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What's next for Time Out? Manchester, Liverpool, LA, Kiev, Delhi and Barcelona

The Independent has a feature on "Time Lord" Tony Elliott and the history and future of his Time Out empire. Some excerpts:

More than 38 years after he used a £75 21st birthday gift from an aunt to found a magazine named after a Dave Brubeck record, Tony Elliott, the founder of Time Out, has made a discovery that he is especially excited about.

...The discovery is this: that there are other cities here in the United Kingdom with the vibrancy and culture to justify a weekly Time Out magazine of their own. Next February, Elliott plans to launch simultaneously in Manchester and Liverpool.

...his next target is the West Coast. "I believe we can establish a business in Los Angeles and will do it in about 18 months, two years' time. The big question in LA is the relation between online and print. It's very spread out and is maybe a good place for us to explore a slightly different model, with online leading and print being a supplement to online." ...The most recent addition to the portfolio was Time Out Almaty (which, in case you didn't know, is the cultural capital of Kazakhstan). Launches will take place next year in Kiev, Delhi and Barcelona as well as Liverpool and Manchester.

How to make flying even more like ground transport- ads on the overhead bins

First, ads on trays. Now, via adrants, Ironic Sans muses about the idea of advertising on overhead bins: "I’m not even sure I should file this under 'Ideas.' Maybe I need a category called 'Predictions.' This seems sort of inevitable to me."

Note Dr. Zizmor in the upper left! 

Fine on media: Blixa Bargeld is "Collapsing New Appliances"

It's kinda the German equivalent of "James Earl Jones reads the phone book"- Business Week's Jon Fine writes about the ads frim Hornbach (the "German Home Depot") starring Blixa Bargeld, head of Einsturzende Neubauten:

According to Trouser Press, the once-fiercely confrontational Neubauten (who alsmot burned down a club in New York during a concert in 1986) is not exactly new to this kind of thing, having previously scored a Jordache commercial. But while the new ads are enjoyable in and of themselves, they’re also evidence that other countries are far ahead of America when it comes to enveloping the most unregenerate gutter-rat art degenerates into the comforting embrace of the mainstream. (Lest my intent be misunderstood, a glance at my record collection offers ample evidence that I mean this in the best possible sense of "unregenerate gutter-rat art degenerates.")

Shopper's eye view of ads that pass us by

From the Guardian's Owen Gibson:

From the Coca-Cola awning at the newsagent's to the looming O2 billboard on the high street, the succession of Calvin Klein ads on the tube escalator and the McDonald's-branded steps, the journey to work becomes a bombardment of marketing messages that would leave Roland Barthes' head spinning.

In one 45-minute journey, the average London commuter is exposed to more than 130 adverts, featuring more than 80 different products. Only half of that information makes any impact, while unprompted we can remember none of the blur of adverts. In an entire day, we're likely to see 3,500 marketing messages.

We know these facts thanks to new technology tested by the Guardian this week. To be specific: a pair of Joe 90-style spectacles attached to an unflattering bumbag. This unlikely looking contraption could prompt a sea change in the way advertisers and big brands spend £14bn on advertising every year.

It is called the Eye Contact, and it's capable of capturing on film everything that you see during a typical day....

Fads are so yesterday: Trends are hot. Cool isn't.

The Los Angeles Times visits some of the usual suspects: 

Fads are so yesterday
Trends are hot. Cool isn't. As culture morphs worldwide at Internet speed, forecasters fight to stay ahead of it all.

There was a time, way back in the late 1990s, when coolhunting was still cool, when nearly every Madison Avenue ad agency wanted a resident hipster to interpret the spending habits of those inscrutable Gen-Xers. Then the Internet exploded, connecting everyone to everything in an instant, and suddenly, the art of predicting the next big trend got way more complicated.

Today, fads ping across continents and disappear so quickly that the coolhunter, even the whole notion of "cool," has become passé. Every big-city scenester or bored teenager on the planet has a blog or mass e-mail anointing the moment's hot restaurants, hobbies and handbags. Add to this, mass obsession with celebrity style and global corporatization and you can get nearly the same chai latte or straight-off-the-runway skirt in Columbus, Ohio, that's available in Manhattan or Milan.

Trend-spotting has, in essence, become just another trend.

Opt in to advertising's new age (NYC Exhibit)

The New York Times has a "Critic's Notebook" entry on a "strange interactive exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library in Midtown where you can sample some of the best ads ever made for television, radio, print and the Internet."

From the press release:

NEW YORK, NY, September 14, 2005 -The history and future of advertising is the focus of the new exhibition Opt In To Advertising's New Age , presented by the Online Publishers Association and The New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library. The exhibition presents a selection of great creative works from print, radio, television and online advertising, from the 18th century to today. Showcasing some of the most significant and beloved ads of all time, the exhibit emphasizes the impact of new technologies on creative advertising formats. The exhibition debuts during Advertising Week 2005 - a week-long celebration of advertising in New York - and is on view from September 27 to December 31, 2005 at The New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library, located at 188 Madison Avenue at 34th Street. Admission is free. Following its New York Public Library debut, the exhibition travels to Los Angeles in February 2006 and then to Chicago later in the year. 

Drink and deplete arctic ice at the same time

Ice hotels have been a topic over the past few years (in places you'd expect, like Quebec and Sweden), but now, thanks to Absolut, "ice bars" are popping up:

Bar made from arctic ice opens in London (ap/bos globe)

LONDON --A chilly bit of Scandinavia is coming to the heart of London's West End Saturday with the opening of Absolut Icebar, a bar made entirely out of ice right down to the art on the walls and the glasses for the drinks.

Situated next to the accompanying but room temperature Below Zero restaurant, the bar is kept at minus 23 fahrenheit year round. For a cover charge of 12 pounds ($22.20), patrons are given a thermal cape, thick gloves and a glass made out of ice before entering the second of two airtight doors designed to keep heat out.

"It's an experience rather than a traditional bar. We feel we're really offering something different," said Anette Eliasson, manager of market communications for V&S Absolut Spirits vodka company, which is opening the bar with partner company Icehotel.

"...This is where trends come from, so that's why London was important to us," Agnetha Lund, director of Icebar International, said.

The cool hunt for teens moves online

We've talked about cool hunting/trend spotting before. The NY Times reports on how online marketers are appealing to teens:

What's Cool Online? Teenagers Render Verdict
... So as part of Advertising Week 2005, interactive advertising agencies tried to answer the question last Tuesday of what teenagers want. The Interactive Advertising Bureau gathered 10 teenagers onstage at the Millennium Broadway Hotel to informally evaluate the creativity and effectiveness of three teenager-oriented interactive marketing campaigns, all before an audience of hundreds of industry executives.

So what do teenagers want? As one might expect, they want to have some fun. They want to customize products, they want to play games and they want to socialize. The online campaigns, created by three marketing agencies promoting Nike, Coca-Cola and the video game Halo 2, focused on the selling points for teenagers.

In other youth marketing news, Clickz reports:

Old Spice Races to Reach the Young Male

Proctor & Gamble's Old Spice wants to get, well... young. In an effort to attract youthful customers, the brand's agency, EVB, has launched four microsites featuring content for NASCAR, music and nightlife enthusiasts.

 

 

Next thing you know, law firms will have names like StrawberryFrog, Taxi, Mother and Anomaly...

For years, people have pointed out that ad agencies try to present themselves as creative entities, but (often because of egos) have names closer to those of law firms and accountants (Messner, Vetere, Berger, McNamee & Schmetterer/Euro RSCG was always a favorite). We'll, there have been several waves of ad agencies with "funky" names, but the Boston Globe reports that the law firms are catching up:

Those long, long law firm names grow short&snappy
Now behold WilmerHale!

Note the edgy single-word name, the hip double capitalization, the three manageable syllables, the obvious pronunciation, the way it rolls off the tongue. It is everything law firm names historically have not been: innovative, savvy, bold. And short.
...
A growing number of law firms nationwide are shrinking their lengthy rosters of stodgy-sounding surnames to names that are quicker, livelier, and help establish an identity. That means experimenting with unorthodox slashes and hyphens rather than traditional ''ands" and ampersands. It can mean eliminating commas and, as with WilmerHale, spaces. Above all, it means reducing the partner names on a shingle to a select few, and sometimes only one.
...
''The general rule is that law firms are dropping names and shortening them to become like corporate brand names, like Coca-Cola," said Stephen Barrett, a law firm marketing consultant. ''Everybody wants to have a nice, clean, crisp, contemporary name instead of one that sounds like it was designed out of copper plate type fonts in 1877, which might be great if your only practice is old, Yankee, WASPy money, but for every other purpose only tells the world that you're behind the times."

Washington Post's World opinion roundup

I've posted before about watchingamerica, which has posts/links/translations to world news stories from the foreign press. Earlier this month, the Washington Post launched "World opinion roundup- a daily survey of what the international online media are saying." Today's episode is on the new Charlotte Beers:

Karen Hughes Catches Flak
In her first foreign trip to improve the image of the United States, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes impressed international online media commentators with her message discipline -- and her naivete