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"Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else.

The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture.

Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup."

NYT


Posted by Ed Cotton Sweden is a country that’s been on everyone’s agenda for the past few years.

People have been marveling at the entrepreneurship and creativity coming out of the place, which is due to the deep pool of talent and the emergence of a new “can do” attitude.

In the last year or so, digital agencies Farfar and North Kingdom have been setting the world alight.

Acne is perhaps the godfather of this latest phase of Swedish creativity.

It’s a company that defies conventional wisdom, because it creates both products and communication in a variety of formats.

The “Factory-like” collective is best known for its Acne Jeans brand, was founded in 1996 by four friends, Jesper Kouthoofd, Thomas Skun Skoging, Mats Johansson and Jonny Johansson.

Acne’s empire now spans a film company, an ad agency, a web design company, a toy company and even a magazine.

The jeans brand is the beacon of the group. It sets to the tone, the mood and the trends and helps build the connections and relationships for the rest of the company, but it also reacts and responds to what the other units are doing. Think of it as a dynamic feedback loop. The jeans brand has its own stores across Europe, including a flagship in Berlin and is sold in over 400 stores worldwide.

The ad agency has worked for MTV, Virgin and even a competitor to its jeans brand, H&M.

Acne Film is a commercial production house and has created ads for the likes of Comcast, Dodge, Garmin and Nike.  

The magazine, Acne Paper, documents the worlds of creativity, fashion and style.



The digital agency, one of the newest ventures, has already worked for the likes of SAS, VW and Volvo.

With ad agencies currently struggling to define themselves, their stragey appears limited to focusing on driving revenue by owning every element of the communication mix.

Acne starts with creativity and ideas and works it out from there, a nightmare proposition for most senior agency management and holding company CFOs. However, perhaps the time is now right for new Acnes to emerge, led by individuals with limited or no real agency experience.

It appears that Acne’s secret is to leverage the cult of cool across a variety of different creative disciplines and areas.

It’s a concept that would be way too risky for most agencies to conceive because there’s always an inherent concern for any brand trading on cool, how long can it last?
 
Here’s how Acne explains its vision.  

When Acne was created in 1996 the initial idea was to build brands, own as well as others', within the fields of fashion, entertainment and technology. Although all members of the collective are independent entities acting in their own right in various fields of creativity, they all share the same vision and culture. This vision combines art and industry in equal measures, whether this is through clothing, film, printed matter or a global advertising campaign.

Posted by Ed Cotton In the relentless quest to be cooler than everyone else, the world of the urban hipster has been slammed for some time and the "slamming" has become an industry in its own right.

This t-shirt, available for sale on Threadless sums up the irony perfectly.



The copy promoting the t-shirt is pretty good as well.

"Is this type tee a badge of honor highlighting the wearer's unique tastes in off-the-beaten-path music and other such awesomeness ignored by mainstream culture, an ironic indictment of others who condemn you for listening to a band once they sell fifty copies of their first album, or just about having imaginary marching bands cascading through your head at all times of the night and day? YES!"




Posted by Ed Cotton Brand cool is an elusive thing.

The coolest brands don’t have to try hard because cool is part of their DNA, they are used by the right people and seem to find themselves in the right places.

It’s all so natural and seamless there’s nothing forced about it.

The brand just is.

Then there are brands that try to buy cool.

They force open the doors, offer everyone piles of cash and hope that the name association of other people’s cool rubs off on the brand.

Trying too hard to be cool makes you a pretender and a poser.

The cool people won’t find you interesting, they may show up to your parties and drink your free booze, but they won’t use your product,

In fact, you may find many of the free products you gave them, unused and still in their nice boxes in said cool people's desk drawers.

Zune maybe doing some great stuff- cool, beautiful ads, great work with artists, fantastic parties, but it can’t rely on others to make it interesting, it needs to be interesting itself.

Zune can do this by doing some interesting and sadly we’ve yet to see it, but…….

 



Posted by Ed Cotton "I have a personal interest in popular culture and the influence of culture on the consumer landscape.."

Quoted in the Wall Street Journal today

Posted by Ed Cotton In the last 24 months, we’ve seen lots of brands try to recruit consumers to create ads on their behalf.

However, what if you subvert and twist the system a little?

We saw that with some negative ads created for Chevy

What if you push further to a subverted consumer-created product?

This is the case with the Prada Ironic Advertisment Wallet, created by a 17 year old girl and sold on the Etsy website.

Here’s how she describes her merchandise.

“This wallet is ironic. Why, you ask? Well, the Prada image is an advertisement plucked from the very pages of VOGUE magazine -- yes, literally. Typically, an item with a brand as prestigious as Prada would be extremely expensive. Advertising feeds into this prestige and brand-name popularity. By taking the advertisement and -- rather than buying a Prada product -- turning it instead into a product in and of itself with that brand-name on it, we have succesfully usurped the entire silly Brand system. We have taken their advertising and turned it into a handcrafted, DIY duct-tape and paper wallet.

The irony is that the product is a wallet.

The owner of this wallet will hold his/her money in this fabulous, handmade wallet with the Prada brand name on it -- but although he/she touts this brand proudly, no money actually went to it.Instead it goes directly to the lovely maker of the wallet, me.”

Lia. Irony queen and brilliant anti-consumerism activist.

OK, let's twist this back, what if you let consumers make their own versions of your products and get paid for it?

Via Bubble Generation



Posted by Ed Cotton