April 24, 2009
Where is it? Might be hidden in Culver City, atop the Baldwin Hills. And now there’s a 50-acre state park, 500 feet up, with vistas from Downtown to the Pacific Ocean, AND a new visitors center. The architecturally innovative project contains exhibitions on local ecology and history, offers event spaces and conference rooms, and native-species landscaping. The Architect’s Newspaper blog calls the facility “a curved, canopied, exposed concrete, steel, and (floor to ceiling) glass structure that hugs the site, affords incredible visibility, and seems to grow out of its undulating earthscape.” (Designed by Safdie Rabines Architects.) Unless you know where you’re driving, the entrance is hard to find: along that Read More
April 24, 2009
Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) wrote some songs with James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins) and Taylor Hanson (Hanson). Flashy, melodic, hook-oholic songs like those he crafts for Fountains of Wayne. All they needed was a drummer who knows classic, Beatles-y song structure (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, guitar solo, repeat chorus, outro). Someone able to propel hardish rock with a clean sheen. Someone like, say, Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick. “We kept throwing out names, until finally we said, ‘Why don’t we just call Bun E. and see if he’ll work with us?’ ” And new super group, Tinted Windows, was complete. (The Carlos story is in Huffington Post.)
Now there’s an album and some shows (including April 28 at the Troubadour in L.A.). You can hear two songs on Read More
April 22, 2009
If you’re like this Hot Sheet poster, bees have popped back to top of mind again when it comes to environmental concerns. Over the last two months I’ve been reminded of bees three times: once watching 60 Minutes’ program “The Case of the Vanishing Bees,” again while picking up Dreyer’s strawberry ice cream (Dreyer’s is donating a portion of its revenue to bee research), and recently when I read CNN’s story about the $14.5 million that a British consortium has pledged towards researching bee trouble. To restate the problem: Bees, essential to pollinating crops, are quickly vanishing throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. Read More
April 22, 2009
It can’t get much worse for the Washington Nationals of Major League Baseball. They’ve won just three of their first 13 games. Even more embarrassing: During a game last week, Nationals Adam Dunn and Ryan Zimmerman wore jerseys reading “Natinals.” Majestic Athletic, the company that makes the uniforms, admitted the mistake of omitting the “o.” Read More
April 21, 2009
“Trust Me,” the TV series about a fictional ad agency with real clients, was cancelled last week by TNT. The tradition of advertising executives on TV goes all the way back to “Bewitched” (Darren Stevens worked for McMahon and Tate). But “Trust Me,” featuring Eric McCormack from “Will & Grace and Tom Cavanagh from “Ed,” was probably the first program whose sponsors were also clients of the fictional agency (e.g. Dove hair-care products). There were also plans for two other giant marketers – Anheuser-Busch InBev and General Motors to be written into “Trust Me” scripts.
April 21, 2009
Almost daily, this Hot Sheet poster gets asked, “Are you on Twitter?” No, I respond, “but I plan to sign up soon.” What a crock. I don’t even know how to begin and now I’m hearing that some experts feel companies must have Twitter in their marketing strategies to get a leg up. Read More
April 16, 2009
Pepsi is pouring $1.2 billion into rebranding its products over the next three years. (See The Hot Sheet’s Gatorade / G item). It should hope most of the new designs won’t be as disastrous as its new Tropicana orange juice cartons. There’s nothing tropical about the new packaging, which, according to website Brand New, “feels, at best, like a discount store brand with what looks like… rights-managed stock photography if not outright royalty-free.” The blocky, sans-serif typography, especially, screams generic food product. Since debuting last year, the orange juice’s sales have plunged 20%. Money down the drain.
Attention, designoholics: The Brand New site offers tons of postings comparing this with other repackagings.
April 15, 2009
From the blog, Signals vs. Noise: “Brilliant move by a local BMW dealer in responding to a national Audi ad. Audi’s 2009 A4 ad on the left side of the street says “Your move, BMW.” Santa Monica BMW comes back with an M3 ad across the street that says “Checkmate.” Now that’s advertising.”
What do you do if you’re Audi?
April 14, 2009
The Times is thick with Twitter hype these days. The social networking site that limits messages to 140 characters gets a laundry list of present and future uses in a recent article by Claire Cain Miller. And marketing tops that list. Businesses large and small are using the diary-like entries to add customers, or at least take the pulse of their buying behavior. “Companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Dell can see what their customers are thinking as they use a product,” and adapt their marketing accordingly, while independent services such as masseuses twitter when they “have same-day openings in their schedules and offer discounts.”
Despite the excitable hype, it’s worth noting that Twitter has yet to make a profit. Also, Read More
April 9, 2009
Imagine Brad Pitt was not only as huge a star as he is, but wrote number-one songs for the top singers of the day, was a brilliant performer in his own right, and championed radical politics when they weren’t popular. You’d be close to describing the significance of Kris Kristofferson. He starred in huge-grossing movies (The Deer Hunter, A Star Is Born); he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” (biggest Janis Joplin hit) and “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” (major Johnny Cash song); and helped reframe country music (along with Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings) toward pure personal expression.
Ethan Hawke’s profile in the new Rolling Stone has some great stories. Like the time Kristofferson, Read More
