Brand Noise

Movies for Planners: Thank You for Smoking

A new movie based on Christopher Buckley's acclaimed 1994 novel looks worth a ticket.  It appears to promise some perspective and well crafted satire on the uglier side of the persuasion game and the growing culture of spin.

Thank you for Smoking is about Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today’s neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes, but he begins to think about how his work makes him look in the eyes of his young son Joey.  Trailer

What's the Matter with Kids These Days?

According to the NY Sun: A growing number of New York City schools are asking students to submit their papers through Turnitin.com, a service that compares students' papers against everything on the Internet and a database of more than 15 million student papers.

Within a few minutes, papers are scanned against every known Internet source and every other paper that has ever been submitted to the site. The program highlights passages in the paper and identifies its original source, in addition to giving it an overall originality rating.

About a third of the papers submitted to the site are found to be more than 25% unoriginal...

The Daily Free Press reports: The UNH Faculty Senate passed a motion in 2005 to adopt Turnitin.com and MyDropBox.com as the official plagiarism detector for the 2005-2006 school year.

Meanwhile, WSJ reported in January: SparkNotes, which offers online summaries and analyses of books popular on high-school required reading lists, branched out with the launch of SparkMobile. The service lets students stuck on English essays send SOS messages from their cellphones: Type in "Gatsby themes" and a text-message comes back reading: "the decline of the American dream." The company recently made the service available on iPods, and an audio version debuted...

Traci Leonardo with the Institute on Political Journalism says, "I think when it comes to the Internet, they don't realize that copying from the Internet is the same thing as copying from a book."

A likely story…

Interestingly, though, ZWire reports, the "poster child" for the cheating student has changed dramatically. The prior image of the under-achieving and slacking cheater has been replaced by the pressured and high-achieving cheater. Given the steadily rising competition to achieve high grades to gain acceptance to top universities, pressure to attain higher grades has increased dramatically. A poll conducted by Who's Who Among American High School Students in 1998, revealed that 80 percent of America's top students admitted that cheating helped them climb to the top of their class…

In 1964, Bill Bowers published the first large-scale study of cheating in institutions of higher learning. This study was replicated some 30 years later by participants in Bowers’s original survey. Disturbing increases were found among women and in collaborative cheating. Download a PDF on the topic.

Yahoo! Takin' it down a Notch

Collaboration can be a good thing, Yahoo. No need to do it all alone.

After proclaiming grand plans to bring elaborately produced sitcoms, talk shows and other television-style programs to the Internet, the head of Yahoo's Media Group, Lloyd Braun, said yesterday that he was sharply scaling back those efforts. He said the group would shift its focus to content acquired from other media companies or submitted by users.

"I didn't fully appreciate what success in this medium is really going to look like," he said. "This is not about creating one-off hits like in my old business. That is not going to create a sustainable competitive advantage over the long term."

With advertisers moving large parts of their budgets online, the market for content, created by professionals, bloggers and individual users, is expanding rapidly — as is the competition. Major media companies are developing video-based programming for the Internet. Myspace.com, purchased last year by the News Corporation, has become a major site based on user-contributed content. Many start-ups, like youtube.com, seek to follow suit.

Yahoo will not do a string of one-off projects, focusing instead on combining program content with licensed, user-generated and other content, Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said.

Read more in the NY Times and on Reuters.

Style ala Cirque

Cirque Du Soleil, the $500 million Montreal-based entertainment empire known for its creative extravaganzas, wants to build a fashion and beauty brand.

Cirque Du Soleil plans to launch women's ready-to-wear line this summer, which will be followed by men's wear and children's wear.

"There's an enormous amount of ambition to take Cirque outside the theater to a wide variety of applications," said Rodney Landi, vice president of merchandising at Cirque Du Soleil.

"We wonder, what would a restaurant, hotel or spa by Cirque be like? There's endless applications." Home furnishings, fitness and children's toys are also good fits, he notes.

Cirque Du Soleil fragrance project is also in the works. Cosmetics is a natural for Cirque — performers are trained to put on their own makeup, which may take hours...

Read the whole story.

Online retailer Bluefly, ponders if the Montreal-based high-end circus will tap these carnivalesque looks from eccentric British designer Gareth Pugh.

Creating Fun

One more entry on couture and collaboration: Here, as seen in the NY Times Style Magazine, two high-profile creators come together for high-impact fun.

Stella McCartney collaborated with the artist Jeff Koons on this wearable, white-gold version of his 1986 stainless-steel sculpture "Rabbit." Only 20 of these pendants will be produced.

Make Way for Blu-Ray

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) is targeting May 23 to deliver the first wave of Blu-ray Disc (BD) titles at retail. Delivery will coincide with the launch that day of the first commercially available BD player from Samsung Electronics, which will be followed shortly by BD players from Pioneer and Sony along with a BD compatible VAIO PC from Sony.

The Blu-ray Disc format provides nearly five times more data storage than DVD, with 25 GB (single-layer) and 50 GB (dual-layer) of capacity. Blu-ray Disc players are backward compatible with other disc formats and deliver the highest quality high-definition (HD) entertainment, while providing a secure playback environment through the use of the most advanced copy protection available.

Sony Computer Entertainment recently announced plans to utilize BD-ROM technology in their next-generation PlayStation 3 system.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Custom T Sites Respond to Markets

Custom t-shirt site Spreadshirt.com just launched Spreadshirt Latino. The site encourages consumers to open their own free online shops, where anyone can become an online artist or entrepreneur simply by sharing their Latin-inspired designs, photos or sayings with the world.
Founded in 2002 in Leipzig Germany, Spreadshirt is a privately held company with offices in the United States, France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Spreadshirt is the leading provider of custom, online apparel in Europe and is growing rapidly in the United States.
Spreadshirt.com builds community via blogs and online forums.

In November, CafePress.com offered its community the tools and online training needed to begin designing black t-shirts.

"We faced three major obstacles with our new printing process for black garments. First, the new printing process had to be perfected in order to maintain the vibrancy and longevity of an image on black fabric. Second, we needed to develop a way for our users to prepare images for this new type of printing," says Mahesh Jain Co-founder and VP of Business Development. "Lastly, we needed a process that could handle the volume our community demands. Now that we have jumped these hurdles we are going to step back and watch as our community amazes us with their continued drive to design new items. This is a true example of the spirit behind the CafePress.com community."

These sites need to be quick in their response to customers. Within hours of the recent Cheney incident, CafePress Shopkeepers had already uploaded the first designs expressing their views, and shoppers had already begun searching for Cheney/Shooting related products. By Monday morning 48 designs had been added to the CafePress Marketplace to create 714 unique new products.

Technobarricading - scenarioDNA and Mobile Transit Authority Join Forces To Decode Growing Consumer Phenomenon

Social Networking, The Mobile Channel  and Personalized Media Consumption Patterns Create New Opportunities And Challenges For Marketers

scenarioDNA and Mobile Transit Authority have joined forces to provide brands and their agencies with a much needed resource: a quicker and better way to understand new critical marketing nuances. The strategic partnership will help clients decipher the changes in consumer behavior and their impact on media consumption patterns.