The new year is likely to be a volatile one for many players in the beer industry. Miller and Coors are planning to merge their U.S. operations, the leading imports are scrambling to regain lost momentum, prices will rise and commodity costs will soar. And with its own turmoil hopefully behind it, Anheuser-Busch is looking to take advantage of the situation by ramping up spending on its core brands.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Once a bastion of tech barons, consumer-electronics retailers and data-drive-hyping journalists, this year's Consumer Electronics Show will also be brimming with marketers.
WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) — Not only did Iowa deliver a blow to the presumptive leaders in each party, it also roughed up a few bits of conventional wisdom.
Steffan Postaer has taken to writing about his agency, Euro RSCG/Chicago, and other topics, on his new blog, Gods of Advertising. The blog’s subhead is “We make you want what you don’t need.”
One of Postaer’s first posts, “The True Meaning of Integration” paints of pretty rosy picture (but hey, cheerleading is part of the job).
Integration. Unification. Call it what you will. As many of you know I’ve likened it to being on a submarine: We’re at sea. We’re at battle. We’re in this thing together. Because that’s what it’s all about: Working Together. That’s what the word “integration†originally meant before all these holding companies got a hold of it.
And so here we are, art directors, writers, planners and suits. Working more and more together, more and more everyday. Sharing our experience, strength and hope. And while I’m sure we’re too busy to sit around and complain, do any of us realize how rare community like this is? And how blessed we all are to have it? I know I’m blessed. And I have you and Euro RSCG to thank for it. A few years ago this place was like the island of misfit toys. And now look at us! It’s Christmas and we’ve this great big tree to celebrate it under!
For more tangible proof of our integration we have only to look at one of our very finest creative business ideas in 2007. It was a piece of advertising copy written by an art director who usually works on direct. Effen is a five-letter word, created by Bernardo Gomez.
I’m not convinced that an art director writing a nice line is “integration,” but I do like Postaer’s teamwork theme and the call for cross-discipline pollination.
Are “real” journalist’s capable of writing moving ad copy? I say, yes. And Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times is my proof.
Let’s watch her role with this lurid product description…
Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side; it roots for the writer and not for the final product — the stubborn Word. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.â€
Ring, scrap and cork sound like fun, a Montessori playroom. But read on — and download the free trial — and being a Scrivener-empowered scrivener comes to seem like life’s greatest role. Scriveners, unlike Word-slaves, have florid psychologies, esoteric requirements and arcane desires. They’re artists. They’re historians. With needs. Scrivener is “aimed at writers of all kinds — novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights — who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organizational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text.â€
Of course, journalists don’t typically write ad copy without a smirk on their learned faces. Lest we think Heffernan is truly out to sell, she brings us back to earth with this send off.
Let’s just say it: It’s biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?
Still funny and dead on, but willfully over the top, as well. Not that that’s bad (from a journalist’s perspective).
In yet another example of what constitutes acceptable advertising in countries outside the United States, we have this billboard in Denmark with a decidedly blunt message. Promoting the alcoholic energy drink Cult Shaker, the events the company hosts and…
It was bound to happen, since Facebook is so popular and so wide open to attach ones own programs onto, now there’s both forced adware downloads on facebook and chinese hackers phishing scams in innocent looking “wall” scrawlings. You might want to log out of facebook now and never log back since if it’s not facebook itself spying on you, someone else will.
An interesting technology from the Australian Centre for Visual Technology called VideoTrace. You can download the paper describing the technology here
The simple models it generate are perfect for Google Earth 3D models, low poly video games and Michael Gondry film clips.
With the huge coverage multi touch screens, photosyth and other international based technology has been getting lately it’s nice to see some Aussies doing something interesting too.
Hola! I’m really happy to show off the new design of we-make-money-not-art. There are still a few glitches to fix, like tons of links not working, part of the archive is unavailable, the “Call of the moment” box still has to be placed somewhere, etc. but that should be solved before the end of the day.
Thanks a lot to Max who put aside his professional life for a couple of weeks in order to create the new layout of the blog. And thanks to Sathia for helping out with the code, the server move, the upgrade to MT4 and other problems i can’t even suspect.
There’s still a lot of pinkness around but i feel that the new design serves better the posts i keep writing longer and longer. It has more of a magazine format, with the most important article of the moment highlighted on the top even if it is not the latest post published (so you might want to scroll down for fresh news). That doesn’t mean that i see myself as an art critic, a reporter or a journalist. I can’t think of myself as anything else than a blogger. Not because of the tools i use but as time passes, i realize that what makes me so passionate about the blog is not informing you but rather sharing with you what matters to me. The selection of stories i cover are therefore submitted to my own whim, not to the ambition of covering extensively a given field of art. So, yes, apologies to anyone who finds them so so gross, but there’s still a fair amount of biotech art stories in store. Apologies again to anyone who believes that new media art should be totally separated from contemporary art. I like new media art too much to store it in a ghetto so i’ll keep on mixing painting with Processing and Artissima with Pictoplasma.
I do hope that you like the new design and the recent shift regarding the content of wmmna but i’d be glad if you could help me improve the blog by sending any suggestion, critique or remark you might have.
Tue Greenfort‘s contribution to the show is a simple plastic bottle. Just a bottle… until you have a look at the title of the sculpture: “Producing 1 Kilogram of PET Plastic Requires 17.5 Kilograms of Water and results in air emissions of 40 grams of hydrocarbons, 25 grams of sulfur oxides, 18 grams of carbon monoxide, 20 grams of nitrogen oxides, and 2.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide. In terms of water use alone, much more is consumed in making the bottles than will ever go into them†(2004). I can’t dream of anything more self-explanatory. The object is a 1.5-liters mineral-water bottle which, under the influence of heat, has melted down to the size of a half-litre bottle, and was then filled with tap water. The artist‘s piece demonstrates that the production of a non-returnable bottle requires more water than it can actually contain.
Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic Meeting on plastic raft (image)
Talking of which, there was a raft made of plastic bottles on the grass outside of the Edith Russ Haus building. It’s Natalie Jeremijenko‘s office. At the exhibition opening, she invited people to jump on it and share with her their environmental anxieties. Best is to have a look at the video presentation that GOOD magazine made of the Environmental Health Clinic project.
If you scroll down the page you’ll be able to see a video of a GenTerra performance which is currently screened at Edith Russ Haus.
GenTerra, 2001, performance at St. Norbert Art and Culture Center, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (image)
GenTerra is a fictional biotech company dealing with “transgenics” and driven by profit, but also by a sense of social responsibility. Products created through this process—-for example, transgenically modified foods—-have often caused controversy. GenTerra claims to produce organisms that help solve ecological or social problems
GenTerra is essentially a participatory “theater” comprising a lab, computer stations displaying the company’s informational CD-Rom, and a bacteria release machine. Scientists and artists are talking the public through the process and implications (whether they are purely profit-driven or feature some utopian qualities) of transgenics. Materials are then provided to allow people to get a hands-on experience by creating their own transgenic organism, using human DNA derived from blood samples. After that they become actively involved in risk assessment by deciding whether or not to release bacteria from one of petri dishes of the release machine. 11 of the dishes have non-transgenic bacteria samples taken locally, and one contains the transgenic bacteria. Should the dish with the transgenic bacteria be selected, a robotic arm will open the lid of the dish, and then replace the lid on the dish after about 5 seconds. The transgenic bacteria is in fact a benign, crippled lab strain that is released in laboratories on a routine basis.
This form of participatory experience attempts to make the whole issue less abstract and distant and by doing so, it provides the public with the critical tools to reflect on how significant the transgenic issue is and how it is going to reflect their everyday life.
The Critical Art Ensemble defense fund page informs that the FBI is still refusing to return most of the tens of thousands of dollars worth of impounded materials. The reason for that is that the art collective was using the harmless bacteria and materials in several of their projects, one of them is GenTerra.
Andrea Polli: The Queensbridge Windpower Project, 2005
The second project she was showing is a collaboration with Joe Gilmore. N. is an artistic visualization and sonification of near real-time Arctic data.
Franz John‘s Turing Tables takes live seismological data and turns it into pictures, sound and movement.
Seismological institutes measure the vibrations of the Earth and exchange the data collected among themselves via automated internet-transfers. Turing Tables feeds into this human-machine-communication data stream and translates it into an installation which bathes visitors in audio renderings and projections of live measurements made by seismographs all over the world.
Franz John: Turing Tables. An Untitled Composition for Tectonic Spaces, 2003-2007 (Foto: Franz Wamhof)
The project is not about the catastrophes that cause these movements in inhabited areas, but instead about the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux.
I liked 01.org‘s Reenactment of Joseph Beuys‘ 7000 Oaks, 2007. My first reaction when i saw the project was “oh! No, not flugly Second Life agaaain!” but this “synthetic performance” has the merit of bringing the spotlight on a very inspiring work. In March 1982, Beuys was at Documenta 7 in Kassel with a mission: planting of 7000 trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high above ground, throughout the greater city of Kassel. The last tree was planted posthumously in 1987 by is son. Beuys intended the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change; locally, the action was a gesture towards urban renewal. 25 years exactly after the planting of the first tree, Eva and Franco Mattes of 01.org (or rather their avatars) started stacking virtual basalt stones on Mattes’ island in SL. SL inhabitants are invited to participate to the performance by placing stones and trees on their land.
Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Reenactment of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks
Infossil had a huge banner hanging above the reception desk of the art space. The white on black text reflects about the dependence of electronic communication, that is of the “infossil”, on the energy resources available, the fossil: coal.
Also on show: Sabrina Raaf‘s Translator II: Grower was painting grass on the wall; EcoScope, a communication tool developed by Transnational Temps, provides a context for discussing environmental affairs; 10 Commandments for the 21st Century, by Tea Mäkipää; Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s You don’t need a weatherman; Christoph Keller’s The Whole Earth, a projection on a weather balloon. White clouds over a blue sky form the perfect picture of the peaceful blue planet we live on, there’s even piano music for perfect bliss. Every two minutes, a roaring aircraft brings us back to reality. Its passage takes one or two seconds but that’s enough to spoil the idyllic vision (image); Yonic, a NGO working in Brazil to diminish pollution in the rain forest and find new solutions to old problems, showed the fanzine they publish on a yearly basis using handmade recycled paper.
Sabrina Raaf: Grower, 2004/5
Now that was a fantastic and energizing exhibition. If only we can get more people to see it, not just the already converted.
Opinión – La piel digital de las ciudades – ADN.es
reason number 1 to learn spanish: being able to read Juan Freire posts. he’s one of the smartest guys i’ve met in 2007. have to translate some of that for wmmna.
Ima-karada – IAMAS in Tokyo
Mr. Rolling incorporates digital technology into toys with traditional analog features as a concept, producing an electronic toy that merges the appeals of both analog and digital.
Give Me Shelter, MIT Grad students
featured "clothes and accessories to help navigate the gaps between work and home, self-confidence and unease, and under- or over-stimulation." some ideas seen everywhere but nice execution.
AMC are premiering a new original drama series on Jan 20 called Breaking Bad. If it’s half as good as their first effort Mad Men then we are all in for a treat. After checking out the first 5 minutes online I have to say I’m intrigued.
View the experience here. An interesting fact is that all the graphics are shot as video. There’s no 3D which is very evident with the test tube section. Also the experience is random giving you a different experience each time you visit. Although the random element isn’t really sold into the user.
It reminds me of the early Hi-Res sites where you are taken through a journey rather than left to navigate freely. The sound design is top notch. Actually follow the instructions and turn your speakers up as this really heightens the mood.
Also it took me 3 minutes to realize it’s the dad (Bryan Cranston) from Malcolm in the Middle. My fav character from the show. I had no idea he has been in so many different productions.
The online experience is by Mono and Unit 9. Mono reflecting AMC’s success with everything they touch turning to gold and coming from no where to be a major player in the last 12 months.
Advertising Agency: Publicis, Johannesburg, South Africa
Creative Director: Kady Winetzki
Art Director: Kamlesh Jogee
Copywriter: Des Williams
Illustrator: George Greyling
Photographer: Michael Meyersfeld
Published: September 2007
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
GenTerra is essentially a participatory “theater” comprising a lab, computer stations displaying the company’s informational CD-Rom, and a 
