A Better Course

what annoyed me was the creative director's justification; "Smart brands now know that it is increasingly pointless just to talk at your market. Today it's much more about involving them in the whole process of marketing." Yes, they'd like to be involved in the sense of being seriously listened to. […] Sticking them in a poster is not involving them in the marketing process.

Pasche ignored the client. The result – the single most iconic band logo and one of the most recognisable identities in the world. Few band logos are widely identifiable from a logo that doesn't feature lettering. And yet, this image is The Rolling Stones.

“Relax while working.”

"curation" isn't anything like the museum version of this activity. But as a means of meaning manufacture, it's pretty good. It takes the "retro treatment one better, by digging into the actual bits and pieces of the cultural debris field. Budweiser is now running ads that are or appear to be antique and they are now using a can design from the 1930s. And as a meaning making strategy, curation multiplies the aesthetic possibilities open to us. It gets rid of that modernist embargo on things that are old fashioned and "out of date."

A study by Gerald Marwell and Ruth Ames found that students of economics are indeed much more likely to free-ride in experiments that called for private contributions to public goods. Their basic experiment involved a group of subjects who were given an initial endowment of money, which they were to allocate between two accounts, one “public,” the other “private.”