The Aesthetic

While looking for this great online article by Wired Chris Anderson on Abundance, I stumbled upon this longer article on the economics of free by the same author. Both are incredibly thought-provoking.

If you walk up to an intersection and don’t press the “Walk” button because you feel that the person already there must have done so, it is almost certain that they haven’t.

You know, there might have been a time when it made sense to criticize newspapers for accepting advertising on their front pages, but that time is long past. These guys need to do what it takes to survive, and if that means covering half their front page with an ad for Sears, then so be it. It’s particularly amusing to see these papers getting hammered over these decisions from online critics whose own website home pages are so riddled with ads that one can hardly get their eyes to adjust to the noise. Even worse, I have yet to see a newspaper run a pop-up ad. So, really, web critics really have no ground to stand on.

I remember well the dawn of time, when I learned that this blogging thing — or whatever we were calling it back then — was something that might be fun, there were two website in particular that fanned my creativity. One was called Textism, the other Fireland. Both were run by creative types and had this amazing cleverness combined with restraint. Well both have fallen into total disfunction, and yet the authors of both have taken their awesomeness to Twitter (here and here). No real life lessons here, but worth noting when the people who were ahead of the curve on blogs are now on a totally different platform.

You have to love a site that begins:

You know when you wake up with a cold sweat in the middle of the night screaming out through the darkness and cursing the heavens that there is no website that has every surfboard logo ever made in alphabetical order? Well, your nightmares are reality NO MORE!!

And then they proceed to back it up.

I’ve long been a huge fan of the Dos Equis ad campaign highlighting “The most interesting man in the world.” So how great it was to find this article in Slate describing all the things that make this campaign particularly clever.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the most interesting man, in marketing terms, is his ambivalence toward the advertised product. “I don’t always drink beer,” he says. Whaa? “But when I do,” he adds, almost offhandedly, “I prefer Dos Equis.” Double whaa? Generally, a brand icon will be an all-out cheerleader. Imagine Tony the Tiger admitting that he doesn’t always eat cereal for breakfast, but that when he does, he tends to eat Frosted Flakes, like, most of the time. Doesn’t have quite the same impact as “They’re Grrrrrrreat!”

Here’s the latest ad via YouTube:

This is the hardest lesson in branding, this idea that no matter what you do — advertising, taglines, earned media, lawyers — you really don’t get to decide what other people think of you. We’ve got another lesson in that this week with the attempt by some to change the name of Swine Flu to something else. Give it up, people. It’s been named, and you can’t unname it. It isn’t N1H1 Flu, it’s Swine Flue. Move on and do something productive.

Anyone who calls anything “the bomb” is not a serious person.

For the record, quotation marks are only to be used to indicate words that someone actually said and to indicate something that the author understands is not accurate, or even ironic. Which makes a blog such as Unnecessary Quotes all the more vital.

For those who believe that every great speech requires an accompanying PowerPoint presentation, I offer this. Enough said.