Rob Walker had another great piece, Can a Dead Brand Live Again? in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine. He profiles River West Brands, a firm that resurrects and reinvigorates inactive brands, similar to The Himmel Group that I mentioned here recently.

Walker also describes

the Licensing International Expo, an annual event at which the owners of cultural properties – TV shows, movies, cartoon characters – meet with makers of things and try to negotiate deals granting them a paid license to use the properties to add meaning and market value to whatever things they make. It is a good place to contemplate the business potential of “the brand” in free-floating form, unmoored to any product or company that may have actually created it. A surprising number of the symbols represented at the expo held last summer in New York were simply brand logos. Spam, for instance, had its own booth. IMC Licensing was there on behalf of its clients Oreo, Altoids, Dole and Oscar Mayer. At one point I encountered a person dressed up as a can of Lysol, which is represented by the Licensing Company.

In 2004 I ran a discussion panel at the Licensing International Expo. You can check out the FreshMeat column where I related my impressions of the event here, and see tons of photos are here

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The image in the banner above!

The Cheerios Play Book. A line-extension designed just for the fist-in-mouth set.

See my previous screed on food companies teaching children to play with, rather than eat, their products.

See all observational ephemera.

• Lagniappe
  A small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase (a term more commonly heard in southern parts of the US, as well as Puerto Rico and other places).
• Stalag fiction
  A short-lived genre of Israeli Nazi-themed exploitation fiction from early 60s. Purported to be translated by concentration camps prisoners. Highly pornographic Popular among adolescent boys, often the children of concentration camp survivors.

Candidate Carole Migden’s booth outside San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

An ironing board? Is this inadvertent feminist/anti-feminist symbolism for a female candidate? Or a show of gumption and make-do spirit? Or really poor planning? Could be interpreted a few different ways (and I’m sure my list isn’t exhaustive).

See all observational ephemera.

Coming soon! New improved pitcher.

A trailer for juice packaging? I went to their website to find some more info (just for the purposes of this post) but I couldn’t find anything.

See all observational ephemera.

Pet medicine packaging. Childproof bottles are certainly not chew proof.

Non-safety cap option.

See all observational ephemera.

Sign posted by concerned citizens or business owners in downtown Half Moon Bay, CA.

See all observational ephemera

My third interactions column, The Journey Is The Reward, has just been published. I offer some thoughts about the experience of the outsider, especially when we travel to other countries, and how that outsider experience can be so generative in understanding other frames of reference and cultural models.

Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• interactions magazine: The Journey Is The Reward
  Teaser for my next column about toilets, transactions, and going global.
• Against T-shaped people
  Consider this my plea for the design community to stop using the term “T-shaped people”. It’s demeaning, over-simplistic, misleading, and dangerously-influential, which combined with the prior three traits makes for trouble-that starts with T