Brand Noise

Growing Pains: As Networks Intensify, Roles Evolve

We here at scenarioDNA love the roller derby. It’s an amazing source of girl power. Not just in the sport itself but in its underpinnings. It takes extraordinary team effort to sustain the operation. That said, there’s been some chatter of late talking about junior league roller derby. The first brat league was formed in Tucson by a group of kids who had been following the Tucson Roller Derby adult league. The girls are from 10 to 18 and they play by modified rules.

What’s interesting is that the girls enjoy the same solidarity as their elder counterparts. Yet, one thing has come up for discussion during our own visits with New York’s Gotham Girls: the emotional impact of injuries.

It’s fabulous to see young girls enjoy the solidarity and empowerment that the older girls find in roller derby. They’re practicing at least twice a week, playing once and socializing in-between. They live and breathe the sport. Even at work or school, they txt and IM their derby friends.

The network is pretty intense, which is something hard to find today. But because of that intensity, the impact of an injury hits very hard. Suddenly, a girl is jolted out of her element. That in itself is difficult for women of age, and further complicated for girls in their teens and pre-teens who are in the formative stages of their identity. It singly steps the issue up for the big sisters who now play yet another role.

The trick is how to maintain the authenticity of the younger set without losing the essence. (Image: Arnicare waiting for derby girls at practice.)

The Eyes of Amy Winehouse

I have spent much time deconstructing Amy Winehouse both with clients and my students.  There are many layers to explore that speak to an evolution and remixing of subculture trends.  The roots of her big eye makeup makeup are touched upon in this interesting clip from Herald Tribune.

NYC Gets Drive-ins This Summer

“Drive-ins have been disappearing for decades, declining to about 400 today from a peak of more than 4,000 in 1958, largely because of rising property prices and changing movie-going habits. After today, there will be 30 or so scattered across New York State, two in Connecticut, and just one, the Delsea in Vineland, in all of New Jersey, the state where drive-ins were born in 1933.” —The New York Times
                   
                    DRV-IN, a pop-up drive-in at 139 Norfolk that ends this week, will partner this summer with area parking lots, car rental companies, and car manufacturers to produce a spectacular series that will bring back the drive-in: Cars Under the Stars.                    

                   

The Method Behind Pep Band Music Choices

Who knew to ask? It can seem that the pep bands are forever behind the times, playing from song lists borrowed from classic-rock radio stations and wedding-reception D.J.s.

But there is a method to their madness — “We try to play songs that not only appeal to the blue-hairs in the crowd, but also to our students,” said Jim Hudson, director of athletic bands at Arizona State.

Updating the songbook is an annual tug-of-war. Most bands hold year-end votes for band members. At U.C.L.A., the bottom five songs are dropped. Five new ones are added.

Most pep-band arrangements, designed for timeouts, range from 100 seconds to 2 minutes. Raps, with their repetitive hooks, are increasingly used for 30-second timeouts.

Choosing the right mix has legal complexities, too. Music is copyrighted, so bands typically cannot simply choose a song and start playing it — although many do.

Read the whole story.

Crushed Ice Gets Its Due

Ice isn't just for chilling drinks anymore, or for packing fish and treating sprains. It's a hot snack. Some Sonic Drive-In franchises sell it in cups and in bags to go. Ice-machine makers are competing to make the best chewable ice, with names like Chewblet, Nugget Ice and Pearl Ice. One manufacturer calls the ice-loving South the "Chew Belt."

Sales of machines that make easier-to-chew ice jumped about 23%, to 16,673 units in 2006 from 2003, according to data from the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute. Some ice chewers, including country-music star Vince Gill, have had the machines installed in their homes.

Ice chewers swap tips on Icechewing.com. A recipe for preparing the perfect cup of ice: Use a glass, not a plastic cup. Let crushed ice fuse in water. Drink the water. Shake the cup to loosen the ice. Dig in.

The American Dental Association says that ice-chewing can damage teeth. "People have the right to do things that may hurt them," says Matt Messina, a dentist in Cleveland and spokesman for the association. "If something breaks, we'll fix it."

A little trading down, a little retro, a little irreverence, a little retro. No wonder ice is gaining commercial steam.

Read more. (Image: Billy V.)

Vampira's Authenticity Pulled from the Culture

Maila Nurmi, whose "Vampira" TV persona pioneered the spooky-yet-sexy Goth aesthetic, has died. She was 85. Friends plan to transport Nurmi's casket in the same hearse she rode in when she served as grand marshal in a procession of hearses sponsored by Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum -- a vintage 1951 vehicle that appeared in a scene of "Ed Wood." (Read more from CNN.)

Vampira played with her pet tarantula, gave gruesome recipes for vampire cocktails and bathed in a boiling cauldron. With a knack for the double-entendre and the requisite blood-chilling scream, Vampira was a hit.

The character won Nurmi short-lived fame and a dedicated cult following. Nurmi claimed Vampira was also the uncredited inspiration for later ghoulish yet glamorous female characters in film and television, including Elvira.

The unconventional came calling in 1953, after Nurmi attended a Hollywood masquerade ball dressed as the ghoul of Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. In creating Vampira, Nurmi said she went beyond the Addams cartoon, developing an alter ego influenced by beatnik culture and her experiences as a child of the Depression.

"The times . . . were so conservative and so constrained," Nurmi said in a video interview that was posted on her website. "There was so much repression, and people needed to identify with something explosive, something outlandish and truthful."

Read more from the LA Times.

Tools To Energize a Writer

Talk about cultural affinities. Consider this POV in the NY Times where a writer declares her farewell to Microsoft Word. Kudos to those who think ahead of what someone just might need. Used to be that choice meant reverting to a typewriter or pen and Moleskine. Not true anymore.

"Goodbye to Word’s prim rulers, its officious yardsticks, its self-serious formatting toolbar with cryptic abbreviations (ComicSansMS?)...Our redeemer is Scrivener."

Scrivener is the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think--encouraging note-taking and outlining and restructuring.

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen.

Our personal favorite feature: Mac OS X only (not compatible with Windows). Now how do you like how that feels?

Then, there's also the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia. With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” Black screen. Green letters. (Beautiful!)

Read more.

Ralphie Represents Pop-Culture Shift

America has a new favorite Christmas movie. A Christmas Story, the 1983 tale about Ralphie, a 9-year-old in 1940s Indiana, and his lust for a Red Ryder air rifle, is everything Wonderful Life is not: satiric and myth-deflating, down to the cranky store Santa kicking Ralphie down a slide.

In a 2006 Harris poll, respondents from 18 to 41 years old named it their favorite holiday movie, while their parents and grandparents picked Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street.

This is one of those little pop-cultural shifts--football overtakes baseball, salsa defeats ketchup--that signal bigger changes: here, in the relationship between the community and the individual. In a traditional Christmas story, the larger holiday is a social good. Here, the Christmas celebrated by the greater society is crass, stressful and risible.

In the end, the characters discover an authentic holiday outside the usual traditions. It's the individual Christmas that matters.

It's the nostalgia of its Gen-X and -Y fans, who remember childhood in terms of divorces and bad haircuts…Ironically, Christmas Story takes place decades before they were born. But [Ralphie] and his friends don't twitter about bells and petals and angels' getting their wings. Christmas is about the kids' getting their due. It's a time of disappointment and bullies but also of dreams…

(This points a direct line to Depression era holidays when my grandparents, for one, decorated a box instead of a Christmas tree. Once again connecting Gen Xers with the GI Generation where honest humor is appreciated.)

Read the whole story.

At Macy's NYC, Only Santa is Real

We made the annual trek to Macy's Herald Square to see Santa with much insistence from my 60-something mother. It's the only place where Macy's is like it used to be, claims she who has had a Macy's credit card since 1956. Or is it? She paraded herself proudly at each sales counter waving the 20% Macy's discount card recently mailed to her--Only to be dismayed that the card was not accepted at any of the favored spots that make Macy's feel like the "old days." It's been policy for as long as I can remember that certain discounts are not extended to these leased departments. Yet the prolification of today's leased departments have deconstructed Macy's Herald Square into essentially a mall. So the Macy's my mom thinks is a nod to yesteryear is simply on lease. That makes it impossible for the essence of what was Macy's to ever extend beyond the...(er)...flagship.

But at least we know that the Santa at Macy's is real. According to my five-year-old, he never has to ask her name and he knows that she's grown a lot. That gives Macy's about another five years to grab hold of their brand before this kid hits tweenhood and steps up her retail expectations. As for now, she thinks Macy's is magical--that one brief visit each year holds her imagination for 365 days.   

What Analog Synths Can Teach Us About Media Planning

My first synth was a Korg 770 and I was hooked from then on...so I found this article in Reuters titled "Electronic artists find inspiration in vintage gear" rather interesting.  I think it also offers some interesting unexpected insights when it comes to looking at media planning today.  The idea of analog  and digital and the cyclical process we go through of over relying on one or the other..

Before preset sound banks overflowed with prefab beats, electronic musicians made them from scratch with freestanding synthesizers. Before drag and drop, remixers physically cut and spliced tape to move sonic parts. When the digital production revolution finally did come, dance producers led the charge, emboldened by the standardization of sounds and methods they had pioneered. Since then, nothing has sped the genre's growth (or dilution, according to some) more than the advent of increasingly cheap, easily manipulated software.

"People are realizing what's missing from the sounds they're getting out of software," Phil Moffa of production/DJ outfit Vinyl Life says. "They're conscious of how everything is sounding the same, and digital replication is the same every time. The magic of analog is it's never the same, depending on the weather, where you are in the world, the electricity supply."