Gucci bags were thrown to the crowd like loaves of bread to sate their appetite for the fabulous life. The crowd politely dispersed after being informed of Mr Pinault’s desire to make it on time for his private jet that would whisk him away to be with his wife, the actress Salma Hayek.

A "vegan" laptop bag. But is it organic?

An example google search on vegan bags shows that an increasing number of vendors are picking up on the value inherent in the concept of veganism, and applying it to strange things like hand bags.

The bags may be vegan, but are they organic? What is their carbon footprint? Do they contain flax?

As a vegan bag, could you eat it? Ah, of course not, you’d probably die because it’s just a bag made of vinyl that has been used as a cheap material for decades, derived from non-renewable oil, made in china, shipped overseas (again, using non-renewable oil as a transport fuel) and then sold to people at a massive markup.

A nice touch is to also name their bags after counterculture and “underground” bands. A mere $295 buys you the chance to feel good about your commitment to “positivity”, your love of The Knife and the cow that still has its hide.

Sheer brilliance, if you ask me. It’s amazing that they get away with it. They must have MBAs.

I am pleased to post the second installment in the ‘map of the world’ series, this time from the Midwestern US.

Not being from the Midwest or having lived there, I am not “qualified” to create such a map, so I’m grateful to Mike who spent the time to create this map and contribute it!

On a side note, some people have sent me links to Our Dumb World . The first map of the world from los angeles was not inspired by that site, but rather by this map that has been floating around the internet for quite some time.

While The Onion’s site is great, the main problem that I have with it is that it presents the world as two places, America and the states of Not-America, perpetuating this myth that America and Americans are a homogenous, unifed bunch, or, at best, separated neatly into Bush supporters or haters, red or blue state. There are interesting aspects to the way Americans from one part of the country view another to be explored, and the degree they are involved, culturally and economically, with foreign countries.

While these maps obviously still make broad generalisations, there is a significant difference in the way Midwesterners, East Coasters, Southerners, West coasters, etc. view the world, and while we may be poking fun at these people through these maps, I would at least hope that it helps people outside the US to realize that America, a vast country of 300 million people, is a much more complicated place than commonly perceived.

"Wow! An ad for ads! How meta"

Sadly, my mobile phone camera is not the best, so I’ll set the scene.

The poster above was in a bathroom at The Lakeview restaurant, a 24-hour diner on Dundas just east of Ossignton in Toronto. Evidently Zoom Media is having trouble finding advertisers willing to pay money to have a drunk, vintage-clad hipsters plant their foreheads on their “innovative” ads while they liberate themselves from their pints of PBR (I don’t claim to know what goes on in the women’s bathroom)

So, I will try a more multimedia approach to showing us how absurd our perceptions of the world around us really are.

In what is the first in a series of a few places, I present “The World”, as viewed by a typical wealthy resident of Los Angeles (America doesn’t do “socialism” anyway so no one gives a damn what the poor think)

And just in case my LA friends think I’m picking on them, just you wait for my plans for NYC and Toronto maps….
(click on map to expand)

I’m too lazy to do all the math, but a breakdown
- Maybe 1-2% of the world’s population lives in the areas i’ve shaded reddish.
- 15-20% of the world’s population lives in the “cold” areas
- the remainder in the grey areas

Don’t ask me why parts of America are brownish or green. There was somewhere I was going with that…

Human Nature

It is human nature to compare ourselves to those around us, whether out feelings of curiosity, envy, greed, superiority or even compassion. In order to defend our honour from those that may judge or mock us, cultures throughout the world put a great deal of emphasis on maintaining the perception of a perfectly-functioning family to the outside world at all costs. This is nothing new.

Appearances can be entirely fabricated yet have very tangible impacts through their influence on other people. People working in sales, whether for online ad space, cars or real estate go to great lengths to create an aura of success around themselves. This usually means expensive Italian clothes, a 7-series BMW or Swiss watches. Some individuals and families, through credit, can keep up appearances well beyond their realistic means, perhaps in the hope that if success is faked long enough, it will eventually come through positive reinforcement.

In the book Irrational Exuberance, Yale professor Robert Shiller does a great job of showing the effects this kind of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses-at-all-costs mentality has had on the stock market and real estate markets. I do not wish to repeat this discussion, but rather focus on how advertising ties in to this.

Exploiting Human Nature

Marketing for condominiums in the city, for example, seem to all have images featuring a variation of models in a cocktail dresses sipping martinis. The image: live here and you will live a lifestyle of elegance and prestige.

Virtually all fashion advertising is completely abstract, sometimes not even containing any of the actual products offered, focusing almost entirely on image. The mass proliferation of celeb-related content on the web and the subtle advertising that goes along with it serves as part of an asymmetrical attack on the psyche of the intended targets — the marketing of an image is no longer just a single picture on a billboard or a half-naked Claudia Schiffer in Flare magazine, it is indeed multimedia and multi-dimensional. You’re never going to look like Gisele in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. The fashion industry knows it can’t go too far in pushing an unrealistic ideal. But here’s the decidedly closer-to-earth Jennifer Aniston, cankles, big chin and all, and look at what she’s wearing! The players in the media and fashion industry are engaged in asymmetric image warfare in which they attempt to outdo each other in how effectively they can instill a sense of insecurity and longing. This has resulted in a predictable race to the bottom in the depravity of the content and the actions of the image-bearers, with DUI violations that put lives at risk becoming mere publicity stunts (I remember personally seeing a spike in the number of clearly-drunk drivers in Los Angeles during that particular fad)

Car advertising no longer seems to have any desire to give consumers a rational reason for purchasing their car. It is purely image based. Sleek cars driven on windy roads or through urban centres. The car companies have simply staked a claim on a particular territory market and bring out all the big marketing guns to protect from invaders. Consumers, on cue, in trying desperately to emulate an image, then do the work of self-segmenting themselves and preaching the virtues of their choice of car as an extension of their (imposed) personality. The sophisticated urbanite drives a Mini, the soccer mom with her SUV, and so on. It takes a great feat of will power for someone to break from this segmentation.

And so on. For kicks, grab an old National Geographic from 1975 in your local library (library? is that a Facebook group?) and find a full-page Ford or GM advertisement. They practically write mini-essays describing to you the virtues of their car and why you should purchase it! How far we’ve come from such primitive times.

Are we living in a “cultural bubble”?

What impact is all of this having?

We have people spending and living beyond their means in order to maintain an ever-increasing appearance of wealth, with others spending more to keep up, resulting in a wealth bubble that is now unravelling.

But what of the cultural bubble that has been forming around us for quite some time?

There is Wall Street folk wisdom that states that boom times are associated with shorter skirts and leaner times with longer ones. Certainly our culture is connected to our economic health, but has this particular bubble popped just yet? The bubble that has people desperately trying to emulate fabricated images that are deliberately unattainable to make us crave and want indefinitely? The bubble in which the vast majority of young girls that do not have the “right” measurements nevertheless buy the clothes from whichever label did the best job of instilling a fear in her of being passed up and ignored?

Just as not all of us can be real-estate wealthy millionaires, not all women can be supermodels, and not all men can be CEOs. What happens when this particular bubble pops, when the excess becomes too much for all to bear? There has always been pressure and motivation in society to conform and succeed. Never before has this pressure been applied with so much force, from so many different angles, and with so sophisticated a system of imagery with which to compare oneself to.

The epidemic of depression, anxiety and other psychological disorders are the signs of this strain. Even if there is a modest correction in extravagance, I am not convinced that the longer-term cultural bubble that has been forming over the past few decades is anywhere near popping. We have medicated the population with Zoloft and Prozac and produced a great growth industry in pharmaceuticals as a result, but there will eventually be a breaking point, if the trends of the last few decades continue.

PAY RATE IS $14.00 hour The purpose of this event is to drive awareness to a new line of AXE products.
Ambassadors will engage consumers in-store and provide them with and interactive and educational experience regarding AXE Hair products.
must be 18 to 45 yrs of age must be energetic,slender,attractive,and comfortable with interacting with customers

But, I thought we were trying tell guys that they need to have better hair? Why do you need someone “slender and attractive” to do so?

I would hope that Canada is more enlightened than this. The UK showed its cultural maturity recently by allowing a controversial atheist ad campaign that asserts that “there is probably  no god”. Certainly not all agree, but even church leaders in the UK welcomed the attention, noting that it causes more people to discuss God. Perhaps those that are not comfortable with the message will end up going to church more often, while those that agree can feel that they have a voice. Everyone is happy, once they recover from the shock of seeing a taboo broken.

If only we could do the same here in presenting an alternative way of life to that of consumerism and GDP growth above all, but there is zero tolerance for such views. At best, they are presented in the mainsteam media as coming from the “loony left” or “crazed environmentalists”. This CNN interview with Kalle Lasn, on the topic of Buy Nothing Day, shows just how deeply entrenched the idea of “buying stuff” really is and how far the media will go to perpetuate it.

Europe Exists. That’s where our period pieces and spy movies are set. Russia and Asia Exist, that’s where the spy movies become really interesting. Africa and Latin America Exist, that’s where drugs and diamonds come from that are the focus of the spy movies. Such is the complex virtual world that has been shaped inside all of our heads by the media.

So this makes for an interesting situation when you want to do condo marketing to people that have been made to believe that they live somewhere that doesn’t Exist. Toronto has a lot of high-rises (about 1750) and evidently they are running out of ideas for how to market them. Well, why don’t we sell people on the idea that they are in a place that does Exist?

So, in the affluent Rosedale/Yorkville area of Toronto, we have the Milan Condominiums.

Near Yonge & Merton streets we have the Merton-Yonge Condominiums (MYC in an old-style font that makes the “M” look rather like an “N”. Clever!!)

On the Etobicoke lakeshore, we have the California condos and South Beach condos and lofts.

These are just four that come to mind that I’ve seen in and around the city — I am not actively looking for a condo or even trying to find these! One notable exception to this trend is the 1 Bloor residences, which I have to admit do look pretty interesting. It’s also one of the few condo developments that seem to want to inspire a sense of pride in the location of the condo. It’s in Toronto and it wants to be in Toronto!

Bazis Internatinoal, the developer of 1 Bloor, is from Kazakhstan, so perhaps they can be forgiven for not realizing that Toronto does not Exist.

100 years from now, in the textbooks, e-books or whatever they’re teaching from in the marketing classes of the 22nd century, they will show this movie as a showpiece of marketing in the early 21st century.

The whole movie plays like an especially bad episode of Beverly Hills 90210 — bad acting and unlikely scenarios mixed in with commercials every 10 minutes. I tried to keep track of as many as I could so that writing this blog post could be thought of as making really sour lemonade from one lemon of a movie:

- constant references to myspace (incidentally none for facebook), complete with bit of the movie that looks like webinar tutorial sessions for how to perform actions on myspace for those that have just escaped from under a rock and have decided to spend their first hours in this movie.

- naturally, someone (Drew Barrymore’s character) in this movie is a hipster creative type, and they use a Mac. Yep, we get it. People who use Macs are cool and artistic. Can we all go home now? Ironically enough, she does (print) ad sales. Come on, Apple, can’t you be more creative than that? Expand from your captive target demographic already, there are plenty of other segments of American society that have debt money to burn buying overpriced and overmarketed computers

- a Crest whitestrips ad so flagrant I almost thought i’d been transported back to the 15 minutes of commercials before the torture movie started

- almost as if to draw attention to it out of sheer irony, Justin Long, Mr. Mac, has a nice Dell promo spot

But I want to discuss in more detail the most sophisticated and effective  promo of the movie — EA’s attempt to not just product-place NBA Live, but to actively shape opinion about who plays console games.

A much more subtle breed of advertising

One of the more absurd scenes of the movie involves a clearly intentional dead-ringer of Gisele Bundchen (i.e. a Hot Girl ™ ) playing NBA Live with Justin Long’s character until 3am, at which point she high-fives him for the great game, and makes her exit, alone, into the 3am night of Baltimore. Yes, I did say Baltimore.

The most important signal being sent to the men and women in the audience: Hot Girls ™ can play video games! It’s okay!

Los Angeles needs to eat. And with the movie and music rackets markets bringing in far less fat revenues from the good old days, gaming is the only growth industry LA has going for it these days, and if it means showing Hot Girls playing NBA Live or other games, so be it. Welcome to the New World Order.

My projection: Gaming in 2020 is going to be decidedly more “cool” than it is now. By 2020 the movie industry / gaming industry differential, already now in gaming’s favour, will be heavily skewed towards gaming. The living, breathing celebrities we all worship will in large part be replaced by virtual characters.  Think I’m crazy? Think about the people that used IM and email in 1995. In those days I was mocked and teased for sitting in front of the computer and chatting with people remotely. Who uses it today? At the very least, celebrities will be commoditized much more than they are now (note the disposable stars from the reality TV trend) .

I could continue discussing but I think you get the idea.

Next time you pay $10-12 for a movie ticket, think about the fact that you’re often paying to watch a 90-120 minute commercial or brain-sculpting exercise. Movie-goers should collectively demand either a stop to this practice, or lower ticket prices, because I sure as hell don’t want to watch Hollywood have its cake and eat it too.