In Modern Marketing, a Big Dose of Data in the Creative Juices

Claire Cain Miller, NY Times Bits Blog:

Computers are once again transforming the business of marketing, infusing the art with science. This time, though, the change is being driven by cloud computing and the processing of huge amounts of data about what customers do and what they desire.

Unlike the computer on “Mad Men,” which took up an entire room, the computers processing the data are not even in marketers’ offices but in far-off data centers. But just as in the fictional company depicted on “Mad Men,” the new technology is causing tensions among the quants, or quantitative data analysts, the artists and the information technologists.
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For consumers, the result is personalized marketing.

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Ideally, consumers do not notice the computing and data-crunching in the background and instead just see more relevant messages from brands, said Ian Schafer, chief executive and founder of Deep Focus, a digital agency. But when marketing is too personalized, it can feel creepy.

The CIA's first tweet

By now you probably know the CIA joined twitter recently. You've probably seen their first tweet, but just in case, here it is:

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

I'm using the situation to steer you in a different direction. Recenly Radiolab spent an episode exploring the origins of the phrase "neither confirm nor deny." It is a must-listen episode about the ubiquitous CIA phrase, so ubiquitous it became their first tweet. 

Intimate Computing: Making Wearable Tech More Wearable

Amy Merrick writing for The New Yorker’s Currency blog:

In the twentieth century, designers took two distinct approaches to imagining the future of fashion. The first approach tended toward metallic, geometric, quasi-robotic styles: think Pierre Cardin’s space suits of the nineteen-sixties, inspired by the first moon landing. The first generation of high-tech wearables look a lot like what those designers predicted. But the designers of the past had another vision, too, and this one could be a big, untapped market: making clothes better serve their original purpose of keeping people warm, dry, and protected. One designer, in 1939, envisioned that decades in the future women would wear an electric belt that would adapt the body to unpredictable weather changes. It’s an attractive idea for anyone who has sweltered on the subway, then spent the rest of the day shivering in an air-conditioned office. Along those lines, a group of M.I.T. graduates have designed a ninety-five-dollar dress shirt that borrows from NASA’s space suits—not the bulky styles themselves, but the technology in their materials—to store heat away from the wearer when it’s too hot outside, then return it when temperatures cool. It isn’t hard to imagine Apple using its technological prowess to weave computers right into clothes, especially if it draws on the fashion sense of Ahrendts and Paul Deneve, the former chief executive of Yves Saint Laurent, whom Apple hired last summer to focus on special projects.

Maya Angelou's Wisdom Applied To Creativity

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

For the past few days that quote by Maya Angelou keeps popping up everywhere. In blog posts, TED talks, marketing books, student design work, branding podcasts, everywhere, because it reveals a simple truth, it is all about how you made them feel.  

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.