advertising category
Also anomalous is the current US obsession with the game of poker
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.
Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.
There is abundant irony in such marketing: The supply of clean drinking water across America and in many other countries is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement that in many ways rivals putting a man on the moon. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost — and it is people in precisely these countries who seem willing to pay premiums of 1,000 percent to 10,000 percent for bottled water.
related { Which industry makes the most misleading ads? }
Foucault quite brilliantly introduces the two ways in which sexuality has come to be assumed by the human race: as an art (in ancient Greece) and as a science (in our present era).
J.C. Penney Co. officials are upset about a racy, fake advertisement on YouTube in which the retailer appears to be endorsing teen sex, and they are blaming the company’s ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi.
The purported ad, which surfaced on the Internet after winning a prestigious international advertising award at Cannes this past weekend, shows two teenagers in their own bedrooms stripping down to their underwear and then timing themselves as they race to put on their clothes. (…)
In a statement late Monday, Saatchi, a unit of Publicis Groupe SA, said the ad was created by a third-party vendor “without J.C. Penney’s knowledge or consent… Saatchi & Saatchi did not enter the spot and deeply regrets the message this ad presents.”
The pulsating, inflating, disco-shaking, heartbreaking future
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now.
Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all. (…) They are the children of the Petabyte Age. [A petabyte is equal to 1,000,000 gigabytes.]
The Petabyte is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. We went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. (…)
It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That’s why Google can translate languages without actually “knowing” them. (…)
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. (…) The big target here isn’t advertising, though. It’s science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years. (…)
But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. (…)
Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about “dominant” and “recessive” genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton’s laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.
{ Chris Anderson/Wired | Continue reading }
Anderson confuses statistical models with scientific ones. As far as the content goes, I’m completely unconvinced.
related { Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? }
555 is the natural number following 554 and preceding 556
555 is the Thai version of LOL in a text conversation. “5″ in Thai is pronounced “ha,” so three of them would be “hahaha.”
555 is a repdigit. A repdigit is a number composed of repetition of a single digit.
In North America, telephone numbers with the prefix 555 are widely used for fictitious phone numbers in television shows, films, computer games, and other media.
photo { Terry Richardson for Sisley }
How to get more ass than a toilet seat
{ TOTO’s Apricot washer | Related: Introduction to the Japanese toilet }
Verbal abuse or something
This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality.” We can destroy only as creators. — But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.” |
I read that Pepsi has a new stupid tagline: “More happy” It comes with a comment from the extremely self-contented marketing VP: “One of the nice things about the word ‘happy’ is it’s really multidimensional” This guy shouldn’t be running a lemonade stand, but rewriting the whole oxford dictionary. By trademarking the language, I think advertising people and brands rape the words, manipulate their values, and impoverish the language. They repeat their self-aggrandized lie (you DON’T become “more happy” just by drinking Pepsi) hundreds of times and create new fake meanings for the words they use. (…) Advertising is a fancy word for pavlovian conditioning: after seeing Eternity associated with Calvin Klein a thousand times, the word Eternity is no longer the vivid (multidimensional) word it should have stayed. In 1986, on his wedding day, Calvin Klein gave his wife a diamond ring inscribed with the word Eternity. They divorced in 2006, so technically, ck’s Eternity equals 20 years. |
The actor of his own ideal
Using economic models US researchers predict new tactics to exploit the personal information that online social-networking sites provide.
One effective strategy could see free or cut-price products offered to the most influential online individuals to kickstart new fads, says Jason Hartline, at Northwestern University, Illinois, US.
Some very targeted advertising schemes using social networks exist, for example Facebook’s Beacon system, which can tell your friends when you buy products on other websites. But Hartline says they will get smarter.
photo { Aaron Ruell }
At the counter of the Schwab’s drugstore, you wonder if she might be single
{ American Apparel matches featuring french actress Lea Seydoux | related: Lea Seydoux flashes her boobs for AA }
related { A fragment of clothing called a “Cock sock” }
