MattCreamer.com

• Sharper Image Lives — as a Brand - WSJ.com
  Mr. Salter envisions Sharper Image products being sold around the world via infomercials, Web sites and catalogs. Or they could be set up in the aisles of a Target or Best Buy. One possibility: a Sharper Image treadmill with a computer and GPS system…
  (tags: marketing brand sharperimage)

• Think Like a Venture Capitalist and Change the Marketing Model - Advertising Age - Digital
  he thing I don’t quite understand about agencies and brands is why they don’t go back to the 1950s and create their own content. At the early age of this new technology called television, they created “General Hospital,” they created the soap-opera phenom
  (tags: digital marketing media advertising community)

• North Oaks tells Google Maps: Keep out - we mean it
  The city of 4,500 residents has demanded that Google Maps remove images of North Oaks homes from the website’s Street View feature, where any Internet user can glimpse a home from the nearest road.
  (tags: google technology maps tech information freedom)
• Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use - Yahoo! News
  You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance? ADVERTISEMENT Time Warner Cable Inc. customers — and, later, others — may have to, if the c
  (tags: inter)

I love Walker’s column and blog but his new book didn’t do much for me. Here’s the review and here’s an excerpt:

For the past few years, Rob Walker has been one of the most original observers of how brands emerge from the noise of culture. His weekly “Consumed” column in New York Times Magazine is among the smartest takes on marketing in the general-interest press because it begins with the product, not the advertising. His website, Murketing.com, is a funny and often surprising curation of brand-focused writing and photography.

So it only goes to follow that the publication of his first book-length treatment of the marketing business would be an occasion of Gladwell-ian proportions, the sort of thing that’s read by everyone from the brand manager or junior account executive right up to the CEO and that’s inescapable in conferences or PowerPoint presentations. I’m disappointed to report that “Buying In” is not that.

• J. R. Simplot, Farmer Who Developed First Frozen French Fries, Dies at 99 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
  J. R. Simplot, a billionaire who grew up in a sod-roofed log cabin and dropped out of school at 14, then fashioned an entrepreneurial career that included developing the first commercial frozen French fry, died on Sunday at his home in Boise.
  (tags: death food entrepreneurship)

I made a trip to Paris this winter to meet the French financier/corporate raider/industrialist Vincent Bollore. He was pretty much unknown in the U.S. until about a three or so years ago when he took over Havas, the French company that owns a bunch of ad agencies including Euro RSCG. It’s not that Euro’s a household name in America. But owning a big chunk of the ad busines, most of which is in NY and London, ramped up Bollore’s awareness in those places. A lot of ad power brokers right now are keeping an eye on what moves Bollore, who has a lot of cash to use as well as a favorable Euro-to-dollar exchange rate, makes. Nonetheless, Bollore remains something of an enigma, partially because that’s the way raiders do things and partially because, I think, he’s still trying to figure out how to shape his media and advertising empire. In this profile, I try to get at what he’s been up to and where he’s going while giving some insight into his personality. It’s long, but bear with it.

Here’s the opening

Part of Vincent Bolloré’s media empire — a TV station, a radio station and two newspapers — is stuffed into three floors in an unspectacular office building just across the Seine from Paris, in a suburb called Puteaux. One afternoon in March, Mr. Bolloré led a few visitors on a whirlwind tour through his collection of media outlets, striding briskly and dispensing a bonjour here, a ça va there to the hired young hands.

 

On the fourth floor, standing amid a bank of Mac workstations manned by people producing his free afternoon paper, Direct Soir, Mr. Bolloré observed, “They look to be doing nothing, but they’re putting out the paper.”

Later, while Mr. Bolloré was bounding down a stairwell with plaster chipping off the walls, the topic was his friend Rupert Murdoch, whom Mr. Bolloré mistakenly insisted is wedded to a paid model for his newspapers. (In fact, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp. publishes The London Paper, a free sheet.) When it comes to media and advertising, he said, “I know 10% of what I should.”

That’s an interesting statement coming from the man who has arguably become the leading protagonist in the final phase of the two-decade-long big bang that’s consolidated the marketing-services business, l’homme who will decide the futures of Havas and Aegis Group and, perhaps indirectly, even Interpublic and Publicis Groupe. Still, the knowledge gap is forgivable when you consider his newness to the business and that in the vast scope of his holdings, his media and advertising business has the feel of a well-tended model train occupying a central place in a large mansion. It is a conversation piece, a bright, shiny, relatively new thing that grabs attention, but it is not the main event. That would be the amazingly diverse collection of businesses Mr. Bolloré began accumulating in 1981, when, as a junior investment banker, he bought a paper company begun by his family back from Edmond de Rothschild for a single, symbolic franc….

• Robert Rauschenberg, Pioneer Of Pop Art Movement, Dies at 82 - WSJ.com
  Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of odd and everyday articles earned him a reputation as a pioneer in pop art but whose talents spanned the worlds of painting, sculpture and dance, has died, his gallery representative said Tuesday. He was 82.
  (tags: art death)
• Five Questions For…Bill Watson - American Press Institute
  Production of content nobody wants. Lack of feedback from the readership produces a situation in which newsrooms assume everything they are doing is vital to someone, and they won’t let go of it. How many readers actually would notice if you dropped the “
  (tags: newspapers Media)

• The Brooklyn Paper: Apple of their eye: Microsoft ‘banks’ on Brooklyn for first store
  “We’ve talked to Apple about opening their first Brooklyn store, and we’ve also talked to Microsoft about opening the first retail store,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of Prudential Douglas Elliman’s retail leasing and sales division.
  (tags: microsoft brooklyn retail)

• Costas Now: Bissinger Vs. Leitch
  (tags: blog sports)
• Is This the World’s Cheapest Dress? - New York Times
  Steve & Barry’s is to fashion what Tower once was to music. It’smanna, a store that sells stylish celebrity-branded clothes at prices that are absurdly inexpensive, lower than those at Old Navy, H & M
  , undercutting even Wal-Mart by as much as half.
  (tags: shopping money nyc retail)

• BlackBerry Kickstart, the clamshell flip phone? We’re unveiling it to you for the first time! | The Boy Genius Report
  (tags: blackberry mobilephones)