The Ad Kid

everythugneedsaladyy asked: Why don't you ever post?

the posts here i have to take time to actually write and think out… i post a lot on my other tumblr… jameelmohammed.tumblr.com

Abercrombie Strikes Back - Anti Branding

Last night I sat down to dinner with my grandparents to watch the news, when a story crosses the screen about Abercrombie and Jersey Shore. I was a little bit confused. The two of those things occupy completely different areas of my brain. I’ve talked before on this blog about the Shore’s cast member, “Snooki”, and the premise of shows like “the Shore” and “Bad Girls Club”…. Let’s just say, not a fan.

Apparently Abercrombie isn’t either.

They’re willing to pay the show’s infamous star, Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino, NOT to wear their clothes. Good move Abercrombie!

Brand Association is really important, and one of the easiest, and most efficient ways of influencing that is through association with other brands. That’s why companies hire positive public figures to endorse them. They promote a lifestyle that the brands products create.

Jersey Shore, and Mike especially, are brands in and of themselves. What a brand allows itself to be associated with says a lot about what it means in itself. Abercrombie spends a lot of time and money to cultivate an image, and an idea about what it’s brand represents.

^Their campaigns are always in black and white, with soft lighting, and fresh faced, happy models. While the ads are very sexy, they’re also cute and playful. Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino, has cultivated a very different image. His lifestyle is greasy, and stale, and roughly sexual… Very different.

But the geniuses at Abercrombie did more than just renounce ”the Situation” as a brand representative. By handling the situation publicly, they didnt just stop the negative image, they created a positive anti-image.

An anti-image is what a company creates when it declares what it isn’t. The story didn’t just affirm what the Abercrombie name means, and what lifestyle it represents, but it tells the consumer what lifestyle it isn’t a part of, and what it doesn’t agree with.

Smart move, Abercrombie! By anti-imaging, what the Abercrombie reps have effectively accomplished, is making the brand just a little bit more exclusive. EVERYONE, (as I’ve said before) wants to be a part of something exclusive. So Abercrombie turned what could have been a LOT, of negative publicity into a positive branding experience.

 Situations will arise, and the best possible way to handle them is to take the negatives and make them positives. Really, that’s all you can hope for.

-Jameel:

RGB Lounge-don’t you wish you were this cool?

This is the first in what will be a series of well known and not so well known creative spaces in the city and surrounding areas. This one might not be that well known yet but it definitely will be. Get in on the ground floor if you know what’s good for you.

 
Last year before Christmas I took a trip over to Chicago’s coolest neighborhood Wicker park. I went to do some Christmas shopping and some cell phone photography. Instead I was quickly distracted by a new space on Milwaukee. RGB Lounge while not imposing has a really cool vibe. When you first enter you’re greeted by a dark soft space. The lights are colored and there’s a lot of bright spots so the dark doesn’t get overpowering. When I first walked in there was a feel somewhere between a gallery, a super trendy store, and a club. There’s a huge open space making it perfect for parties, (you can rent it) There’s also a luminescent bar in front of a huge plasma screen and t shirts by the latest featured artist.
And that brings me to the next reason that this is such a cool space and the reason that I’m putting in the creative spaces series. RGB Lounge is different from all the other trendy t shirt and party spots, its an artists’ collective. For a small fee of $50 (I believe) you get access to the lounges’ premium Mac work stations and Adobe design suite software. Also included in membership is access to their screen printing software @ a reduced rate of $6 per t shirt (instead of the 25 for non members). I got a tour of the work area, the basement, and I could just tell that some great work is gonna be getting done there.
Besides regular member based artwork the guys and girls over at RGB are also using pptheir powers for good. There are plans in the works for community art programs for students, in high-school, who may not have access
to this kind of software. This type of program would allow a lot of people to create digital art and learn the process of print making which is really cool.
To top it all off they aren’t just doing the memberships and the out reach. They don’t just have a cool space and talented artists. They’re also merging technology and art in innovative and interesting ways. The coolest of these is their digital graffiti board. The board consists of a massive custom LCD screen and a fiber optic krylon can. While it took me a little while to get used to the distance and pressure required for a consistent line, once I’d gotten the feel of it it went pretty well. I did my tag a few times and then called it a day.
The last thing that I’m sure is going to make this space a success is that the staff is super obliging. I simply walked in off the street and approached the front desk. They were more than willing to give me a full tour of the facilities, even before I mentioned that I might write about it here.
So be sure to stay tuned for much more to come from this up and coming creative space. They’re always looking for donations to bring more art to more people so if you’d like
You can learn more at rgblounge.com or you can visit
1420 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622
Adios
-Jameel:

The Cool- Part 1

^^ read this book^^

The Cool

Definition: the best possible moment in time, as defined by all the things that make up an experience.

Usage: this party was cool, because everything was really fun.

The Cool Life: a series of ideal moments over the lifespan of an individual person

This music is cool. i.e it makes me feel like this moment in time couldnt possibly be any better than it is right now. This dj, this party, this story, this store, these shoes, this neighborhood, those jeans, that boy, that artist, those models, that city, are all cool because they make me think that my life is being lived better than anyone else.

Everything is a lifestyle accessory. These accessories make the consumer believe that his life is being better experienced than those around them. The only way to win is for others to lose. This is why the lame, the antiquated, the passé, are all equally important to the idea of cool. No one can gauge what is cool without also defining what isn’t.

This does, of course, mean that cool can’t be tangible. It’s in a state of constant flux because it’s relative to the beliefs of others.  If cool is the belief that this product, this experience, this moment is being better spent than those around you and everyone carries this belief then no one really wins and no one really loses. The cool thrives because of a basic human instinct to be the best, the dominant force, and it’s this need that guarantees the perpetual existence of the cool. Once again, nobody wins if nobody loses, and nobody loses if everyone believes that they’ve won the best lifestyle competition. This human instinct drives some people one way and some the other. Some people take the intitiative to re dominate, by buying new shoes, new cars, new etc. This newly spurred purchase is the result of a new understanding that others believe that they have won the best lifestyle competition. Thus the need to be cool isn’t innate, it’s a response to the discomfort of not living a better life than someone else.

Outside of the smaller cool-conscious force there is the majority of people. Most peole don’t have this internal monologue. They wear and do what they think is cool because most people think it’s cool. Though few people do it consciously or to the extremes that are involved in the real “lifestyle fight”, most are involved in it by association. The cool is an inescapable ideal. This manifests itself in the feeling of happiness that even the most fashion unconcerned receives when he slips his feet into a new pair of nikes, and even more when he receives the pats on the back from his peers.

Personally, I love the cool. It’s such an intricately woven and effective system that drives constant consumerism. I don’t say this omnipotently. I am an active participant in the system. It drives a lot of my actions. Though I don’t know yet for sure, I hope that I’ll continue to be a part of it for quite some time. I just hope I can stay on top of it all.

It’s cool to hold hands and be nice…. for now

This is just something I’ve noticed lately, but its been true for a while. It’s very loosely related to advertising and its super psychologically based. Let’s start with a song.

I don’t think there’s much debate about the gender roles of women and men in songs like these. In a video like this you have 50 cent,  the presumed master of a veritable harem of scantily clad overly sexualized skanks. But thats not what I want to talk about here. I would bet that girls who listen to these songs and watch videos full of other girls that they don’t look like probably don’t feel so great. I would go so far as to say that an overwhelming majority of these girls have had a negatively effected self esteem as a direct result of these videos. But this isn’t really what I want to talk about either. Let’s play another song:

And then like Saul on the road to Damascus (lol bible reference) I saw the figurative light. I noticed a pattern, a trend if you will. Simply: we are in the middle of a trend toward social acceptance. There are cool celebs pushing the anti bullying movement, songs like fireworks “baby you’re a firework, come on show them what you’re worth” and “we are who we are” are topping the charts… Chris Colfer is making out with guys on national tv. Suddenly its cool to be nice and accepting… as opposed to 2006 when it was cool to be a “mean girl” (People seemed to miss the message of acceptance hastily tacked onto the end preferring to head straight to making their own burn books. Either way love that movie).

The saddest part is that it doesn’t seem random. I haven’t been able to tease out the cause of this cycle of trendiness (whether it not the songs become popular because of what people want or if people want them because they become popular), but as someone whose main interest is marketing I tend to believe the second. I don’t really believe that people really decide what they want. Rather they’re told what they should want. This would of course mean that the people being the music industry have cracked this code of destroying and rebuilding the self esteems of its’ listeners. To be honest I’m not really surprised. They have to sell music and maybe that means that they create the demand… instead of just responding to it.

Let’s go back to the very root of the idea though: the girls (and boys) themselves. Just because someone chooses not to say something cruel out of a self serving need to be cool (whatever that means at the moment) doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking it.  A lot of people are just as mean (and racist and sexist and homophobic) as they’ve always been, but society won’t stand behinf xctheir crude opinions and thus they won’t vocalize them.

Don’t get me wrong, the fact that it’s not trendy to be a jerk is a good thing. I for one and am subscriber to the belief that change starts with cool. Hopefully this will grow into something that stops being about the fad of the moment and starts being about actual human compassion, but I have no doubt that there’ll be a resurgence from the across the aisle. It’s going to have to get worse before it gets better.

In the meantime I guess all of the gleeks, and little monsters will just have to enjoy it while it lasts.

-Jameel:

TROIVAINGLORIOUS……………….

pictures?