Greenpeace Toys with the Innocence of Childhood

After the publicized success of Ken's breakup with Barbie earlier this month - the revelation her packaging contributes to tropical deforestation annihilating all the lust left in Ken's heart, - Greenpeace has again used the joyful innocence associated to childhood to better reveal environmental horrors. If their use of Barbie was entirely their initiative, their campaign 'Dark Side' is based on Volkswagen's latest ad for their new Passat. In the Greenpeace campaign the young endearing Dark Vador trying to animate everyday objects gets swapped for a young yet evil Dark Vador backed by a float of polluting earth killers that must fight an adorable group with young Leila, young Luke, young Droids, young R2- D2, young C-3PO, young Chewbacca and more...

Pretty cute and pretty successful at attacking a brand with a four start branding history (Volkswagen) and a toy every girl under the age of 60 has played with (Barbie):

The Funniest Use of Personal Digital Branding: Harper's Adorable Kitten

The realisation that in less than two weeks more than the equivalent of two thirds of his nation's population had seen the video 'mom cat hugs baby kitten (having a nightmare)' must have sparked somekind of fabulous lightbulb within the Canadian Prime Minister's personal branding team; something like adorable kittens do well at making things go viral and our client (Harper), although viral, is anything but adorable so let's try to use that 'insight' and make Harper adorable.

A few days later they came up with a facebook status and an album - "We have a new family member, a grey tabby, what do you think he should be named? Nous avons un nouveau membre de la famille. comment devrions-nous l'appeler?"

Interested in helping Harper? Go to Harper's personal facebook page before midnight or else Stanley will be the attributed winner. Not interested in helping the Harpers baptize their new grey tabby or contribute to the 505 messages left by the kitten's friends? Then at least go check out Stephen Harper's profile picture and discover what a Harper family picnic looks like:

http://www.facebook.com/pmharper

The Anti-Modern Twist Take II with Citroën

New technologies enable new behaviors, relations and expectations by dissolving old ones. Yet as I have mentioned in the past the relation between high-tech products with outdated technologies, in particular their vintage aesthetic, design and materiality, is ambiguous. For example the iphone has a successful camera producing endless quantities of high pixelised images, yet the iphone's hipstamatic application - that creates unfocused, variable, blurry photographs with vintage polaroid boarders - is a true success story. Why would anyone want blurry versus high-def?

The potential reasons are multiple. Maybe newness is too overwhelming, too ever-changing, and there is a certain desire to use more tamed and defunct technologies. Like the hipstamatic's recent reappearance, over the past decade the sales of vinyls that were in decrease since the 1970s, have been increasing. A desire for materiality? A desire for material looking?

But this doesn't mean that vinyls are replacing music downloads or that hipstamatic pictures are replacing the classic high-def iphone ones. Rather this nostalgia for rudimentary objects from the past is ironically more an addition to novelty - the hipstamatic necessitates the iphone and the vinyl necessitates the downloads to convince it is worth buying.

This Irish ad for Citroën banks on something similar the coolness of the past to sell the new:

Prisoner Stripes, Marine Stripes, Referee Stripes, Fashionable Stripes: Nike Soccer Stripes for the French Team

Les marins portent des marinières pour être repérés si ils tombent à l'eau, Coco Chanel l'anticonformiste en avait fait son uniforme, les prisonniers les ont en noir pour être reconnaissables si ils tentent de s'échapper, et les arbitres se soumettent au même modèle pour se différencier des joueurs. Récemment le renouveau des râyures dans la mode de tous les jours a vaguement changé la donne, mais il reste vrai que les râyures sont une manière élégante de se mettre en avant. 

Picasso l'avait compris, maintenant Nike le reprend pour l'équipe française de football.

Rien de mieux pour redorer un blason sportif que d'avoir de beaux joueurs à la mode qui courent.

What is Levi's Up to When Simply Reproducing History is so Trendy?

Opening Ceremony is collaborating (again). With Levi's again. 

The video launched for the occasion is touching with a cake and a playful kiss, short skirts and cute accidents all happening in a little white-cube house, but the clothes seem really secondary. I get that Levi's is confused and needs the trendy power of OC to feel hip again, but I think that instead of producing a few pretty unnecessary items to be associated with Opening Ceremony, Levi's should have engaged in a now very common branding maneuver: look back (on its own) to reproduce some of their old collections. Like Mr.Oizo's Sta-Prest or their Twisted (greatest jeans of all time) collection which (unlike their past collaboration with OC which is on sale) would last more than a season:

Opening Ceremony (aw... adorable colour coordination, clothes?):

Sta-Prest (great ad, interesting outfit):

Twisted Collection (weird ad, great pants):

The Phenomenology of White: Trying to Think Differently About Bleached Models and Real Estate

Last week Cathy Horn, fashion writer for the New York Times, argued that the fashion world gets off the idea of pushing boundaries, when actually there aren't any to push (nothing new under the sun, Foucault said similar things about Western sexuality some fifty odd years ago), and uses Givenchy's latest advertisement featuring Stephen Thompson - an albino model - as an example. 

Although he may never have produced melanin ever, seems like overall low melanin secretion isn't a bad thing when it comes to success in fashion. And Miu Miu's winter bleached eyebrows campaign, Lara Stone's pigments or Thompson's apparently just as melanin-less co-model in the ad aren't going against the phenomenon. Which got me into thinking why? What does white have that the other colours don't?

The study of colour value and colour perception is an old one that, with the advent of post-modernity's concerns for societal causes, went out of politically correct and academic style. For centuries this field followed Plato’s distinction between mind and body. Similarly to René Descartes' ideas, it was understood that the world of appearances was one of allusions as opposed to the world of thought in which ideal and universal forms existed. For Descartes accordingly the perception of colour was like any other experience of tangible substance: an automatic process itself worth studying but insignificant in the greater pursuit of selfhood and truth.

While this Cartesian dualism has received severe criticism because equating 'objective' colour seeing to 'physical' measurements (such as the Munsell chart, NeCoSyn or the Swedish Color System) excludes the less tangible implications informed by culture and context (problems of objectivity basically), the opposite end of the purely quantitive pendulum is close to a similar intellectual dead-end. What anthropologist Daniel Miller coined the tyranny of the word - a theoretical stand point in which all material things are studied and understood as projections of something else. As a result white doesn't 'just' exist in itself, it is standing in for something else - the biased aesthetic standard of a European colonizer, or the pre-pubescent innocence of childhood and birth (because of things like the 'universal' colour of breast milk and sperm). In other words these two approaches deny "the emotion and desire, the sensuality and danger and hence the expressive potential that colours possess themselves" (Young: 174). A kind of phenomenology of white.

What are the emotions attached to white? Albinos are killed in Tanzania, white hair is dull in Canada but aristocratic in Guatemala. White also reminds me of wedding dresses and real estate. White wedding dresses appeared under the Victorian era. Real estate because I read an ethnography in which London apartments with white walls sold for more than the ones equivalent in size but with, say, girlie pink walls and green bathroom wallpaper. The author/anthropologist argued that white on the market makes for a better sale because it is easier to identify to something that lacks the presence of past occupants. Which brings us back the wedding dress (remember the whole virginity thing?) - a historical construction.

So I don't know, really, is what it comes down to. Beyond ideologies rooted in biased universalist aspirations or in over-exploited identity politics, is there an agency to white? Something that intrinsically belongs to it that results in low melanin secreting people being more appropriate models (and better sellers of things)?

Benetton "Tribe (Albino)" 1992. Photography: Yves Gellie, Advertising: Oliviero Toscani

Lady Dior's Universalism

Sometimes trying to impact too many markets, even in this globalized economy, isn't that great. Sadly I feel like Dior abused the rather charming concept of their first Lady Dior campaign, turning Marion Cotillard into an impersonal looking model/doll and their bags into cheap commodities.

After Marion Cotillard clutching to her life (read her black Lady Dior bag in Paris) on the Eiffel Tower, Marion Cotillard singing with Franz Ferdinand and strolling with nostalgia (read her red Lady Dior in NYC) along the Hudson River and Marion Cotillard in Shanghai dealing with drama (read her blue Lady Dior), here is the video version of Marion Cotillard with her grey Lady Dior too photoshoped to look not like herself in London's Eye.

Dior presents Marion Cotillard as a cabaret star/muse/healer/saint and proud owner of the grey Lady Dior as well as Dior pens and Dior flasks in London and all in grey.

Porselli Ballerinas: Authentic, Timeless and Decay, How to Insure the Consumer Will Consume Again

These ballerinas are the result of a collaboration between Collection Privée and Porselli, the equivalent of Italy's France's Repetto. The Italians are a little late on the whole ballerina come-back collaboration thing - an on-going trend spearheaded by Repetto owner (and ex-Reebok VP) Jean-Marc Gaucher. Gaucher is smart and banked right into a now common branding strategy: he stressed Repetto's authenticity (we have been making dance shoes since the 1930s) and gave it edge with exclusive collaborations. In 1999, when Gaucher bought Repetto, the company was near bankruptcy but his séries limitées and exclusive deals with Comme des Garçons, Vanessa Beecroft, Colette, Opening Ceremony or Rodarte have led the company to record 27 million euros in profit in 2008. Not bad in a decade when the rest of the European industry survived by offshoring.

Needless to say not offshoring is in many ways a very good thing. I am also a victim of Gaucher's and Bardot's charm and believe ballerinas (and Mary Janes) to be the next best thing to come out of the 50s for women after de Beauvoir. But the reason for Repetto's survival is part of a current within contemporary consumption patterns that isn't as charming. 

Today's consumers reward products linked to notions of authenticity ("the piece has a history"), quality ("this is a lasting") and timelessness ("the is a classic piece") or at least products with the image of being such. Paradoxically however today's fashion makers find money and fashion buyers find meaning from trends that are as short-lived as possible. The shorter the better - apparently more trends means more sales and more outfits means more identity. While I'm suspect of such logic it's obvious that if Repetto stops producing new collaborations to increase sales and stay hip, the consumer will in all likelihood forget about the timeless qualities of the Repetto and rapidly adorn its feet with Porselli such as these:  a pair that is (illustration) totally banking on its 'timeless' credentials by literally accelerating the time process (aka decaying) the shoes.

Buying new decayed shoes means that if they haven't been replaced by another collaboration resulting in an other authentic timeless and quality pair, the consumer will have no other option but to replace the pair because of its uselessness (read - unwalkable). Brands are so scared (as if they should) that their marketing and trend producing devices wouldn't sellout their next season that they preemptively ruin their creations so that consumers to HAVE to buy new. And shoes aren't the only pieces affected by this trend - the torn tights, the ragged jeans, the bobby-pinned jackets, the see-thru cotton aged t-shirts, and the list goes on.

In present day fashion, time, its value and its look, seem to be a very convoluted dialectic - the look of decay is in because it rings authentic, although authenticity is only a manufactured concept originating in our present, and repairs might be the most timeless activity there is in costume yet it is overrated because our time is directed by an endless appetite for consumption from fear of our future's lack (of money, of identity). 

Time for a new model (and I'm not talking about ending anorexia)?
Brigitte Bardot, originally a dancer, allegedly asked Rose Repetto in 1956 to conceive shoes as light and comfortable as her chausson de dance but sexier. Rose added the heel and voilà the Cendrillon was born:

CNN Turkey and Jacques Villeglé

CNN, an American info channel, might have been in need of refurbishing it's image in the somewhat Middle Eastern country of Turkey (aka we are American but we don't take sides), and as a result CNN Turkey has come up this advertisement campaign with tagline ''Stories with the full background'' (found at Wooster Collective). 

I don't know if the ads aptly represent the media company's stance in the country, but I find the images to be great.

They remind me of Jacques Villeglé (Rues Desprez et Vercingétorix - “La Femme”, 1966):

Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson Commercial: Branding the next Pabst Blue Ribbon

What beer comes after Pabst Blue Ribbon's underground cheap appeal withers? After the Pabst Blue Ribbon drinker gets a job, a vespa and a bachelor pad in Paris? Stella Artois seems to think it should: once the hipster blooms into a full grown (childfree) bobo (bohemian bourgeois), he will want Stella (and date French cute women). mon amour: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola for Stella Artois.

Lineups, Feeling Different and Dumping the Disc: Apple Marketing 101

Today Apple introduced the world to its redesigned iTunes symbol. Someone in their marketing department decided it was time to get rid of the CD that's hiding behind musical note. Who's uses CDs these days? Jobs doesn't.

Because I'm still not entirely over how the marketing geniuses that managed to create lineups for their new iphone came up with this boring logo, here's the totally iconic 1984 ad by Steve Hayden. 

It came out in 1984 to introduce the first Apple Macintosh personal Computer. A 'different' computer from the PC... Now people are lining up to be different. Which makes 1984 iconic and ironic.

Nike Air Max 90 Ad: An analysis of the Shoe Collector's Core Values

After "Write the Future," Wieden and Kennedy launched a new commercial for the Nike Air Max 90 shoe in the UK. Entitled "I am the Rules" this is a one minute film of clean, concise, energized and assured images. If the symmetrical geometry of each frame and beat-based music are powerful factors to this effect, the colours are just as important: the six colours of the exclusively designed for Footlocker shoe are used throughout the ad, with black, grey and white as base, and colza, red and violet as decorative highlights.

If at first the whole thing feels like a mish-mash of rule-breaking attitude, it's unsurprisingly filled with stereotypical ideas (that sell) about tradition, innovation and respect. How are these materialized?

During the first few seconds of the clip we are introduced to the very majestic notion of time and history - somewhat of sports, but also in general with the a shadow clocking away, the iconography of kingdoms lost and of traditions forgotten (aka the projection of the colosseum). Then, skipping through a few centuries, we are facing present-time sport brands' favorite athletes - the consuming shoe collector - commanding the video with his remote control. From then on things get a little crazy, when intercutting slow motion and rapid shots of various activities paralleled with statements about defying tradition (by dancing hip hop or being a girl boxer), expectations (screaming at microphones/media) and stereotypes (wear Nike instead of suits) are presented. The guys who created hip-hip might be 60 by now and blowing up in front of media not so revolutionary (or appreciated by brands like Nike see Tiger Woods or Les Bleus), but these ideas look great. The weirdest thing is when the ad turns to illustrating how to defy prejudice via Nike shoes. They come up with two Brian Jungenian masks, a DIY time machine from Japan with flags waving and lighting fire crackers over an athlete in front of the projection of the amphitheater. 

Really defying your idea of prejudice, right?

"I AM THE RULES"

Branding Auras: the Charity of Painting

While working on an ethnographic project for a marketing firm on young adults' relation to new media, we observed obvious things like cellphones kept on at all times out of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), but also realized how very knowledgeable young westerners are about the mechanisms of advertising.

They are hyperaware of how branding works and the extent to which brands need them to consume - and as such want something in exchange. This exchange isn't based on the actual material product (aka comfortable shoes, an efficient computer or quality beer) but rather on the immaterial aura the product discloses: Vans'  authenticity, Appel's creativity or Milwaukee Dry's freedom from branding. While brands are freaking out about the end of television, many are seemingly loosing precious time on creating new auras.

A not so recent but beautifully executed campaign to give a rather unglamourous product a new meaningful aura is the British paint company Dulux and its Let's Colour Project.

Now instead of just painting your kitchen you can also feel like your partaking in an International Development Studies action. In a similar way as success story  Toms shoes, the brand has put the idea of charity and community empowerment into consumption. While I'm far from critiquing brands that have a social consciousness, there is something slightly uncanny about enhancing a product's aura by appropriating a community's poverty.

Either way here is a beautiful and powerful rendition of how something as simple as paint can do more than colour walls.