This week, Fast Company has featured a new book: New Packaging Design by Janice Kirkpatrick. The book reviews packaging design from around the world. The Fast Company review includes pictures of several of the designs, including the one I like best:
This is a campaign image for Nepia tissues.
Wonderwall, a Japanese interiors firm, and Groovisions, a graphic-design firm, brought a high-concept approach to a tissue box for Nepia. Each one looks like a mottled brick; when stacked, they look like a wall. The fluffy tissue contrasts with the industrial-looking tromp l’oeil.
I am a marketer at heart, and I really appreciate those who extend themselves in thinking of novel and memorable marketing ideas. Thus it was impossible for me not to be impressed when a German group recently used banners tied to houseflies to send their message. The report and video from Wired:
The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often, which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land and recover, the banner is clearly visible. What’s more, the zig-zagging of the fly naturally attracts the attention because of its rapid movement.
After experimenting with Etsy as a store for my artworks, I have decided to move on. I have selected RedBubble, and my store is here.
The great advantage of RedBubble is that they allow me to offer a significantly wider range of products, from postcards to posters, at a range of prices. They take care of the printing and the shipping.
Please give the store a look. I have quite a few items already posted and I am preparing a lot more.
Regular readers will know that I am a fan, a devotee of the ancient sport of sumo. I enjoy the rituals, the colour, the history. But I also think it is pretty stuffy, and needs to get over itself in order to attract new and younger supporters and stars.
The great champion yokozuna Asashoryu from Mongolia has, over the years, been the face of modern sumo. He fights hard against the tradition-bound rules that govern how rikishi should live, and he is always in trouble with the authorities.
However, it may be that the Sumo Association is softening its stance. Rikishi are generally not allowed to be seen in public unless they are wearing wrestling gear or a kimono. But they have given Asashoryu permission to appear in a series of ads for a new soda drink. In them, the big guy plays a supposedly oversized 13-year old schoolboy. In this one, he and his friends arrive home late from school. The mother thinks he has taken the boys to a dance club, but Asa shows her they were actually practicing at the school’s sumo club.
It is definitely odd. But then again I find a lot of Japanese ads are designed for a completely different sensibility than mine. Fun though to see the yokozuna dance and act!
In another place, an earlier incarnation, I wrote a lot about North Korea. It is a fascinating place (so long as you don’t actually have to be there). Now they have produced art on a scale unimaginable today in the west.
This glorious piece created to celebrate what would have been the Great Leader’s 97th birthday (except that inconvenience called death got in the way) is stupendous in scale and concept. It is time we stopped sabre-rattling and started to appreciate the vision of the Korean artist!
In a clear victory for free speech and secularism, the Atheist Bus Campaign raised more than $150,000 in just four days. Yesterday, they unveiled their message on the side of 800 buses across Britain.
Next week, the campaign will put up 1,000 posters on the London Underground system with similar messages.
An interesting element of the bus slogan is the word “probably,” which would seem to be more suited to an Agnostic Bus Campaign than to an atheist one … But the element of doubt was necessary to meet British advertising guidelines, said Tim Bleakley, managing director for sales and marketing at CBS Outdoor in London, which handles advertising for the bus system.For religious people, advertisements saying there is no God “would have been misleading,” Mr. Bleakley said. “So as not to fall foul of the code, you have to acknowledge that there is a gray area,” he said.
What a weird culture we live here in North America. So much advertising is about, or uses, sex as a sales strategy — which in simple terms means good looking women wearing few clothes and preferably with a deep and well-rounded cleavage; women’s breasts are to modern marketing what “god” is to religions. And yet, at the merest suggestion of a nipple, the cultural warriors ride in on their chargers screaming about pornography and obscenity.
These musings were inspired by a Time magazine article entitled “Facebook’s War On Nipples“. It appears that everyone’s favourite social networking empire has decreed that any image displaying part or all of a female nipple is prima facie obscene. It has arbitrarily removed a lot of pictures — to the loud chagrin of some well-organised groups. Not the least of these organizations is the Facebook group called “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” which had 85,000 members by year’s end and arranged the simultaneous uploading of 11,000 breastfeeding images to Facebook last Saturday.
For me it is the simplest of issues: Censorship is censorship and has to be challenged constantly and decisively. I agree with Paul Rapoport, coordinator for the Topfree Equal Rights Association (TERA): “[Facebook's] policy clearly implies that visible nipples or areolas always make photos of women obscene. Facebook stigmatizes breast-feeding and demeans women.”
But the two cultural issues that fascinate me most are hypocrisy and self-reference.
The hypocrisy is implicit in my first paragraph: We use sex everywhere to sell everything, and yet we wield a big stick if it goes “too far”. One example was the ludicrous fine levied by the FCC because a Janet Jackson nipple may have been exposed for a fraction of a second on TV — only noticeable to a viewer who was already staring at her breasts at the exact time it happened. The cultural hypocrisy was doubled in that case because for months afterward, it was hard to watch a TV show or read a magazine without seeing close-ups of the offending moment, sometimes with large red arrows in case we missed the point.
As for the self-referential nature of a Facebook group being used to hammer Facebook, it is so perfectly post-modern that I could weep.
I was drawn to the World Health Organization’s recently published “The Global Burden of Disease: 2004 Update” through David Kenner’s review article in Foreign Policy. The WHO’s report is a snapshot of the world’s health as of 2004. From that, “using projections of economic growth and advances in medical treatment”, they extrapolate the leading causes of death in 2030.
It is interesting to me that the three causes expected to kill more people (heart disease, lung disease and traffic accidents) are each deaths by consumer choice in the use of fatty foods, tobacco, and automobiles.
I was surprised to see that tobacco consumption is expected to rise. But then again, it is reasonable that developing nations should buckle under the full weight of tobacco advertising just as we did. It is a pity that they can’t seem to skip that bit of our experience. But Big Tobacco can make the stuff for as little as it needs to keep the wholesale price low, and governments quickly become addicted to the tobacco sales taxes they collect. The guy on the street hardly stands a chance.
A final thought: when you add up the cost of the world’s military, the tobacco and road transportation industries, and the unhealthy parts of agribusiness, it quickly becomes apparent that modern capitalism is in large part an economy of death. I’m certain that is something we could change if we really wanted to.
Like the Queen of England, Mickey Mouse has a real birthday (presumably May 15, 1928, the release of “Plane Crazy“) and an official birthday. Today, in 1928, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks released “Steamboat Willie” to a receptive world.
As the global representative of Disney, the symbol of Mickey Mouse has become so powerful that it can, at one and the same time, represent both the American Dream and the American Nightmare. Now that is marketing!
New York’s transit agency is testing digital advertising screens on the sides of buses. The screens can target ads for specific neighborhoods. The ads, which resemble TV commercials, could even advertise coffee in the morning, and beer after work. Titan Worldwide has a 10-year, $800 million contract to sell ads throughout the city’s bus and commuter-train systems. The company says GPS technology allows it to change the ads based on the buses’ locations. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is testing the system on a Manhattan route, with an eye toward 200 buses in the first quarter of next year.
I’m disappointed with the transit’s in-bus ad management. I was on a 135 express this morning, the ads facing me were for an AIDS walk on 9/21 and for the 7th annual wedding show on 9/13-14. As we are now more than a month beyond the latter event, it is disturbing to see these old ads.
It cannot be too difficult to establish a list of date-sensitive ads currently in the system, to maintain the currency of that list, and to remove old ads in a timely fashion based on alerts generated by the list.
If no new paid ads are available to fill the slots, then PSAs, recruitment posters, maps of the route and/or system could be used — anything useful or interesting for the rider to spend some time with.
Finally, I want to congratulate the designer who came up with the concept of the 11 x 35 cardboard card for in-bus advertising. Cheap and easy to produce and install/replace. And yet with an area large enough to stretch the skills of the finest designers.
Posted by jakking 
Posted by jakking 
Posted by jakking 
