seifert was ordered, as part of her sentence, to submit a proposed code of ethics for the ad industry. So she stole one! Where’s her panel at Advertising Week 2005? That’d class up the joint. … 50 percent of bloggers say they use their blogs as therapy. Sounds low.
Posted by jim at 04:25 PM ||
Thursday September 15, 2005
Spoofing Truth
I’ve attempted a few times before (probably unsuccessfully) to get at the exact nature of the Bush administration’s freewheeling attitude toward the truth. Is it a secret, and unexpected, endorsement of epistemological relativism? Is it some kind of kettle logic that hopes to aggregate a constituency out of several distinct, and perhaps mutually exclusive, constituencies?
After the administration’s handling of Katrina, however, I think I’ve finally hit on the correct analogy. The Bush White House’s practice of flooding every accusation with a scattershot of accounts and alibis is just like the record industry’s practice of “spoofing.” Only in this case, they’re spoofing the truth.
“Spoofing,” to recall, has been one of the industry’s more successful strategies for combatting file trading on P2P networks. Rather than trying to stop people from trading files, hired spoofers—like Overpeer and MediaDefender—simply flood P2P networks with decoy files that make finding actual songs frustrating and impractical. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” as spoof engine developer John Hale told Wired News last year.
In the same article, Hale—a computer science professor at the University of Tulsa—notes that the same principle might be used to protect sensitive material well beyond P2P networks. “If you have a secret that gets out there, how do you get the genie back in the bottle?” he says. “You make millions of clones of genies and hope that they won’t find the right one.”
Which leads back to Bush. In the wake of Katrina, the administration and its allies have provided a steady stream of alibis, which range from questionable to demonstrably false. In this non-exhaustive list compiled by Media Matters, Bush’s claim that no one expected the levees to break is in the first group, while the allegation that Governor Blanco did not declare a state of emergency is in the latter. The now debunked account of Bush pleading with Mayor Nagin to evacuate the city belongs there, too.
This makes members of the reality-based community, like myself, apoplectic. How could anyone believe a story with so many holes in it? (Or, rather, how could anyone simultaneously believe so many stories with so many holes in them?) That’s where spoofing comes in.
Remember, P2P spoofers don’t expect you to think that the 30 seconds of static you just downloaded actually is “Hollaback Girl.” That’s not their game. Rather, they hope that after downloading a dozen files full of static, you’ll simply abandon your search for “Hollaback Girl.”
Same thing with Bush’s PR strategy. The idea isn’t to get you to believe any of the administration’s various stories, but to get you to give up on the idea that you’ll ever find the true, unspun story. And once you’ve given up the search, you can only make judgments based on aesthetics and ideology.
As one pro-Bush blogger, whose idea of truth has been effectively spoofed away, asks, “Given that spin seems pretty much inevitable these days, would you rather have spin intended to lift our spirits and instill a positive, constructive attitude? Or spin geared toward making the situation worse in order to wallow in America-bashing and in hopes of scoring cheap political points?” Um, I’ll hold out for the truth.
Posted by jim at 04:18 PM ||
Easy, Breezy, Beautiful Cover Girl
Speaking of my nPRm Alexandra, she’s on the cover of a book!
Years ago, she met designer Keira Alexandra—who is now VP/Creative Director at the Sundance Channel—when they both served on a jury for a murder case in Brooklyn, and she ended up writing a story for Metropolis about Keira’s affection for stuff.
A few weeks ago, Keira moved out of the apartment documented in that story and had a bang up moving sale. It included a screening of a still-in-development TV adaptation of This American Life, and David Brown took pictures of everyone with their purchases—which are collected in Everything Must Go, an on-demand book created for Keira’s friends and now—thanks to the choice of cover model—for Alexandra’s friends as well. Get ‘em while they’re hot.
Posted by jim at 10:42 AM ||
Christianity Explained
If you’ve been following the Roberts hearings, you may be baffled by some of the legal lingo. Strict constructionism? Stare decisis? And you may have gathered that the nominee is an adherent of a religion called “Christianity.” What the hell is that?
Bob and Betty Jacks (with Ron Wormser, Sr.) provide a pithy and useful diagram that explains all—including all those “Left Behind” movies—in Your Home a Lighthouse: Hosting an Evangelistic Bible Study, a book Alexandra, my non-Platonic roommate, picked up somewhere.
The full diagram is after the jump. Game geeks might notice a startling resemblance to the RPG spoof Kingdom of Loathing. Philosophy geeks, on the other hand, might notice that the Jacks seem to be working with a rather primitive understanding of eternity when they depict Bob’s dead grandmother getting to heaven “first.”
Posted by jim at 10:12 AM ||
Wednesday September 14, 2005
Reinventing the Camera
Disposable cameras have become so sturdy and substantial—so permanent feeling—that at least one person has taken the time to hack a Kodak MAX One-Time-Use camera so that it can be used again and again. Kind of like, you know, all the cameras we had before there were disposable cameras.
We should have seen this coming. While disposability starts out as the key advantage of various limited-use products—like one-time use cameras and razor blades—the logic of product evolution was bound to bring the disposable camera full circle. First it was made more durable—so durable that it seems like a waste to throw it out—and now it can be reused. Once Kodak finds out how popular their disposable cameras are—so popular, apparently, that people want to use them again and again—don’t be surprised when they introduce the Kodak MAX Multiple-Use disposable camera. They’ll introduce it with a splashy campaign, with TV ads where people are about to toss out next wave disposable cameras but are stopped by friends “in the know,” who remind them that they can use it again. It will be hailed as a revolution and breakthrough, at least until everyone realizes that that’s how cameras worked in the first place.
It’s brilliant when you think about it. Digital cameras were taking over the market anyway, so the film giants devalued their product by making it completely disposable—trash to be thrown away. This, in turn, lowered consumers’ expectations of the product to the point that customers became impossible to disappoint. “What do you expect? It’s a disposable.”
But now, by slowly reintroducing the camera—the old-fashioned, reusable camera—into the marketplace, Kodak et al. can charge a premium on a new generation of “super disposables” while still playing to low expectations. That point and shoot you bought ten years ago? The one that crapped out after twenty rolls? As an old paradigm “camera,” it was a real piece of junk. But as a “disposable,” it would have exceeded your expectations by 2000%. Genius.
Posted by jim at 12:19 AM ||
Thursday September 08, 2005
The New Aristocrats
The beauty of this joke is that you only have to remember one line:
This guy walks into a political consultant’s office, and he says, “I’ve got a great strategy I want to run by you.”
“Alright,” the hack says. “Let me hear what you’ve got.”
[This part of the joke is where you can let your personal political style shine through, although versions of the man’s strategy usually include several of the following: rallying supporters to block a legal election recount by promising to cut their taxes—taxes that pay for things like levees; ignoring intelligence about terrorist activities in the U.S.; lying about WMDs; fudging the connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden; “liberating” between 10,000 and 25,000 Iraqis by killing them; forcing Iraqi prisoners to engage in sex acts (Karl Rove, a gifted joke teller, reportedly improvises here with a series of hilarious tableaux involving feces and bestiality); failing to prepare, despite repeated warnings, for the largest natural disaster in American history; and incest.]
“And for our big finale,” the man tells the consultant, “we tell people we can’t be criticized, because we’re in the midst of a crisis—a crisis that we created!”
“Well that’s quite a strategy,” the consultant says. “What do you call it?”
“Homeland Security.”
I’m still working on the punchline.
Posted by jim at 12:44 PM ||
