Nike Lebron James Collection Illustrated
from Hypebeast
Similar to the revolutionary approach accomplished by the formidable duo of Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand in the realm of athletic footwear, the sneaker giant has been partnering with the self-proclaimed King, LeBron James, for nearly a decade to recondition the way we look at street-ready athletic apparel. Although the newlywed years of the mid-2000s produce similar product to what is typically seen in the Jordan line, the recent seasons have introduced consumers to more adventurous lifestyle ranges. This holiday season, Nike’s Sportswear line will release a capsule collection with LeBron James featuring newly designed garments as well as iconic silhouettes from the storied history of Nike. Complete with some personal storytelling, the most hyped piece will definitely be the 100% recycled wool Destroyer Jacket, adorned with the embroidered text “Vivat Rex” translating to “long live the king.” Rounding out the collection the two heavyweights in their own right offer; a down bomber jacket, the 1823 Rugby made of 100% cotton, the N98 Track Jacket, the AW77 Fleece Hoodie, a pair Nike Air Max Conquer waterproof boots, a duck boot-inspired AF1 Low, and a 100% organic cotton pocket tee. Featuring the fusion of contemporary and heritage pieces, this back to the future collection may have a radical impact on the course of the athletic apparel world as we know it.
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MC Hammer launching his own search engine
OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to.
The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools.
The project, called WireDoo, has been two years in the making, said Hammer (real name Stanley Burrell) Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.
At the conference, he said what will make his search tool better than Google (or, too legit to quit, if you will) will be its "deep search" ability.
"It's about relationships beyond just the keywords," he said,according to Mashable, a CNN.com content partner.
The rapper-turned-entrepreneur said a search would render not just direct results, but also information on possibly related topics. Its tagline is: "Search once and see what's related."
Other details about the product were scarce.
WireDoo, which Hammer said he has a team developing, is still in pre-beta. Its website is currently letting people sign up to test the search engine when a beta release is ready.
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Field Notes: A look back at The Crisis
By Kristy Tillman
Originally founded in 1910 by W.E.B DuBois The Crisis magazine became the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).The journalʼs original title was The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races; inspired by James Russell Lowellʼs poem “The Present Crisis”. Published monthly, by 1920 its circulation had reached 100,000 copies. Predominantly a current-affairs journal, The Crisis also included poems, reviews, and essays on culture and history.
The cover design featured a variety of visual techniques, with heavy use of illustration in the earlier years. During the Harlem Renaissance DuBois featured many of the artist from at era for the cover designs. However, as time progressed you can see the cover design featuring photography as the the primary medium almost exclusively.
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What's Left of the Middle Class Is More Diverse, Harder Working -- and Still Shrinking
"It seems like everything got more expensive. And for me, personally, I got the same pay rate that I've had for five, six years. So I'm being paid the same—and the gas prices aren't helping much, either." -- Alfredo, a married father with a son in middle school and a daughter in high school -- Los Angeles County, Calif.
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"We can't really help [our daughters in college.] We just can't afford to. So they've got a lot of student loans that they'll be paying off for a long time." -- Frankie, a married mother with three daughters -- two in college and one more on her way -- Teton County, Montana.
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"I was living paycheck to paycheck with that job and so as much as a 5% [pay cut] sounds, well, "it's just 5%,' it was enough of a significant difference that I was like, "Oh, my God.' So I actually started [working] part time for a radio station so that I could make up for it." -- Liz, an unmarried 26-year-old --Champaign County, Ill.
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Perhaps there's no more fitting signpost for where America is economically headed than dish soap.
Procter & Gamble, a marketer with its finger closely on the pulse of the American public, last year introduced a bargain-priced dish soap under the Gain name. The move was seen as an acknowledgement of the changing profile of the American middle class. Its price was a nod to the strained economy and its branding under a name popular among Hispanics pointed to the growing diversification of what was once the "traditional" middle class.
In short, America's backbone is bending toward the breaking point. In the last decade, consumers overall cut spending 4.2% in 2010 dollars, and the brunt of that was felt by the middle class, which slashed spending between 10% and 13%. Meanwhile, the upper 20% of earners curbed spending only 6%. The blame can't be pinned on the recession, either. In real dollars, median family income is now what it was in 1997.
Meanwhile, Census data show us a much more diverse picture as well: 16.3% of the population is now Hispanic. The number of black/white biracial Americans has doubled in the past decade. The Asian population is the fastest-growing by percentages. The number of African-American households earning more than $100,000 grew 88% in the past decade helping propel African-Americans to a trillion-dollar buying force, according to Nielsen.
Take the trends together—changes in income, shifts in family types, and the remapping of the racial and ethnic make-up of the population—and what emerges is a very different middle class.
This America looks like neither the Cosbys nor the Jeffersons; it does not resemble the Conners or the Bunkers. Perhaps it looks a little like "Modern Family" without the spending power. Today, half of all households have less than $10,000 in annual disposable income, according to Experian Simmons.
While these changes haven't happened overnight, marketers are grappling with how to keep up. Walmart has stopped adding upscale merchandise and put back the bargain bins known as Action Alley. Layaway programs are in full swing at Kmart, Sears, Best Buy and Toys R Us. Hallmark even has greeting cards for the unemployed.
Food marketers are shrinking pack sizes as a means of providing lower prices for consumers with less to spending power. "We're seeing a lot more paycheck-to-paycheck buying and so in those instances you're talking to consumers with limited dollars," said Rick Shea, a food-marketing consultant and former Kraft Foods marketer.
But consumers aren't oblivious to the change. They are watching the price per portion and their food bill. With less for staples like food, the shrinking middle class is thinking more about private-label products, even if they have different thresholds of compromise.
Frankie, in Teton County, will only buy Del Monte corn, not the generic. "There are certain products that I won't skimp on because I just like them better, but not very darn many." Chris in Clark County sticks with General Mills cereal, but thinks store-brand ice cream is just fine.
Through it all, there's hope. Always a hallmark of the middle class, there's this notion that sometime, somehow, things will get better. Through the hardship and the cutbacks, these families and millions like them are still going about their daily lives, driving to their jobs, cooking more at home, being good parents and making sure their kids are provided for -- no matter what their household looks like.
We see this reflected in the families and in the data.
Clearly, people are still spending money and buying products. Just not as many or as often.
Some marketers take this as a cue to refocus on the affluent. Not a bad idea, they still have money. But there are 5% fewer of them than there were before the recession.
In Howard County, one of the most affluent in the U.S., Rosemary, a married mom with a 10-month-old daughter, didn't see many effects of the recession firsthand. Her family's subdivision, in a rural-esque suburb of Baltimore, seems a lot like what middle class used to look like. It just takes a lot more income to get them there.
"In the early 1970s, the median family lived on one paycheck. Today the family in the middle brings home two paychecks. The shift from one income to two has had seismic implications for families across America," said Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose pithy sound bites on middle-class decline have often gone viral online. This may not be one of her better quotes, but it's certainly one more relevant to marketers and planners.
Indeed, the majority of the income growth over the past 35 years has taken place in two-income families. The problem is that there just aren't that many of them anymore. For the first time, married-couple families are not the majority of American households.
Married couples with kids have fallen to just one in five households, and dads are taking a bigger role in household chores and child rearing. Hispanic millennials are changing the conversation -- literally -- by shifting seamlessly between English and Spanish. Populations are leaving the suburbs and clustering in urban cores. Single persons, single parents, and couples who are shacking up for economic reasons -- often with one of them jobless -- are all on the rise.
So what are marketers doing to understand and target this new consumer?
Here's what Ad Age is doing. We are embarking on a yearlong study of the American Consumer, using two tools that segment all of America: ESRI's Tapestry framework and the Patchwork Nation, a project by journalist Dante Chinni, which looked at each of America's 3,141 counties and classified it into different broad segments.
We've mashed up two of them to give us a more complete picture—one that encompasses demographic and economic characteristics but also dives into politics and religion. We're then able to layer in dataset after dataset from other sources to create a data-rich look that maps out (literally) the changes to the American Consumer.
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"When my 18-year-old was growing up ... there was concern about crime, but not to the extent that it is now. So I think I'm more protective of my [4-year-old]. Where we go, who she sees. Who I will let her stay with. Things like that. Just because of the way the world is changing." --Sandra, a 42-year-old single mother -- East Baton Rouge Parish, La.
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"All our homes here where we live, it's like, "Wow, what happened to our ... investments?'" --Basha, a married empty-nester -- Lake County, Fla.
Movie Trailer: Night Catches Us
Finally we get a trailer for the movie 'Night Catches us. Looks like it's going to be good. The film stars Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie embroiled in some post Panther turmoil. I can't wait to see this.
UPDATE: Apparently this film was scheduled for a November release has already hit Netflix... So yeah, I'm late. But I now have plans for the weekend.
Field Notes: Infographics and the Georgia Negro
By Kristy Tillman
“The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line”– W.E.B. Du Bois
These infographics were created at the turn of the 19th century by sociology students at what is now Clark Atlanta University, under the guidance of W.E.B. Du Bois. Initially prepared for a display called The Georgia Negro at the larger exhibition entitled The Exhibit of the American Negroes in Paris. The Exhibit of American Negroes was a sociological exhibition shown at the Paris 1900 International Exposition, also known as the World's Fair. The display was conceived by W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Calloway, Daniel Murray and several historic black colleges. The original exhibit included thousands of photographs, as well as hundreds of books, pamphlets, and assorted documents, chronicling the experience of Black Americans from the Civil War to the year 1900.
Du Bois stated “The great World's Fair at Paris was being planned and I thought I might put my findings into plans, charts and figures, so one might see what we were trying to accomplish. I got a couple of my best students and put a series of facts into charts: the size and growth of the Negro American group; its division by age and sex; its distribution, education and occupations; its books and periodicals. We made a most interesting set of drawings, limned on pasteboard cards about a yard square and mounted on a number of moveable standards.”
The charts themselves give us insightful socioeconomic data about the Black American community during this time in an unprecedented way. The real brilliance behind the visualizations was the political act of disseminating understandable information about a marginalized group globally. Using the graphic technique of simplifying a highly complex situation into a visualized data set was a transformative act by Du Bois and his students in rallying international attention for civil right struggles in the United States. In addition, this form of communicating skirts potential language barriers to make the information available to the widest potential audience.
The charts themselves give us insightful socioeconomic data about the Black American community during this time in an unprecedented way. The real brilliance behind the visualizations was the political act of disseminating understandable information about a marginalized group globally. Using the graphic technique of simplifying a highly complex situation into a visualized data set was a transformative act by Du Bois and his students in rallying international attention for civil right struggles in the United States. In addition, this form of communicating skirts potential language barriers to make the information available to the widest potential audience.
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Jimmy Smith Departs Omnicom's TBWA, Launches Shop Under Interpublic
My homie, my man, Jimmy Smith has broken out! Hide your accounts, hide your next level idea making machines! Things just got interesting.
Jimmy Smith, the veteran creative behind high-profile branded entertainment efforts such as Gatorade's Replay and Nike Battlegrounds, is departing Omnicom Group's TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles to launch a new agency under Interpublic Group of Cos. His shop, which will be dubbed Amusement Park Entertainment, will focus on storytelling and branded content.
Outside of its nontraditional focus, the L.A.-based shop also boasts an unconventional revenue model that places a premium on what agencies are best known for -- ideas. "The philosophy behind the company is simple," Mr. Smith said. "Ideas are the Holy Grail; therefore we should value them and their creation highly."
Mr. Smith has already made a name for himself steering successful branded entertainment properties. At TBWA, he served as group creative director on Gatorade and oversaw the highly-awarded branded content Replay series. For three seasons, it's given sports teams the chance to address unrequited triumphs from their athletic past and now, Mr. Smith says, it's on its way to becoming a feature produced by Sony.
Read more about the agency's launch at Creativity Online.
This is going to be good!
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