Brands leave their mark on children's brains

Truncated excerpts:

The idea may be "unpalatable", but companies seeking an edge over their rivals should ensure that children are exposed to their brands as early in life as possible.

This was demonstrated by presenting students with a range of real and fictional brand names and asking them to indicate as quickly as possible whether a brand was real. If a brand had been experienced from birth, the students were quicker to recognise it as real than if it had been encountered from age five and up. A second experiment showed that students were also quicker at accessing information about early encountered brands compared with late-encountered brands, as indicated by the speed with which they said a product was or was not made by a given brand.

These findings resemble classic "age-of-acquisition" effects, in which people are more proficient at processing words they encountered earlier in life.

Combined with prior research showing that people generally feel more favourable towards words and pictures that they find easier to process - a phenomenon called the "fluency effect".

BPS Research Digest: Brands leave their mark on children's brains

Soviet Deep Sea Garbage Dump

A spectacular image. I would love to see big high-res stills, the video's is a bit obnoxious and the quality is iffy. Still, it's an amazing sit. My next dive trip?





Via Colors Magazine

The Visual Miscellaneum

Picked up a copy of The Visual Miscellaneum (website for the book) this evening, one of the best books of data visualization I've seen in some time. , Very well designed, amusing topics explored, a very fun and interesting book.







From the author's site: Reduce Your Odds of Dying in a Plane Crash

Amazon Link

Between the Folds (a Documentary on the art and science or origami)

Another fascinating look at how engaged minds can take something simple and beautiful. In this case the folding of paper. Below, a video from the Filmmakers@Google series.

About: Between the Folds chronicles the stories of ten fine artists and intrepid theoretical scientists who have abandoned careers and scoffed at hard-earned graduate degrees - all to forge unconventional lives as modern-day paperfolders.

Official site for the film: Between the Folds.

A full list of featured artists can be found on this site.

Quote Pull: Endless Summers

A great paragraph from a piece called Endless Summers (on Larry Summers) for the December issue of Vanity Fair

"People plant a little wheat. People demand to eat a little more bread, and the thing self-stabilizes. But it was [economist John Maynard] Keynes’s central insight that it’s not always that way. And it’s not always that way in particular because leverage [i.e., borrowing] can create situations where, when prices fall, then people have to sell, and so they fall faster. When asset prices fall, capital values fall, and, therefore, people are in less of a position to lend, and, therefore, other people are forced to sell. And there’s a whole set of these vicious cycles. You can also have a change in gestalt where people who had perceived things as safe all of a sudden move things from the concept of being safe to the concept of being risky, and if they’re risky, they don’t want to hold them. And so you see a large scale of abandonment. And I think in one way or another the leverage, the vicious cycle, the change in gestalt, the unwinding—that’s the financial crisis.”

Deep Water (Documentary Film)

In 1968, 9 men set out to be the first to sail, non-stop and single handedly, around the world. The film, Deep Water documents the attempts of these men to complete their voyages.

The chronicle contains none of the themes and story lines one would expect to find in documentary about a great race. There is no classic rivalry played out between two men until the bitter end, no come from behind victory by an unlikely contestant no harrowing survival and no man against nature overcoming. Instead, the narratives turn inward as these men are absorbed by their isolation over the 10 months at sea. The end is an unexpected and heartbreaking anticlimactic tragedy and the best documentary I've seen in a long time. Tt is "a movie which will reduce the hardest of hearts to a shipwreck" (The Daily Telegraph).

I was tempted to write a summary of the story but I think I've said too much already. Just watch it.

Wikipedia entry: Deep Water

IMDB: Deep Water




On a related note there is a good piece in this month's Vanity Fair by James Wolcott, "I'm a Culture Critic Get Me Out of Here: Amid the smoldering wreckage of popular culture, the author blames Reality TV, which has not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior and murder." (December, p.146)

Inforgraphics: Resurrected, Feared and Seeking Converts

Via Rufus Via Nixta

Heritage as a theme in fashion and brands

Given all the talk of the decline of America's preeminence as well as all the chaos and uncertainty in the world right now it should come as no surprise that people are looking back at earlier times in American life with nostalgia. A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal reported on the "American Heritage" trend in fashion. Varsity sweaters, newsboy caps, tweed, argyle sweater vests, checked shirts and shawl-collar cardigans are all on the comeback.

(WSJ:Designers Mine American Heritage for Rags and Riches)

This may be more accurately described ads the peaking of trends that have been in play for several years now. Things like argyle, have been around for several years now. Lacoste's comeback and Pan Am bags are old news. In New York City bars and restaurants the "hunting lodge" has been in full effect for many years.



Ralph Lauren has always been the master when it comes to capturing and romanticizing American Heritage.

I actually have a theory about the aesthetic narrative of Ralph Lauren for women.

There is a cliche moment in many films, a morning after moment between couples, the woman is dressed in the button up shirt the man had on the night before. There are many ways to read this: symbolic submission, a symbol of their coming together as one. She on some level has crossed over INTO his world

The aesthetic narrative behind Ralph Lauren is that moment on a larger cultural scale. Ralph Lauren leverages iconography and symbolic imagery more effectively than any other fashion brand. It is a storybook narrative of a classic, eastern-seaboard America. A folklore or industrious and wealthy men who's patriarchy is so powerful that even the women's clothes seem fashioned from "his" world from things pulled from "his" drawers.

That ain't no woman, it's a man, baby!
-Austin Powers

(From my essay: The Aesthetic Narrative of Ralph Lauren for Women)







A few years ago Canadian Club wiskey ran a heritage campaign that celebrated dad with the tagline "Damn right your dad drank it". It didn't do very well. I think they were on to something but missed the mark by centering the campaign on dad. Grandpa, more often than dad is the guy esteemed and revered as cool in a young mans eyes.




Related Previous Essays:

Life's Sweet Revenge. Part 1

Life's Sweet Revenge. Part 2: Decadence

Life's Sweet Revenge. Part 3: Pop Decadence, The Candy Macabre and Bourgeois Estate Sale

Facebook and Twitter Stats

Both pieces below Via Hitwise Intelligence:

Facebook accounts for 1 in every 7 UK page views

Facebook accounted for 14.5% of all UK Internet page views during September 2009, equivalent to 1 in every 7. The social network is the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK, but because users view a much larger number of pages per visit, Facebook is the clear leader in terms of page views. As the table below illustrates, it currently receives more page views than Google UK, eBay UK and YouTube combined.

Twittered Out?

On the heels of yesterday's rumor that Twitter is close to securing an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company's valuation in the $1 billion range, I decided to take a quick look at Twitter's market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic.

Another angle on measuring new user adoption is to track the volume of searches on "Twitter." As we can see in both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.

To explore the hypothesis that slowing and now decreasing market share of visits may be attributable to the drop in new users, we can turn to our Experian Hitwise Clickstream report that shows new versus returning users from the top Twitter traffic sources. Here's a table for those traffic sources in April 2009.

Talking the Talk (The language of your target audience)

Pepsi AMP's “Before You Score" iPhone app categorizes women into predictable, unimaginative stereotypes and gives guys pickup lines tailored to each "target". I'm really surprised by the apparent controversy and backlash (Via Mashable: Pepsi and AMP: We Apologize If Our App Was In Bad Taste). It's not shocking. In fact, it's very lame. The stereotypes themselves are cliche and pedestrian: Aspiring Actress, Artist, Bookworm, Goth, Nerd, etc. The girls in the cruddy illustrations — this may be the most revolting element — look like trannys. The copywriting is utterly stupid (the first pickup line for the "princess" type is "I'm so rich my driver has a driver". This is controversial? I wouldn't be surprised if the controversy is manufactured PR.

AMP Energy Website



This does however give me the opportunity to discuss something I've been thinking about, the widening gap between the language of consumers and that of marketers.

Coded language has always served the purpose of creating a differentiating identity that bonds insiders of a group as well as a membrane that keeps outsiders shut out. In general, verbal expression in contemporary culture has become increasingly loaded with color, profanity, shock and appall.

The language of advertising, which always presents a kind of theatricized reality, is constrained not only by federal law but the desire on the part of marketers to say nothing that could possibly offend anyone. The result is an unwillingness or an inability on the part of marketers to speak to their audience the way that members of their audience speak to one another. This becomes painfully apparent when a product or brand aspires to be edgy or is targeted at youth or urban markets. One of the reasons the ironically-sexist advertising for Axe deodorant has been so successful is that it "talks the talk" of its target audience. It talks about what their young male audience talks about — girls — and it does so in a way that makes you feel as if you're listening in on the banter of these kinds of guys. Most advertising, including that bullshit for Pepsi's AMP, doesn't tread anywhere near the reality or voice of their audience. It doesn't even dare to be as provocative as an episode of Entourage, Weeds or even Sex in the City.

See also (previous posts):

Axe Deoderant

Ironic Sexism

Graphic Designer vs client

100 Greatest Hits of YouTube in 4 Minutes

The web-video version of a "clip show". Short form video content condensed and compiled.



Via How It Happened

Technology: Foreseen/Unforeseen: (Mobile Phones & The Segway Scooter)

One of the most fascinating aspects of technology is it's unpredictability. We are about as good at predicting what will stick as we are knowing what will be a smash-hit pop song or movie. Even more confounding are surprising ways in which technology is ultimately adopted and used.

See my previous essay:
Technology and Culture: The foreseen and the unforeseen.

A piece in last month's Economist: Eureka moments: How a luxury item became a tool of global development, discussed the remarkable impact of the mobile phones on developing countries.

How did a device that just a few years ago was regarded as a yuppie plaything become, in the words of Jeffrey Sachs, a development guru at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, “the single most transformative tool for development”? A number of things came together to make mobile phones more accessible to poorer people and trigger the rapid growth of the past few years. The spread of mobile phones in the developed world, together with the emergence of two main technology standards, led to economies of scale in both network equipment and handsets. Lower prices brought mobile phones within reach of the wealthiest people in the developing world. That allowed the first mobile networks in developing countries to be set up, though prices were still high.

Compare the mobile phone initially "regarded as a yuppie plaything" and the Segway scooter. The Segway at the time of it's unveiling was declared a revolutionary invention that would transform the world (in particular developing nations) but has thus far turned out to be a rather silly plaything. In most of my sighting the scooter is being used for marketing promotions. Of course, it may be too early to tell what will become of the Segway. Afterall, if history teaches us anything, it's that nobody knows anything.




Image above from my post titled: Chariots of Hummus

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man