The Metaness Of "This Is A Generic Video"

You've probably seen this already making the rounds online. "This is a generic video" is far from it. What's brilliant about the video is that it was inspired by "This Is a Generic Brand Video," written by Kendra Eash for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. A literary piece making fun of advertisement became a video that looks like it's making fun of ads but it's really an ad for a service for stock footage. So meta it's an Ouroboros.

The History Of The Movie Trailer

Some people consider them the best part of the movie going experience — the Movie Trailer. Take a look at the evolution of the "coming attractions" from simple silent film splices, through the template style of the Golden Age of Hollywood, through Auteurs and finally into the Blockbuster era.

Learned a lot of things I didn't know about the movie trailer. More trailers from throughout history can be seen at Filmmaker IQ

How “Lion King” Regained Its Crown As Broadway’s Top-Selling Show: An Algorithm

Patrick Healy, New York Times: 

Since 2011, the show’s producers, Disney Theatrical Productions, have been relying on a previously undisclosed computer algorithm to recommend the highest ticket prices that audiences would be likely to pay for each of the 1,700 seats at every performance in the Minskoff Theater. While other shows also employ this so-called dynamic pricing system to raise seat prices during tourist-heavy holiday weeks, only Disney has reached the level of sophistication achieved in the airline and hotel industries by continually using its algorithm to calibrate prices based on demand and ticket purchasing patterns.

By charging $10 more here, $20 more there, “The Lion King” stunned Broadway at year’s end as the No. 1 earner for the first time since 2003, bumping off the champ, “Wicked.” And Disney even managed to do it by charging half as much for top tickets as some rivals. 

The End of Brand Loyalty

James Surowiecki for The New Yorker's Financial Page:

It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its “most important asset,” more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. “Absolute Value,” a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand.

Today, consumers can read reams of research about whatever they want to buy. This started back with Consumer Reports, which did objective studies of products, and with J. D. Power’s quality rankings, which revealed what ordinary customers thought of the cars they’d bought. But what’s really weakened the power of brands is the Internet, which has given ordinary consumers easy access to expert reviews, user reviews, and detailed product data, in an array of categories. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that eighty per cent of consumers look at online reviews before making major purchases, and a host of studies have logged the strong influence those reviews have on the decisions people make. The rise of social media has accelerated the trend to an astonishing degree: a dud product can become a laughingstock in a matter of hours. In the old days, you might buy a Sony television set because you’d owned one before, or because you trusted the brand. Today, such considerations matter much less than reviews on Amazon and Engadget and CNET. As Simonson told me, “each product now has to prove itself on its own.”

What Does Your Brand Sound Like?

Laurence Minsky and Colleen Fahey for the Harvard Business Review Blog:

To gain advantage on this leveled playing field, there’s one powerful branding tool that has been generally overlooked — or perhaps undervalued — by most marketers: sound. With of our increasingly audio-enabled media environment, the strategic use of sound can play an important role in positively differentiating a product or service, enhancing recall, creating preference, building trust, and even increasing sales.

Called audio branding, sonic branding, sound branding, or acoustic branding, cognitive studies show that relevant sounds and musical cues can truly influence people in ways marketers want. According to research presented at the 2012 Audio Branding Congress, congruent sound cues can increase the speed of a visual search for products (a key for success in both online and retail settings), as well as improve the perceived taste of food and wine (PDF).

Some marketers have long employed sound and music as part of their brand experience, including the familiar chime of an Apple Computer launching, the pop of the Snapple lid, and the aggressive howl of a Harley in rev mode.

A few years ago, at the beginning of Lady Gaga's ascent in pop music, I was at the gym with a friend. I found myself mindlessly singing along to one of her songs. My friend pointed this out to me. I didn't own any of her albums, didn't own the song, had never seen the video for the song and yet her sonic presence was so ubiquitous that I had managed to learn all the lyrics of the song totally unconciously. That kind of earworm quality is what makes sonic branding such a powerful tool that few people are utilizing.