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How ABC and Disney Spoiled “Wall-E” For The Entire World

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Last night, I was watching Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, and during one of the time outs ABC turned their cameras to show the Celebrities in the audience at the Staples Center, one of the inevitable and annoying trends of the past couple of decades.

Naturally, ABC was running through all of the usual Celebrity suspects: there was Jack, flanked as always by Lou Adler and a young chick; Dustin Hoffman; Spike Lee, etc. Suddenly, out of the blue, there was an interview or something with Wall-E, the robot subject of the latest movie by Pixar.

And all I could think was “Gee, thanks for spoiling the movie for me!”

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Why “Sweet Home Alabama” is a Bad Choice For A Tourism Theme

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The song “Sweet Home Alabama” is many many things: one of the greatest political songs ever written; the song that put Lynyrd Skynyrd on the musical map; the catalyst for Neil Young and Ronnie Van Zant’s friendship.

What it wouldn’t seem to be, however, is a song that would make people go, “gee, I need to spend my tourist dollars on Alabama. Let’s go!!”

However, the good people who run Alabama’s tourism agency disagree with me: in 2008 the theme by which they will try to encourage people to go visit Alabama will indeed be “Sweet Home Alabama.”

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Second Life and the Stupid White Man’s Burden, Part One: Anshe’s Ascension

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sl_mrburns.jpgWe at Medialoper take pride in surfing the hemorrhaging edge of cultural analysis, so I’ll be blunt: sex sells.

Especially celebritarian sex, famous pretty people associated with products which may or may not be related to the source of their fame. I still don’t get what Catherine Zeta-Jones has to do with cellular phones, but whenever I walk by a T-Mobile store or see their ads in a magazine, there she is. (Maybe if I watched television and saw the commercials it would make more sense, but I don’t want to know that much.) Though it helps, fame is not required. Like, there’s an auto shop at 10th and Howard in San Francisco called Smog Queen. On their sign is a faded head-and-shoulders glamour shot of what I’m guessing is a porn starlet. The Queen of Smog, no doubt. The sheer gall of it cracks me up every time I drive by. Empirically, what does a hot chick have to do with a smog check?

Not a damn thing. By my math, that’s exactly as much a hot chick has to do with virtual real estate in Second Life. Not that a hot chick can’t do smog checks or sell virtual real estate—they can be found in both fields—but if you create the association in the consumer’s mind, it’s unlikely to hurt sales.

Which brings us to Anshe Chung, the Second Life persona of one Ailin Graef.
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Second Life, Sony, and Suzanne

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Suzanne Vega, Journey, and Aimee the Scary Blowup Doll.My initial reaction was you have GOT to be shitting me, followed closely by huh. that kinda makes sense. That’s been my chain of response to most everything about the online virtual world thingy Second Life thus far, from the basic concept to its immense popularity to the gazillions of dollars spent on it daily to the notion that for many users it’s just high-bandwidth cybersex to the fact that major brands are establishing a marketing presence there. That it even qualifies as a “there” is troubling, but according to consensus reality, it exists. And where people go, they will be sold to. Certainly advertising in video games is nothing new, dating at least back to the Marlboro ads in Pole Position II. The blatant promotion of cigarettes to ten year-olds (as opposed to the comparatively more subtle Joe Camel approach) has that certain early-eighties charm, doesn’t it?

So after a momentary incredulousness, I realized the lack of shock value that the allegedly beleaguered music industry (whose tolerate/hate relationship with the internet is probably the most well-documented struggle since World War II) is attempting to get a piece of the virtual pie’s very real money, in such forms as the imaginatively named Sony Music Media Island. In Second Life parlance, an island is the same thing as in meatspace: a mass of land surrounded by water. The owner can do pretty much whatever they want with it, allowing for the fulfillment of more than a few fascist fantasies. Rule your vampire clan while sitting at your computer in a bathrobe! We may not have flying cars, but the Future’s still pretty great.

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How Not To Sell Books

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So, yeah, it’s Monday morning and I’m checking headlines, and I see an interesting article from Publisher’s Weekly about the Penguin group: turns out they’re pushing the direct sales. Now, me being me, I’m immediately interested. This is the first time a major publishers has made direct-to-consumer sales — no local bookstores, no Amazon — a high-profile goal.

Or not.

Let me explain, first by quoting from the PW article:

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