Pop Art Blog

When the first iPhone was announced, I publicly stated that I would wait for version 2 before purchasing. It took about 30 seconds of playing with version 1 before changing my mind. Holding the slim, elegant device in my hands, I felt like I was experiencing radio for the first time. I didn't want to be the person who waited for FM. I wanted it now, and I marched down to the Apple store at lunch, plunking down my $600 with a smile. Yesterday, Apple announced a new, faster iPhone yesterday at... Read More...

Guy Kawasaki had a great post the other day on his blog. If you want customers to be happy, give them less product Information. Here's a counter-intuitive thought: Shoppers with less information about a product are happier than those with more information." He cites a study conducted by the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business. The researchers used three experiments to arrive at their conclusion. Two of them were consumer test-style experiments in which subjects were asked... Read More...

Great book(s) review from the New Yorker about why consumers make stupid decisions . There’s a lot of “duh” statements in here — Consumers are effort-averse ? Really? — but stated in a researched, academic way. A few Halloweens ago, Ariely laid in a supply of Hershey’s Kisses and two kinds of Snickers—regular two-ounce bars and one-ounce miniatures. When the first children came to his door, he handed each of them three Kisses, then offered to make a deal. If they wanted to, the kids could trade one... Read More...

On May 12, 2007, Warner Brothers released the first web teaser for the upcoming Batman Begins movie sequel, The Dark Knight. The teaser was an image of the Batman bat symbol exploding into many pieces. It was mysterious but it was only the first clue into an almost year long interactive marketing campaign that bridged the offline world and the web, and fiction with reality. The following is the chronology of “The Dark Knight” interactive marketing campaign. May 13th-ish: Fictitious campaign posters... Read More...

We're all big fans of Malcolm Gladwell over here. And so when I saw this article in Fast Company titled "Is the Tipping Point Toast?" I dug right in. If nothing else, I love a good academic smackdown. The article interviews a former prof who now works for Yahoo, and who refutes the "viral" theory behind a shadowy class we marketing folks call "Influentials." Along the way, he also coins my nominee for the marketing buzzword of the year: Wildfire marketing. But let's... Read More...

I bet you're not trying to be No.1. I bet you're making excuses. I bet there's someone in your company, or in your industry, who OWNS you. They've got the Midas Touch, and you're niggling about process documents and sweating out a 15 percent improvement. No? A new study on professional golfers suggests otherwise. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place. They play it safe. From Slate.com . If money motivates, then the prospect... Read More...

So Fred Meyer's got this coupon where you get a free, frozen turkey when you buy $100 worth of groceries. And we ALWAYS spend $100 on groceries, especially the weekend before Thanksgiving. But we don't actually need a turkey, right? Nor do we have room in our tiny freezer. But a free turkey is a free turkey, so we took it. We figured we'd be able to find some organization who'd love it. Bang! A Google search for "Food Donation, Portland" turned up Metro's "Fork... Read More...

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I need to start with a disclaimer. I own an iPhone. I do not plan on switching phones anytime soon. I don't care for AT&T and the slow Edge network, but the functionality and pure wonder of the iPhone is too much for me to even consider a new phone anytime soon. That being said, I love the new Sprint "Waitless" campaign. Waitless is a digital campaign. An interactive campaign. I haven't seen any tv ads or print ads for it, but I have seen banner ads here and there. I can't... Read More...

One thing I've loved about Facebook is finding old high school friends. People I haven't spoken to in ages, right? So when there's a "friend request," Facebook wants to know how we know each other. So I check the box "went to school together." But then there's these other boxes, right? "We hooked up." "We dated." And, in some cases (extremely rare, sadly, but that's another story for a different blog), that might be true. So, here's... Read More...