Lucinda Rosenfeld explores what happened to The Gap for Slate: These days, I never think of walking into a Gap. And neither, it seems, does anyone else. Last year, profits at North American Gap stores fell 10 percent, while the share price of Gap Inc.—which includes Banana Republic and Old Navy—fell 16.5 percent. Once synonymous with the very category of mid- to high-end chain stores it helped to invent, the Gap is …
Sneakers Freakers
From Time: By 9:35 on a recent Friday night, Dominique Thomas had been camped outside the Niketown store in South Miami for two full days. Thomas, who goes by the street name DK the Line Pimp, had flown in from Denver and was first in line to buy the $100 Cowboy Air Max 180s, which were scheduled to go on sale at 10 that night. Just 140 pairs of these limited-edition sneakers--a hunter green, lizard-skin design with …
Bouldergusky’s Rocky Mountain High
In their January issue, Creativity asked Alex Bouldergusky, "Why Boulder?" I think because it's very different from Miami, and we wanted to give our people a choice, an option. In some ways it's completely opposite from Miami, and that's good. Also, the Boulder/Denver area didn't have an agency where we thought we would be stealing their home turf. I believe Jonathan Schoenberg of TDA may have a slightly different …
Blogging Your Way To The Boardroom
From PR Week: During the nascent days of blogging, when both emerging and large corporations were firing staffers for blogging-related offenses, the jury was out on whether blogging was a nefarious habit, to be hidden when applying for jobs, or a positive career move. The recent ascension of two high-profile bloggers - Steve Rubel, formerly of CooperKatz, and Jeremy Pepper, formerly of his own firm Pop PR, who were …
Austin Talk
Courtesy of Flickr user, "timoni". Rex Hammock transcribed the SXSW panel keynote conversation between blogging luminaries Heather Armstrong and Jason Kottke. Here's part of what they said about ad support vs. a subscription model for their respective media properties. Kottke: I wanted the support to come from the readers. I also don't like advertising that much. I didn't want to see bad advertising on my site. Or to …
Detroit-Style Appropriation
Harper's is running a piece by Bill Wasik (a senior editor at the magazine), inventor of the Flash Mob. He describes his experiment, and explains how the Flash Mob was co-opted by the Ford Motor Company, with pathetic results. I had traveled to Boston last summer to observe a "Fusion Flash Concert"--a marketing campaign I had first learned of two weeks earlier, through a Financial Times column emailed to me by a …
Media Companies Hungry For Content
From The New York Times: Digital-era media companies like Yahoo and Google, as well as traditional media companies, including those with deep roots in television and print, continue to scour the Internet for emerging content and technology companies. But the pickings of obvious acquisition candidates, while hardly exhausted, are slimming, according to financiers, entrepreneurs and industry analysts who follow the …
Migrating To Mac
I just read one of the funniest blog posts ever. It's about the PC to Mac conversion experience. From Que Sera Sera: This upgrade was a long time coming, a mixture of two parts being poor and one part being lazy, but the switch to the Mac was something else altogether. I had an iMac and an iBook at my first advertising job back in 2000, and liked them both just fine, so it wasn’t a fear of the unknown that kept me …