Reclaiming Public Spaces

With more and more of our public spaces being inundated with Urban Spam, there have been many attempts to reclaim these places. Sao Paulo did it with legislation that banned billboards. In many places though citizens are taking up cudgels on behalf of the city. Graffiti Research Lab has been running many events where they superimpose slideshows on billboards at night. Anti advertising Agency has been working hard to bring sanity to the streets by identifying and talking about stuff that shouldn’t be there. Google CD and former advertising professional Ji Lee started The Bubble Project many years ago to give people the power to participate in the conversation with advertising in cities. Now there is Public Ad Campaign, a guerilla art project, that is a civil disobedience movement against public spaces being taken up for advertising. Many cities are seeing more and more onground advertising that is taking advantage of the downturn to turn many unused advertising spaces, like shuttered storefronts being converted into advertising spaces. Read more on the Public Ad Campaign blog.

Puma’s Out Of The Box Thinking

Retail has seen a lot of changes in the past few years. The famed Prada Marfa experiment has got a lot of coverage, even in this newsletter. Now it is time for Puma, with an unboxed idea that had been catching up in many cities of Europe recently, using old shipping containers to set up homes, offices and retail stores, like this one that came up on Boston’s Fan Pier. With the kind of crowds you see in the pictures, this one created a lot of buzz. Using 24 used shipping containers Puma set up shop quickly, cheaply and effectively it seems. Read more.

See The Ads You Want To See

If you are a Firefox user you must have heard of AdBlock Plus. An add-on that blocks out banner ads on the sites you visit. Now if you think you have figured out a way to filter out banner ads you will be surprised to know that Ad Block Plus is the most downloaded add-on on Firefox with some 700,000 downloads a week. So there is a real movement from people wanting to take control of their browsing experience. But there is a debate raging, most notably one started by Wladimir Palant the creator of the add-on. He recently wrote about his proposal for a fair adblocking approach one where the user has the option of unblocking ads from some sites he visits often. Slate joined in the debate with a well thought out approach that tells advertisers to create less intrusive and more sharply targeted advertising that deliver real benefits to people who access sites. Read the story in Slate.

Apps As Advertising

With over one billion apps downloaded for the iPhone, and Nokia Blackberry and Android joining the app bandwagon, there is merit in believing that creating a useful app that works on phones and desktops could be the way to integrate advertising on to mobile phones. Brands like Uniqlo, Adidas, Burger King and Audi have had some success with ads disguised as apps as this story in Ad Age tells us. So is your next ad, an app?

The Diesel Unwatch

What time, which brands.
Brand Timeline Portraits. An interesting take.

Beyond The Website

If you are a brand planning to build a website to support a campaign or otherwise, you may like to look at this bit from AdAge. From destination web to online enlightenment. Unlike in the past where people were flocking brand websites for information and other details, new trends show that people are picking up this information from other sources online. In March, the average American visited 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What’s worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing about 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention. We are far more likely to take action when reading online articles that include brand information (51%) compared with search-engine advertising (39%) or banner ads (25%). Read the story in AdAge.

Dell Swarm

Long known as a distribution innovator, Dell is once again rolling out a new service which allows online users to act as a purchase cooperative. When enough users commit to buying a computer together (say 15 users), they get the bulk price. The price incentive will spur more sales, and the social aspect of the virtual coop will be a multiplier. It’s an idea that has been tossed around since the beginning of the Internet, and there have been a few attempts to see it through, most notably with MobShop and Paul Allen funded Mercata, but none of them could survive through the dot com days. In fact one of the reasons why Mobshop failed, it’s customers being too diverse could be the reason why Dell Swarm could work. With choices limited to its own products, Dell could have hit upon an idea that takes its distribution innovation to the next level. Dell Swarm opened its doors in Singapore, its first market, last week.

From Luxury To Necessity

From the kitchen to the laundry room to the home entertainment center, Americans are paring down the list of familiar household appliances they say they can’t live without, according to a new national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project. No longer do substantial majorities of the public say a microwave oven, a television set or even home air-conditioning is a necessity. Instead, nearly half or more now see each of these items as a luxury. Similarly, the proportion that considers a dishwasher or a clothes dryer to be essential has dropped sharply since 2006. Along with a new creed of thrift, there’s another factor — technology adoption — that appears to be shaping public judgments about some of these items. Take cell phones. A relative newcomer in the everyday lives of most Americans, the cell phone is among a handful of newer gadgets that has held its own on the necessity scale from 2006 to 2009. Moreover, it may have contributed to a drop in necessity ratings for the older-era appliances it has partially supplanted. Read and download a copy of the report here.

Reimagining Failure

A theory is gaining momentum that looks at failure differently. Failure, it says, is at worst a mixed blessing: It hurts, but can pay off in the form of learning and growth and wisdom. Some psychologists, like the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt, go even further, arguing that adversity, setbacks, and even trauma may actually be necessary for people to be happy, successful and fulfilled. "Post-traumatic growth," it’s sometimes called. Its observers are building a solid foundation under the anecdotes about wildly successful people who credit their accomplishments to earlier failures that pushed them to the edge of the abyss. Steve Jobs, JK Rowling, Michel Jordan – watch his ode to failure in this classic Nike commercial. Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison all have failed and failed hard to become what they have. Read the story in Psychology Today.

Coke Summer Cans

Also of note, the new Coke commercial from Mother London.