Brand Noise

All Over the World, Teens Crave Empowerment

Last season, Frontline/World ran a story from the Middle East that introduced viewers to the fastest selling comic book in the Arab world, The 99. The comic features characters with super powers based on the concept of Allah's 99 attributes, including wisdom and generosity, as taught in the Koran. Its creator, Naif al-Mutawa, is a 36-year-old from Kuwait who was educated in the United States and who, as a boy, devoured Marvel comics and the Hardy Boys mysteries.

Reporter Isaac Solotaroff followed al-Mutawa as he marketed his comics throughout the Middle East, hoping to spread a moderate, modern image of Islam to the world. In this update, Solotaroff catches up with al-Mutawa in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the comic creator is trying to sell his work to the largest Islamic country in the world, a country that accounts for one in six of all Muslims worldwide. An ensuing documentary, Wham! Bam! Islam!, is in the works. Go, Isaac!

Even more compelling will be to see how the Islamic comic fans evolve. Will the cosplayers take it to the next level? Spirituality already underlies many a Manga. And, apparently, you can even see lotsa hijabi girls in Malaysia attending cosplay events. Could cosplay become the common ground the world needs? Can kids who think change the world? In our own research we've found the cosplay kids to be some of the most open-minded serious global thinkers. It belies the initial impression often viewed simply as kids in costume. These are not the Star Trekkies of past generations.   

Conde Nast Gets in Step with Facebook

Why fight what’s already working? It’s more important to be the one who is empowering consumers. Conde Nast is beginning to catch on:

Flip.com launched in February as CondeNet's effort to target teen girls with an ambitious social media site. Less than a year later, the digital arm of Conde Nast is reversing course to embrace a distributed media strategy and converting the destination site into a series of applications that will live on social networks, starting with Facebook.

"It's hard to carve out enough time from those girls [because of] Facebook," said Sarah Chubb, president of CondeNet. "Why fight it and try to build your own social network when there is one that is open to things being built on top of it?"

By abandoning a destination strategy, CondeNet hopes to draw an expanded audience from the peak of 300,000 users the site attracted.

Flip already has a series of applications on Facebook that have proven moderately popular.

Read the whole story.

New Sex Info Site Launching

ThePeeq.com has hired Boston-based alternative marketing agency Street Attack to run its September 2007 launch. ThePeeq.com is a witty "Sex-Centric" online magazine and community geared toward women and men in search of a positive place to talk and learn about sex and related topics. Street Attack will be running ongoing grassroots and viral marketing efforts for ThePeeq.com's September 2007 launch.

This, one week after the NYC burlesque festival. So sex still sells, in fact it's everywhere, only the shock value is gone...could we finally be moving closer to a Euro view, rather than a Victorian one?

Wired Plugs People into Cover Art

(from NY Times) In its April issue, Wired magazine, in partnership with Xerox, invited subscribers to upload their photographs to Wired.com. The first 5,000 who did so are now receiving their July issue with themselves as the cover art.

Eager to boost their image both Wired and Xerox Xgot involved at the March convention of TED — they set up a booth at which attendees could have their pictures taken. Each will receive a personalized July issue of Wired. They also printed covers for David Letterman, Katie Couric and other television celebrities who could possible mention it on their shows.

Forget Manga. Here's Manhwa

American comics connoisseurs, add this to your personal lexicon: manhwa. It's the Korean term for comics, just as manga denotes comics from Japan, and with a host of publishers bringing new manhwa titles to the States for the first time, it's poised to become a household word among fanboys and pop culture mavens alike. Read more (BusinessWeek)

http://technorati.com/tag/manhwa

Lad Mag Channels Largerfeld to Retool Brand

(from WWD) Dan Bova, editor in chief of Stuff magazine since late October, wrote the editor's letter of his first full issue in the supposed voice of Karl Lagerfeld, focusing mostly on what Bova fabricates is the designer's taste for eating cats. Bova said he wants to de-emphasize scantily clad women and ramp up the fashion coverage, believing FHM's steadily more explicit covers helped speed that magazine's demise in December by alienating advertisers and newsstands.  Read more

Can You Hear Me Now?

PSFK picked up this New York Magazine article the other day: "As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited."

This article correlates with our trend report on Poly ID from September 2006. Ironically, the uninhibited personas online are the ones you'd least expect offline. Online affords a psychological freedom where introverts can find their confidence in the company of likeminded peers and cohorts.

Does the shirt define the man?

Topping the list of nine brands of 100 percent cotton men's shirts tested by Consumer Reports was the Jos. A. Bank Traveler Pinpoint All Cotton at $75. The Brooks Brothers 100 percent Pinpoint Cotton 80's 2 ply, scored the same as the Stafford shirt from JCPenney, but at $75 cost $35 more. The lowest-priced shirt in the study, Merona (Target) at $25, scored the poorest.

      

"You can spend $75 on a Brooks Brothers or Jos. A. Bank shirt and it will look good and you probably won't have to iron it, or you could spend $40 on a Lands' End, L.L. Bean or Stafford shirt and it will also look good and you probably won't have to iron it," said Pat Slaven, Consumer Reports Senior Project Leader and a textile expert.

But really, $40 or $75, doesn't it all come down to: Are you a Brooks Brothers man?

Three Style Standouts

The Style.com editors put together a compendium of the designers, personalities, events and trends that shaped 2006. Our three favorites from the list?

• For reminding us how hard it is to be queen, let alone a teenager in ‘80s: Marie Antoinette. The bon bon loving queen hit both the big screen and the runways this year.
• For continually keeping us guessing which end is up: Viktor & Rolf. Their new H&M line, including a $349 wedding dress, caused a worldwide frenzy when it debuted last month.
• For recognizing that weddings always end in bed: Vera Wang. Her groundbreaking deal with Serta mattresses will make you dream of couture.

On Human Nature: We Sweat the Small Risks

According to Time Magazine: Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.

Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread.

For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things.

The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. The more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.