The Lazy Environmentalist, part 1

A small plug for checking out The Lazy Environmentalist, a show on NPR, a website, and a book that I am currently paging through. I'll have more to write once I finish leafing through the book and have some more time on my hands, but in the meantime, have a look...

The Story of Stuff

First, a bit of a goof on globalism that we pulled together back in the old SPR days. While our low-fi comedic ramblings may or may not be that funny, I am still constantly shocked at how much cheap, disposable stuff you can buy in New York, and how the economics of extraction, production, labor, and transport can scale to make a $3 umbrella a viable product.

With that silly context setting, I'd urge you to check out this animated movie "The Story of Stuff," which Professor ND forwarded to me. Annie Leonard touches on a number of powerful themes, that I think are constantly missed in public dialog about sustainability, civic responsibility, and the power that people have, as consumers, in influencing their world. Specifically, I think that while a lot of people feel trapped and fed-up with our consumerist culture -- the need to buy, the lack of durability of products, a keeping up with the Joneses mentality -- and I think Leonard does a good job articulating that, while you may feel trapped, there is a legitimate choice you can make, to opt out of the cycle of consumerism. Secondly, it is important to frame the materials economy as a cycle, recognizing that the choices that are made - by consumers, by politicians, by business people - all have impacts both upstream and downstream in the cycle. Positive choices can be amplified to be even more positive, and unfortunately, the same holds true for choices with negative consequences.

While I am not always enamored by the slight shrillness of people who are active advocates in the sustainability movement, and some of that occasionally bubbles to the surface in this video, I think, in general, The Story of Stuff is a very thoughtful and engaging overview of our consumer-driven materialist culture, and should be broadly forwarded, to people who care about these issues, and probably more importantly, to people who may not know to care about them.

Additional resources worth checking out:

Free Range Studios - the design firm responsible for the production of The Story of Stuff, who apparently have a very cool charter.
The Center for the New American Dream - I haven't kept close tabs on this non-profit, but when I was paying more attention five or six years ago, they were doing a great job communicating how the objectives of adopting a more sustainable lifestyle were very much aligned with quality of life aspirations that are core to the classic "American Dream"
The Global Footprint Network - Another non-profit that focuses on trying to raise the public and political awareness of how the material flows in our economy, driven by consumerism, impact global sustainability.

Selling the Absurd, part 1 of Infinity

Advertising is on the march. Yes, if there is one thing that is on the march, it is advertising -- far out-pacing anything else that might be on the march. From the subway to the bus shelter to the elevator to your mailbox to your e-mail box to your Google search results to your blogs to my blog, there it is, another opportunity to sell. So no wonder we've run out of ideas, of how to sell, of what to sell, and advertising has, once again, embraced the absurd.

Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the artfulness of this go round with the absurd. I just wanted to mention two recent offenders that have caught my attention.

If you ride the subway in New York City, you cannot avoid Windorphins. Brightly colored signage adorning the insides of cars, in bus shelters, on billboards - showing happy-looking Pokemon-like characters and bearing slogans that mean absolutely nothing. Nauseating? Yes. Cynical? Absolutely. Effective? Totally. I don't know how many subway cars I've been in when some young New Yorker asks, in that ever-flattening accent that young New Yorkers are increasingly seeming to have, "What Are Windorphins?" to which his/her friend might respond "I think we learned about it in class," and a third says, "Let's look it up on the Internet when we get to so-and-so's apartment." So, winner for Ebay. And, of course, I did come home one night to look up exactly what it is. So cheers to whatever ad agency fucker came up with this annoying campaign.

Next, the more charming and less invasive woot.com. What is woot? A website, that apparently sells only one product a day that popped up in the modest banner above my Gmails one day. Reluctantly, but unfailingly, I clicked on it. And, apparently, selling one product a day is an effective way of doing business. Per Woot's own site:

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been. But don't take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.

So, I guess the engine of innovation chugs on, fueled increasingly by banner ads and billboards. To badly appropriate a morbid Townes Van Zandt track, well, I guess its better than waitin' around to die...

How Advertising Runs the World, part 1 of Infinity

Wired: How should we think about Google today?

[Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google]: Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system -- Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values -- all that kind of stuff.

from the May 2007 issue of Wired magazine.

"We are in the business of monetizing our services through advertising." - Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President, Connected Life Division , Yahoo! Inc.

at TIECon 2007, discussing how Yahoo! plans to make money from its emerging suite of mobile services.

Stating nothing but the obvious, but it is interesting to hear how two of the most exciting, fun, and revolutionary companies of the past ten years view themselves. Yes, both Google and Yahoo! have been on the forefront of innovating new products and business models, and continue to either build, acquire, or incubate cool new products seemingly every quarter. But at their core, and certainly at the core of their revenue streams, they each understand themselves in clear terms: as effective channels for delivering ad content to consumers.

No news here, and my purpose is only to set the table for a series of future posts exploring my love/hate for the advertising industry (where $150 billion a year is spent, annually, in the United States alone). Some of the questions I am looking to pursue:

- Are the metrics and core theses for advertising (from impressions to purchases, from direct marketing response rates to brand value) well grounded in data? Still valid as advertising finds new mediums and channels, like the Internet? Do those questions matter? [In short, No, no, and no].
- Can advertising be art? Is this redeeming?
- What are the real insights in how Google (and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo) have brought advertising to the internet?
- Is advertising an effective medium for achieving non-commercial goals?
- What happens to advertising in a world where content becomes increasingly diversified?

My admitted biases are that I enjoy advertising (when it is used to create campaigns that are artful, funny, or cool), that I think advertising can be highly successful (when it creates a meaningful brand or transparently puts meaningful product data in front of consumers), that I think advertising is generally deceptive, dishonest, unimaginative, base, and boring, that I think advertising is increasingly ineffective (who even looks at banner ads? or watches ads on TV?), that the need to circumvent the disdain that consumers have for ads, in terms of interrupting their consumption of media, will have few positive and numerous negative consequences. And so on and so on.

What I'd love to hear from you are any perspectives or questions that you'd like me to consider as I start thinking more closely about advertising, and more helpful to me, any interesting data points or analyses that you could send my way. Dear readers. All four of you.