The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight has been attending English classes at Stanford. Knight graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1962 and has given over $100 million to the school since then. One of the tidbits in the article I found particularly interesting is the way he reads The Sun Also Rises. One of Mr. Knight's homework assignments suggested he had a …
Sometimes You’re Just Trying To Slip One Past The Client…
Like some bored copywriter did with this Spirit Airlines e-mail blast. I laughed. Anyone ever try to pull something like this on an unsuspecting client? …
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Dr. Martens Shows A Little Leg
According to The New York Times, Dr. Martens are looking to rebound from a bad ad campaign and slumping sales. After Dr. Martens ran advertisements that depicted dead rock stars like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Joe Strummer of the Clash wearing its shoes in heaven, the musicians’ survivors (who had not granted permission) and fans were outraged. The outcry was so great that the British company that makes the shoes, …
Join The Tribe. Exchange Totems.
The New York Times explores the cultural and anthropologic modes found in online social networks. Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users. “In tribal …
A VC Afraid of Apple
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in the tech sector with a popular following thanks to his A VC blog, thinks Apple brand is bruised and on the road to worm-ridden. I am afraid to upgrade to a new version of iTunes because it might make my music and video unusable or it might brick my iPhone. I am afraid to upgrade to Leopard because it might brick my MacBook. I have a brand new iPhone sitting right next to me on my …
Publicis Gets Its PR On
This month's Fast Company has quite the puff piece on Publicis and its assorted ventures, including Digitas, Droga5, and how it's all coming together. Here's a choice nugget you may not have known about Digitas and its CEO, David Kenny: Kenny has focused on transformative, systemwide initiatives since arriving at Publicis. In May, he rolled out a digital production company called Prodigious Worldwide, which uses …
Why So Ugly?
Rob Walker discusses the absense of a design imperative in MySpace's offering. When I first looked at MySpace, my reaction was: “What a mess. It’s just (visual) noise.” In fact I think I reacted to it much like parents reacted to some of the music I listened to when I was a kid: That it wasn’t music at all, just noise. Now what’s interesting about that to me is that, from my point of view, it most certainly was …
Booze Barriers Fall
According to Stuart Elliott, WNBC-TV in New York is daring to run spirits ads. The decision is a small but significant sign of changing attitudes toward advertising of products that many consider contentious. From 1948 until 1996, no TV station or network accepted liquor ads although distilled spirits were advertised in newspapers, magazines and billboards. Today, hundreds of television stations and networks carry …
