BRAINSUSHI – The Mutant Media Agency

Avant-garde technologies, social mutations and cultural turmoil… New York vampyres, Mexican freaks, Silicon Valley nerds, Guatemalan gangsters, London fetishists or Japanese otakus, the Brainsushi agency is specialized in documenting contemporary phenomena that foresee the world of tomorrow.

Interesting idea for an agency. Looking at the team, they are a bunch of cutting-edge/outsider/freaks themselves. It’s not clear what use their clients make of this information, and I see that if you must sign a non-disclosure before you can receive any of their insider cultural information (which makes sense business-wise but does seem at odds with the whole notion of cultural info.

[via Pasta and Vinegar]

Text messaging seen as a culprit in event that took deadly turn is a tragic story but a ridiculous fear-mongering headline. The media loves to blame technology. A family had a party in a tough neighborhood and tried to control who came to the party. Kids told other kids about the event by SMS. The parents searched people who came to their house. One kid had a gun, and he was kicked out, he returned and shot the father to death. Seems like the shooter, and the gun are both culprits. Text-messaging is merely a technology and the SF Chron (a leading paper in a tech-centric community) should be embarrassed to be writing bullshit headlines like that.

From Stuart Elliot’s email-only column today

A Reader Writes: In asking you a question recently about the music in an AT&T commercial, I mentioned a college paper I wrote about “floating signifiers in popular culture,” and in answering me you asked what that was.

This is probably more information that you (or your readers) want to know, but the concept of “floating signifiers” comes out of post-modernist cultural criticism building on the language of semiotics.

Signs and symbols tend to communicate specific meanings to those who use them. That which is signified is somehow related to one or more signifiers. For example, the American flag is a signifier of both the nation and of patriotism to that nation. Logos are designed and created to become signifiers for specific companies or products, and can eventually become signifiers for entire life styles.

Floating signifiers are no longer attached to their original meanings. Either through the passage of time and changing values or intentional manipulation, they become attached to new, totally unrelated meanings. The song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was effectively used by the advertising world to shift the meaning of the “grapevine” from the gossip mill spreading rumors of infidelity, which the song lyrics originally signified, back to a literal grapevine, the source of all those dancing California raisins. They successfully created a floating signifier.

In the case of Toyota using the music from the sea chantey “A Golden Boy Again” in a commercial about football, Toyota was attempting to shift what they thought was a football signifier to their vehicles – not knowing that the song had not been successfully separated from its sea-chantey origins.

That left many viewers wondering why an auto maker would associate itself with “drunken sailors.” In this instance, the advertising world was not successful in creating a floating signifier because the song was too strongly attached to its original meaning.

A nice little essay about meaning and media and culture!

In a great example of demography (and other factors) driving cultural shifts, Latino-style soaps will be appearing on English-language TV in San Francisco.

MyNetworkTV’s dramas – called ‘Desire’ and ‘Secrets’ – are each hourlong programs featuring 65 episodes that run over 13 weeks.

The network describes ‘Desire’ as the story of ‘two brothers on the run from the mafia who both fall in love with … the same woman’ and ‘Secrets’ as ‘an in-depth look at the dreams, successes and tragedies found in the fashion industry.’

MyNetworkTV, which officially premiered last month, is the first network to produce English-language versions of Latin American-style soap operas, said Les Eisner, the network’s spokesman.

‘These story lines will be guilty pleasures. There will be beautiful people, intriguing and captivating story lines with a cliff-hanger at the end of each episode,’ Eisner said.

Called ‘telenovelas,’ Spanish-language serial dramas keep tens of millions glued to their sets throughout the hemisphere. They differ from traditional American soap operas primarily because of their finite story arc. Eisner said the network is ‘Americanizing’ story lines and creating them with the same production value of regular prime-time programming.

‘This (telenovelas) is a concept that I, as a television person, have looked at for a long time and said ‘Why doesn’t anyone do that for an English audience?’ ‘ he said. ‘It attracts younger people, and it attracts just the kind of audience advertisers desire.’

Oh, jeez. This is the dumbest buzzword yet!
House Calls
by Larry Dobrow, January 2005 issue of Media (reg req’d)

JUST AS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT GURUS learn about the capabilities of new products by watching consumers interact with them, media strategists are gaining a better understanding of media consumption behaviors by observing consumers at home. Deploying so-called “adthropology” strategies, they conduct in-home observation and interview sessions. A typical adthropological endeavor begins when an individual shows up at a consumer’s door, camera in tow. The observer tours the home, noting details like the location of TVs and piles of magazines that may have been saved for reference purposes. “When we were doing this for Kraft, we saw so many TVs in the kitchen. That’s an incredibly significant detail for a food company,” notes Jane Lacher, senior vice president of consumer context planning at MediaVest.

Information gleaned during home visits tends to bolster, and occasionally trump, intelligence gathered via focus group interviews, Lacher adds. “People tell you about their habits, but they tend to script a little bit. When you go into the home, you see if the newspaper has been read, or if there are coupons on the refrigerator, or how many TVs are on,” she explains. “People generally won’t tell you ‘my life is in disarray.’ So [with a visit] you get a better sense of where media fits into the picture.”

The New York Times does a great cover story about all the technology products that make strong and unsubstantiated claims about how much smarter they’ll make your baby.

New media products for babies, toddlers and preschoolers began flooding the market in the late 1990’s, starting with video series like “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby.” But now, the young children’s market has exploded into a host of new and more elaborate electronics for pre-schoolers, including video game consoles like the V.Smile and handheld game systems like the Leapster, all marketed as educational.

Despite the commercial success, though, a report released yesterday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, “A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers and Pre-schoolers,” indicates there is little understanding of how the new media affect young children – and almost no research to support the idea that they are educational.

“The market is expanding rapidly, with all kinds of brand-new product lines for little kids,” said Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Foundation. “But the research hasn’t advanced much. There really isn’t any outcomes-based research on these kinds of products and their effects on young children, and there doesn’t seem to be any theoretical basis for saying that kids under 2 can learn from media.

In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended no screen time at all for babies under 2, out of concern that the increasing use of media might displace human interaction and impede the crucially important brain growth and development of a baby’s first two years. But it is a recommendation that parents routinely ignore. According to Kaiser, babies 6 months to 3 years old spend, on average, an hour a day watching TV and 47 minutes a day on other screen media, like videos, computers and video games.

…

Others have less restrained marketing: The “Brainy Baby – Left Brain” package has a cover featuring a cartoon baby with a thought balloon saying, “2 + 2 = 4” and promises that it will inspire logical thinking and “teach your child about language and logic, patterns and sequencing, analyzing details and more.”

“There’s nothing that shows it helps, but there’s nothing that shows it’s does harm, either,” said Marcia Grimsley, senior producer of “Brainy Baby” videos.

Incredulous italics mine, of course.

I wrote previously about how Q107 had presented a broadcast of live Rolling Stones as if it was a simulcast of a club show in Toronto, and how many of us protested and they responded. Well, they got some press out of the whole thing, too.

From this story

Bartrem maintained that Q107’s intent was never to deceive, but does concede that the station could have been a little more specific in its programming intentions.
…
“I guess the way we positioned it on the air was ‘Celebrating this night at the Phoenix, we’ve got Stones live on air at 9:30.’ People heard ‘live’ and ‘Phoenix’ and put the two together and thought ‘simulcasting,'” he said.

“In hindsight, one line would have saved all the problems: ‘While some are enjoying the show at the Phoenix, let’s go back three years and enjoy what was going on.'”

Since he was one of the lucky 1,100 people to attend the show, Bartrem said he can’t speak to what Scholes said on air, but he is taking care to absolve the station’s DJs “of any kind of responsibility in this thing” and accepts full blame for the furor.

As penance, he has volunteered to be morning host John Derringer’s “Tool of the Day” today and will publicly proclaim the whole thing “totally my fault.” He has sent a mea culpa e-mail to everyone who wrote the station.

and from this story

The station evidently never specifically told its listeners it was simulcasting the Stones show from the Phoenix, but one listener, Steve Popichak, who e-mailed the Sun said, “During their broadcast, their announcer came on between songs and made references to this performance happening right in front of him right there at the Phoenix.”

“Well, it was live Stones,” DJ John Scholes told the Sun Wednesday night.

Blair Bartrem, Q107’s program director, yesterday told the Sun that the station received 30 to 40 complaints from fans, via e-mail. He said he takes responsibility for the confusion and that, in hindsight, the e-mail should have been clearer.

“I think a few of our Q listeners felt that we were trying to deceive them, which clearly wasn’t our intent,” Bartrem said. “I mean, there’s a trust that we have with our audience, obviously, and we’re not trying to pull a fast one.”
…
Bloggers on Tuesday and Wednesday were abuzz with anticipation about the perceived simulcast. An Ottawa resident filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council [over the playing of a bootleg? — SP]. He said other fans might do the same.

From discussions online, it appears that few believe that the deception was accidental or that the apology was genuine. I guess I was glad to get any acknowledgement of a mistake from a company.

But desite their claims to have responded to all who complained – I have not heard back from them, and obviously am not going to. I feel singled out!

A big news story today deals with the Crawford, TX guy who fired a shotgun in the air, presumably in protest over the Sheehan gathering near both his and GWB’s place. I was surprised by the rhetoric used by the SF Chronicle to describe the incident (story not available online).

Larry Mattlage hopped into his pickup truck, barreled across his pasture and pulled up to the fence within a few hundred feet of the protests. He then climbed out of the cab, retrieved a a shotgun from the back and fired at least one blast into the air.

Don’t you just get the picture of some angry redneck, hopping and barreling so? Seems like some sloppy journalism; I guess having a point of view is a “good” thing, but it seems rather manipulative to me.

The London Bombing story

seems to be evolving crazily, with so much information being revised. First, the bombers were amateurs. Then CNN’s timeline of the explosions was radically revised from the original stories. But timers were used not suicide bombers. Then we were told the bombers were experts, given the quality of the bombs themselves. Then we hear that some people were arrested. Then that is denied, but we hear that the bombers did kill themselves aboard the trains and bus.

I’m sure this post will be out of date before you read it.

Obviously there’s a balance between keeping the public informed and getting the story straight. Personally, I find the shifting facts and emotions that those facts engender to be unsettling, leading to more of a feeling of being out of control – that the authorities are out of control and that we the public are increasingly helpless. Others may take a Law-and-Order like comfort from the narrowing in onto the truth.

Pretzels are out on US Airways. Besides the bad press this constant nickel-and-diming is creating, there’s the usual corporate press release, where they remind us that they conducted customer research in support of their action

Amy Kudwa, a US Airways spokeswoman, said the airline decided to end the pretzel giveaway after meeting with the carrier’s focus groups.

Amazing this one didn’t include the standard “our consumers tell us that…” line. I’m amazed at how often this appears in press release-driven news stories.