ICONSMASHER

Cafe Press + American Idol

I love Cafe Press.  Not necessarily as a place to buy stuff, mind you, but as a fantastic expression of the cultural zeitgeist.  I love seeing people’s creativity (and plagiarism) and the capitalist drive at work. No event is too minor that some entreprenurial type hasn’t thought to stick it on a T-shirt.

I nearly worked with Cafe Press when I was at Organic. They have gone through a couple of management cycles since then, and they have clearly improved their merchanding.  Tonight I am using number of T-shirt designs proferred to predict the American Idol finalists.  Based on this survey, it’s going to be Adam Lambert (559 designs) vs. Danny Gokey (374 designs) in the final, and not, surprisingly, Kris Allen (262 designs).

Update: per Newsday and The Davie Brown Index, brand reseach confirms my hypothesis!

“Basically, each celebrity gets an overall ranking, which is based on how test audiences scored them on eight things: Appeal, aspiration, awareness, endorsement, influence, breakthrough, trendsetter, and trust.”

Rating/Person
91.28 Barack Obama
90.85 Will Smith
89.92 George Clooney
87.46 Angelina Jolie

81.52 Elvis Presley
80.77 Carrie Underwood
79.68 Justin Timberlake
78.92 Kelly Clarkson
78.87 Miley Cyrus
78.59 Britney Spears
74.55 Michael Jackson
71.80 Clay Aiken
66.17 Mick Jagger
64.84 Jordin Sparks
63.45 Kanye West
61.10 David Cook
58.64 Chris Daughtry
57.70 David Archuleta
44.12 Fantasia

46.47 Adam Lambert
46.46 Anoop Desai
44.24 Danny Gokey
41.27 Lil Rounds
39.62 Allison Iraheta
39.26 Kris Allen
37.29 Matt Giraud

Amazon Kindle 2.0 = Fail

Amazon’s big annoucement is out today- a redesign of the Kindle.  On the face of it, this is a story about the power of design.  While Tim Brown of IDEO singled out Kindle 1.0 as an example of poor design (sorry Bob Brunner/Ammunition) that in turn hobbled adoption, Kindle 2.0 is a Frog Design re-envisioning, basically Mac-ifying the form factor with rounded buttons and a slimmer profile that immediately invited (favorable) comparisons to the iPhone 3G.

Still, I think most coverage misses the point.  The secret of the iPod is not the form factor- it’s iTunes. Anyone can replicate the industrial design (as the Kindle proves)- but no iPod competitor can replicate the delivery mechanism for the content. WalMart, Amazon and other have tried, to no avail.  Kindle’s secret sauce is WhisperNet, not the reader itself.  I think Amazon made a big tactical mistake in not lowering the price ($359), especially in this economy.  They should be following the razor & blade model - building unassailable market share in eBooks and taking a loss on the hardware if necessary.  Mark my words, a re-designed Kindle, no matter how slick, is just not going to move the needle in terms of attracting a wider user base.

I'm Calling the Next American Idol

It’s Adam Lambert.

He’s got the looks, the personality, and the kid can sing.

This notwithstanding (and maybe because of) the minuscule coverage he has received so far on Season 8. You could tell when he walked into his first audition that the judges loved him already. He has a very timely pansexual quality- think Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy.

The only potential snag: can he be the first (openly?) gay winner?

Pepsuber Meta-Advertising

I love SNL (lately- and it’s only tolerable on Tivo), I love Will Forte, and honestly I think the most out-of-the-box and therefore effective Superbowl ad was Pepsi’s three-part riff off the MacGruber sketches. Very memorable, and I love the nudge-and-a-wink “we know that you know that you’re being advertised to”.

Peter Arnell calls it “un-advertising”, but I think a better word is meta-advertising. Just right for the kind of jaded sophisticates who watch SNL in the first place. My only question- are these people Pepsi drinkers? My thought is that most viewers (like me) are too old to drink a full-calorie soda.

Unfriend Me!

As usual, Crispin Porter’s latest campaign has tapped into something deep in the pop culture zeitgeist. I don’t mean to trivialize it- they are genius at the frivilous- it’s just hard to know whether that the same thing as effective marketing.  I’m talking of course about Whopper Sacrifice. 

Today’s NYT takes it to the next level of analysis- what does it mean to have more “friends” than friends in the world of social networking? I had a personal experience with this via LinkedIn this week -a “friend” contacted me about a rec for a job at Organic.  He had a cartoon for a photo and I didn’t recognize him at all. I had to ask him directly how we know each other- very embarassing- and kind of cover it up by offering to help him out anyway.

I explored this a little bit about two years ago when developing a combination trend forecasting/persona development product at Organic. One of our predictions is that people would want tool to manage social media lenses- multi-personalities and levels of access to their “friends”- their party boy persona, their business persona, their Second Life persona etc. This is precisely one of the suggestions from blogger Henry Blodget in the article.

Male Bonding

Few things are more fascinating to me than trends in popular culture. The latest trend to bubble up- “bromances”. Honestly I think the beginning of the trend (in recent times) was Brokeback Mountain, even though the most recent incarnations (MTV’s Bromance, TNT’s Trust Me, Dreamworks’ I Love You, Man) are all about two straight guys who, uh, happen to enjoy one another’s company.

My first glimmer that this whole thing had legs was the relationship between (gay) Ronnie and (ostensibly straight) Ben on Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel. Something about their friendship/sexual tension clearly appealed to the young female demo that supported the show- they both stuck around until the very end despite otherwise inferior talent. So to me it’s a misreading to that this is a genre that men want to see, but rather about what women find sexy and appealing. It ties back to the NYT Magazine article on What Do Women Want. At least according to plethysmograph studies (a plastic probe that sits inside the vagina and measures genital blood flow), women find two men together (subliminally) hot.

MediaWeek has this round-up:

Career Advice to Myself

Sometimes I lose sight of why I am interested in design, experience design, new product development, customer insights, digital innovation- whatever it is I do. I despair (and rejoice) that there are no elders in this field and there is definitely a very poorly defined career path. Then every now and then one of these design institutions actually comes through. Listen to this Design Global Agenda Council Manifesto (ugh) written in Dubai (double ugh) for Davos (triple) via Bruce Nussbaum:

“ON DESIGN

Throughout history, design has been an agent of change. It helps us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to turn them to our advantage by translating them into things that can make our lives better. Now, at a time of crisis and unprecedented change in every area of our lives – economic, political, environmental, societal and in science and technology – design is more valuable than ever.

The crisis comes at a time when design has evolved. Once a tool of consumption chiefly involved in the production of objects and images, design is now also engaged with developing and building systems and
strategies, and in changing behaviour often in collaboration with different disciplines.

Design is being used to:
· Gain insight about people’s needs and desires
· Build strategic foresight to discover new opportunities
· Generate creative possibilities
· Invent, prototype and test novel solutions of value
· Deliver solutions into the world as innovations adopted at scale

In the current climate, the biggest challenges for design and also its greatest opportunities are:

· Well-being – Design can make an important contribution to the redefinition and delivery of social services by addressing acute problems such as ageing, youth crime, housing and health. Many
designers are striving to enable people all over the world to lead their lives with dignity, especially the deprived majority of the global population - “the other 90%” who have the greatest need of
design innovation.

· Sustainability – Designers can play a critical role in ensuring that products, systems and services
are developed, produced, shipped, sold and will eventually be disposed of in an ethically and environmentally responsible manner. Thereby meeting - and surpassing - consumers’ expectations.

· Learning – Design can help to rebuild the education system to ensure that it is fit for purpose in the
21st Century. Another challenge is to redefine or reorient the design education system at a time of unprecedented demand when thousands of new design schools are being built worldwide and design is increasingly being integrated into other curricula. Designers are also deploying their skill at communication and visualization to explain and interpret the overwhelming volume of extraordinary
complex information.

. Innovation – Designers are continuing to develop and deliver innovative new products at a turbulent time when consumer attitudes are changing dramatically thereby creating new and exciting
entrepreneurial opportunities in the current crisis. They are increasingly using their expertise to innovate in new areas such as the creation of new business models and adoption of a strategic and
systemic role in both the public and the private sector.”

Social Media Predictions 2009

Reading Peter Kim’s Social Media Predictions 2009 roll-up of various Social Media gurus while I wait for my new Mac to finish target disk-ing with my old Mac. Net: look for a “conversational ecosystem” from brands, not just a Twitter program. Look for humans to supplement automation.

Like this quote from Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Online: “Along the way, we’ll rediscover timeless truths: friendship must be earned, fame is fleeting, excess begets backlash, it always pays to listen, and credibility is our most enduring marketing asset.”