Short post cuz the video pretty much says it all and I can’t take any credit here.

If you want to read the original post and get your hands on many of the sources as well as the stats go here. If you want to see a presentation (different authors) with very similar statistics on slideshare go here.

Grab some popcorn cuz its a few minutes but its good.

If you haven’t seen this post by Engadget you missed a good one. Obviously Microsoft got caught with their pants down so to speak. I can understand using different agencies in different countries and thus not having continuity in your marketing from region to region – even though you should. I recommend using the same agency globally for a product and then if called for regionalizing the message. What I do not understand nor recommend is using Photo Shop to crop an African American’s head for a Caucasian person’s head! And let me take it a step further and say even if the designer was going to be that callus and insanely lazy, could they at least have taken the time to change the colour of the man’s arms – cuz he’s pretty tanned on the arms in the second picture, oh wait its the same body as the first…Insanity. Score one for Engadget and another for social media for spreading this post.

I came across this article in Print Magazine and thought it was pretty interesting when you think about the design elements. Basically Print asked four design firms to come up with the design for packaging and branding a pack of dubes. Besides the fact that it is a cool idea in general, when you actually step back and think about it, this is uncharted territory. Nobody has ever really tried to brand Marijuana and so these guys were playing in a completely new ballpark. Of course you can go to Amsterdam where coffee shops have different names for their marijuana but even there almost nobody advertises and the closest you get to branding is the coffee shops themselves becoming chain-like. Therefore, it was interesting to me to see four graphic design firms get a chance at “building a better baggie.”

The four firms chosen for this little task were – Lust, a graphic design practice in Amsterdam established by Thomas Castro, Jeroen Barendse, and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen; the New York office of Base, which worked with its branches in Europe; the Oslo firm Strømme Throndsen, winner of the 2009 Award for Design Excellence for its flour packaging; and The Heads of State, a two-man operation run by Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers in Philadelphia.  The brief was simple: What would a legal pack of marijuana cigarettes look like?

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USA Today recently reported that the NBA and NHL were both looking into allowing some form of advertisement directly on game (practice) uniforms – see below the post for examples and the various league’s stances

Although this practice has been around for many years in European sports and many sports purists will make their argument from a sports perspective, I thought I would try to give a more economic look at the same issue. I think the thinking behind advertisements on jerseys as a revenue generator is pretty straightforward but I really think that by not having a league-wide policy or making this a league-wide initiative there is a major potential pitfall with respect to corporate naming rights and conflicting jersey advertisements  for all the major sports. Please allow me to explain… Continue Reading…