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 Yet as I have mentioned in the past the relation between high-tech products with outdated technologies, in particular their vintage aesthetic, design and materiality, is ambiguous.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:

Walter's Idea, Google's Project and a few (elitist) thoughts

In the 1930s a man called Walter predicted that as technologies of reproduction would expand, the aura of art would wither. So much so that with everyone owning a version of the Mona Lisa, art (as a Bourgeois elitist enterprise) would not longer exist. Walter was a marxist with big ideals. And obviously in today's context of Picassos selling for billions and every cellphone including lenses, he could very easily be discarded as have been heavily mistaken. Yet he's cited by everyone everywhere, and it is not only his terms that are used and quoted but his actual motivations and beliefs - as Google has shown with their new Art Project.

It's a website where Google has scanned in very very high resolution amazingness with high tech machines greatness some important museums' collections and spaces. This is how the employees of Google describe their aspirations with the Art Project: "It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close."

Isn't the trust of Walter and of Google employees in visual reproductive technology and imagery not only as enabling larger access to more people but also better access to more people stunning? And I don't disagree. I myself enjoyed going through the halls of the Prado (that I've never been there) - although got fed up quickly - and I've never seen a Van Gogh brushstroke quite like that before. But who cares? The people who don't have access to museums, those mentioned by Google's art loving employees? There's a cultural capital to quote Bourdieu in wanting to see art which I fear will exclude many. However in the cultural capital there is also a behavioral protocol in experiencing art, that the Art Project dissolves entirely. Indeed if one thing is for sure is that the Art Project versus the Museum experience is like facebook or porn versus stalking an ex-boyfriend's house or the actual sexual act - there's not pressure to perform a proper social behavior. Although, honestly museums have done a great job at making record entries, and adding restaurants, stores and lounge-like areas to make their spaces more accessible in recent years. So was it necessary? Some even complain about the dumbing down, the infotainment of contemporary museums and exhibitions.

Furthermore seeing art frontally isn't what art is all about, truthfully. Zooming on the skull of the Ambassadors is one thing, but unable to position oneself differently to ultimately see the perspectival trick that made the painting famous is another. Furthermore excluding all the other senses that are at play in the museum space and that are so fundamental to their 'artness' again seems like reducing art quite dramatically. The anthropologist Contance Classen might even say that the Art Project is the latest in Modernity's plan to make everything appear most real when rationally organized in an ocular-centric way (versus multi-sensorially experienced). For example, how about the clinical cleanliness of the Louvre, the decaying ceilings of the Hermitage (that clash with the Matisses so wonderfully), the over heating and noise of the MoMA and the Tate Modern's unique smell of humidity that are such fantastic ways to think about objects and their agency over people's actions.

This might sound elitst, but the Art Project seems to be far from a generous act but rather a marketing coup for Google to gain cultural (capital) credit.

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:

The nonsensical advertisements before a Dicaprio Blockbuster and French McDonalds is said to have Macaroons

I saw Inception last night at the MK2 Odéon. The plot-line - a dream within a dream within another dream - was a genius marketing move broadening the range of the flick's target audience exponentially (from Matrix lovers to chick flick freaks) and the characters were as flat (a wannabe James Bond stud and a miserable Japanese version of the evil turn good guy) as much as their relations improbable (Juno as therapist?).

If that could have been expected, if not calculated, it's actually the advertisement and preview period before the movie that was the best and most disconcerting experience of my time in front of the screen. It reminded me I was paying to be sold things, and gave me the shitty feeling that either I should have downloaded it or that I was suppose to be a sexually open-minded 13 year old geek with a love for green-conscious fast food.

Demonstration:

Targeted towards teens, preferably geeks, the first ads are by SFR and promote their phones' games with animated Princess Peach and her other forgotten gameboy friends. Check here. I might be totally out of the loop but what in the world is it promoting? good friendships? SFR's lack of cool? Nostalgia for Mario World? Not sure? Me neither. After seeing three versions of that same concept, McDonalds kicked in with their new bio friendly image: lush tomatoes collected meticulously by a McDo employer and brought in every morning fresh in a wooden box merged with happy meal boxes entering a miserable city filled with miserable black puffy things who, by the mere presence of happy meals, change into colorful dancing puffy things:  



What's going on? Is it really that straightforward: buy a happy meal and you will be happy? Is it for parents? Rare McDo eaters? Rare to never McDo eaters (I didn't leave convinced)? Kids? Sad people? After that and my neighbor telling me McDo menus have now salads, biological yogurts and also macaroons (which by shape is just like a hamburger), this soft porn artsy indie Mexican preview played. If most likely American censors would have banned it from the eyes of any adult under 21, what is weirder is that someone must have thought that placing it after Princess Peach animations selling games on cellphones and happy meals' happiness was a good move.


 
and then bam Dicap was in a dream.

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.