In the advertising world, brand identity is everything. Volvo means safety. Colgate means clean. IPod means cool. But since the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, its “show of force” brand has proved to have limited appeal to Iraqi consumers, according to a recent study commissioned by the U.S. military.
The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation.” The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.
Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you.”
Josh Marshall makes an interesting find regarding campaign spending :
Turns out there’s one place GOP prez candidates spent a lot more than their Dem rivals last quarter: direct mail. Don’t want to read too much into one factoid or imply that direct mail is an outmoded campaign money technology. But it was very much a key pillar of what the late 20th century GOP machine was built on. And I would imagine the political future belongs to the digital equivalents of direct mail.
I completely disagree that this is a sign that the Republican party is “slower to make the switch” to more technologically advanced methods of voter outreach. Have you seen direct mail campaign literature? At first glance they look like nonpartisan “voter guides” that give a rundown on the various measures and candidates that will appear on the ballot. It’s only upon closer inspection that people see that they’re carefully constructed bits of Republican propaganda that give the illusion of being impartial. This is where Fox News got their “fair and balanced” trick.
Moreover, despite the higher costs, direct mail has a distinct advantage over other forms of communication. Voters may tune out political ads and instinctively delete mass emails, but they hold on to these flyers until election day. For a week or more before election day, many of the recipients of the GOP direct mail efforts see the same advertisement over and over again, whether it sits in the mail pile, used as a bookmark, or tacked to the refrigerator, these ads make a much more lasting impression than any other type of political communication.
When election day arrives, these voters pull out their “voter guide” to do some research and then march to the polls to vote the way the Republicans told them to. It’s a brilliant move, I just wish our side did it more often.
If I had a nickel for every time CNN aired a story about Evangelical voters under the banner of “Faith and Politics”, I could probably afford to be a Republican.
NEW YORK - With a blast that made skyscrapers tremble, an 83-year-old steam pipe sent a powerful message that the miles of tubes, wires and iron beneath New York and other U.S. cities are getting older and could become dangerously unstable.
The steam conduit that exploded beneath a Manhattan street at the height of rush hour Wednesday, just a block from Grand Central Terminal, was laid when Calvin Coolidge was president, and was part of a system that began providing energy to city buildings in 1882.
Investigators are still trying to determine what caused the explosion, but some experts said the age of the city’s infrastructure was a possible factor. Pipes don’t last forever.
“This may be a warning sign for this very old network of pipe that we have,” said Anil Agrawal, a professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York. “We should not be looking at this incident as an isolated one.”
From Boston to Los Angeles, a number of American cities are entering a middle age of sorts, and the infrastructure propping them up is showing signs of strain.
Story. The real marvel of life in New York City is that streets don’t explode more often, that more people aren’t injured or killed by falling cornices or collapsed scaffolding. Once when I was living on 120th street, I watched flames ten or twenty feet high shoot from an open manhole at the end of my street. And shortly before I moved, a woman stepped on one of those ubiquitious metal covering plates Con Ed leaves strewn about the city, and was electocuted. To death. Just an average New Yorker going about her business, steps on the wrong patch of sidewalk, and bam. Turns out some huge percentage of those things are carrying some measurable amount of live electricity.
Honestly, the astonishing thing about New York is that it works as well as it does, given the density of the population and the age of the infrastructure.
This is an actual ad clipped from some long-discarded WWII-era issue of Life Magazine. If you’ve ever seen one of my longer talks, you may remember this image from the digression into old advertising imagery and its influence on my work. Bringing it all around full circle, I’ve got a new section in the shop in which I hope to feature more of these found-art oddities (sans watermarks, of course). So: overall shop with Tom Tomorrow shirts, posters, etc. here (including many items specifically requested by readers, such as this poster); subsection with weird found art stuff here. Only a couple things in the latter right now, but I’ll be adding more.
I meant to post this sooner, but I’ve had a ton of stuff going on lately and, well, I forgot. Anyway, my pal Peter Kuper has what looks like a very cool new book and is doing a series of signings. (Warning to those of you at work, which, judging by my site stats, is most of you — turn your speakers down before you click thru.) There’s one more event in NYC, as well as several others around the country. If you go, tell him you saw it here, so I don’t look like a total schmuck for not getting this up earlier.
July 22nd: 7:00PM
Peter Kuper and Kevin Pyle will be doing powerpoint presentations including Kuper’s work from Oaxaca, Mexico, Kuper in Oaxaca and signing their new graphic novels Stop Forgetting To Remember and Blind Spot at Bluestockings located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington one block south of Houston and 1st Avenue.
July 25th – 29th
Artist’s Alley at ComiCon in San Diego, Ca.
July 31st: 7:00PM
Cleveland, Ohio
Mac’s Backs ~ Books on Coventry
1820 Coventry Rd.
Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118
216-321-2665
www.macsbacks.com
Fri August 31 – Sun September 2Atlanta, GA
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival talk and signing.
… here’s a little more info:
World War 3 illustrated editors Peter Kuper and Kevin Pyle will be presenting work from their latest graphic novels, Stop Forgetting to Remember and Blindspot.
Peter Kuper’s Stop Forgetting to Remember is a wry quasi-autobiographical meditation on the reconciliation of a past of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll with the present demands of parenthood in the shadow of 9/11 and Bush’s wartime America. Kuper will also be presenting his first-hand graphic reportage of the recent citizen uprising and government repression in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he has been living for the past year.
Kevin Pyle’s Blindspot chronicles one boy’s disillusionment with heroic comic-book depictions of war and the role of forbidden imagery in exposing the darkness at the center of the adult world. Pyle’s will also show material from Lab U.S.A, his docu-comic on authoritarian and racially-inspired scientific research.
Harry sits with his friends in a diner. Ominous customers cast enigmatic glances. Are they rival wizards? As one of them moves closer, the narrative abruptly stops, mid-sentence. Fans initally wonder if the last page is missing from their books.
Longtime readers are divided: is it a brilliant act of literary bravado which disregards both audience expectations and the traditional dramatic arc, or simply a pretentious, unsatisfying copout on the part of a creator who couldn’t figure out how to end a long-running series?
J.K. Rowling emerges from seclusion long enough to note defensively that “Real life doesn’t have neat, tidy endings!”
For those of you remember the cartoon my friend Tom Neely and I produced a few years ago, “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”, you might be interested in his first book, The Blot. If you live in Los Angeles, the book release party is Friday night :
Painter and cartoonist Tom Neely’s first graphic novel, “The Blot,” is like a sad song that breaks your heart while reminding you of life’s beauty. “The Blot” follows a nameless everyman who, while dealing with the fallout from a doomed relationship, is stalked by a mysterious black splotch. As the story unfolds, this shape-shifting blot appears as a harmless cloud of ink, a faceless demon, a source of strength and an inescapable darkness, testing our character in a new way with each metamorphosis.
With a drawing style resembling the 1930s newspaper comic strips of E.C. Segar and Floyd Gottfredson, and a surrealistic sensibility inspired by painter René Magritte, Neely eschews traditional, representational comic storytelling and finds innovative new ways to tell an ultimately human story about love and loss.
Accompanying The Blot will be a selection of original art work as well as the introduction of 3 new limited giclée prints of Neely’s paintings. These prints will first be available at SHQ Friday, July 20th.
Tom will be signing copies of The Blot at SHQ from 8pm - 10pm.
My guess is he’ll be drinking beer at SHQ from 10pm - until we decide to close the gates and even then we may lock him in the store. He’ll share some beer with you I’m pretty sure.
His new book is fantastic, so even if you aren’t able to make it to the opening, you should pick up a copy of the book. I’ll be there too, so don’t miss this opportunity to say “Oh…so that’s what that one guy with the website looks like. I thought he’d be thinner. Is there any beer left?”
Last chance to get your name in the metaphorical hat for a free CAKE cd — contest closes at noon EST tomorrow. Details above.
CAKE week was also supposed to feature a transcript of a conversation I had with John McCrea last week, but his European tour seems to have thrown a spanner in the works. Or maybe a Spaniard, as John Lennon put it. At any rate, we’ll get that up when we can. It’s not like you’re paying for any of this.
Robert Parry’s new book Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush is now on sale. I just ordered it, and I hope you’ll consider doing so too and maybe even sending Parry’s website some money. Parry is one of America’s greatest investigative journalists, and has really put himself on the line to do the work he does.
