… and products advertisement for branded content.

From drinks to content: Pepsi invests heavily in content production – not as mere branded content for advertising their branded bubbly drinks, but as a business model that leverages the popularity of the brand. The drink is  the product consumers pay for. While media houses pay for branded content, which consumers like all along with the drinks. The drink becomes an advertisement for the content and the other way around.

PepsiCo, the food and beverage manufacturer, believes its new in-house studio – called the Creators League – could soon help its major brands “fund their own marketing” by selling content to media companies.

From the marketing newsletter warc. The article is citing Brad Jakeman, President/Global Beverage Group at PepsiCo:

“My ultimate goal is for our billion-dollar brands to actually fund their own marketing, so that we leverage the equity of the brand to produce content which we then sell [and] which we can then put back into the marketing for those brands …

As hinted at by these provisional figures, the Creators League has the potential to turn PepsiCo into a significant seller of media, not just a buyer of it. …

One part of the content centre is actually leveraging our brands to produce content, which we then sell to media platforms…

And it’s a very interesting thing, because it changes the relationship we have with the media from people to buy media to a company that sells content…

Some of those brands – like Pepsi, and Doritos, and Gatorade – are really themselves enormous platforms for content”

That process is facilitated by the financial muscle and unique marketing assets possessed by PepsiCo’s slate of billion-dollar brands, according to Jakeman.

Welcome to the world of brave new branding. How to de-brand this complete pervasion / perversion?

Source: “PepsiCo’s new content model” on warc.com

UPDATE:

0)

Brad Jakeman, President/Global Beverage Group at PepsiCo,
http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/EmailNews.news?ID=37048
“Instead of five pieces of content a year, a brand like Pepsi needs about 5,000 pieces of content a year,” he said.

1)
Dana Anderson, SVP/CMO of Mondelez International – the owner of brands such as Oreo cookies, Honey Maid graham crackers and Trident gum – discussed this topic at the 2016 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “The thought is: If we like to make ads that we think are so wonderful and people would like to watch, why don’t people have to pay to watch? Can you make content that’s great enough for somebody to pay to watch?” she said.http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/EmailNews.news?ID=37157

2)
Niantic CEO John Hanke told the Financial Times earlier this week that monetisation options included “sponsored locations“, with businesses paying the developer to become locations within the virtual game board – “the premise being that it is an inducement that drives foot traffic”.
And Redditors who have examined the game’s code claim that burger chain McDonald’s is already lined up as one of the first sponsors, with one telling Gizmodo “it looks like they’re going to hold a promo with McDonald’s which’ll turn them into all gyms”.
“Gyms” and “Pokéstops” are real-world places where players can spot and train Pokémon characters.

Some retailers are already utilising “lures” – which can be bought in the game to attract Pokémon characters to specific locations – to attract people to their stores.

One coffee chain franchise owner told Ad Exchanger that half of his locations had PokéStops in their geo-range. “We’ll be measuring the difference in foot traffic at certain times between those with lures and those without,” he said.

“I can tell you already though that at the locations where we have been keeping lures open all day, it’s the best ROI we’ve ever spent on marketing.”
https://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/Retailers_tap_Pok_mon_Go.news?ID=37082

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/75942b12-48ba-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c.html#axzz4FmVfEOQ2

… wir so Leben würden wir wollen. Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig … Mehr mit weniger … mehr Gutes mit weniger Gütern. Keine Kriege, kein Kampf ums Geld, keine Wichtigtuerei, … etc.

Kaum vorzustellen (Zizek), außer von toten Spinnern wie John Lennon (“Imagine“)  oder ein paar lebendigen Freigeistern, Aktivistinnen und Gestaltern (mehr dazu auf diesem Blog unter “Stellt es euch vor und tut es. Die Gestaltung der Zukunft”).

Statt dessen: allgemeine “Alternativlosigkeit”, Sachzwänge und zwanghafte Vorstellungen (“Images” von Erfolg und Konsumglück). Um all dies geht es Heribert Prantl in seinem Wort zum Sonntag, äh zu Pfingsten. Und da formuliert er ein paar Sätze so schön, daß ich diese Pointen hier gerne versammle:

… Die Katastrophen sind allpräsent: die Umwelt- und die Klimakatastrophe, die Flüchtlingskatastrophe, die Katastrophe auf dem Finanzmarkt, die Bildungskatastrophe; die demografische Katastrophe. Zwischen den mörderischen Taten der Radikalislamisten, dem rasenden Stillstand des Turbokapitalismus und dem auf- und abschwellenden Ebola-Alarm leben Politik und Gesellschaft wie gelähmt dahin. …

… Man glaubt nicht mehr an den geradlinigen Fortschritt, aber auch nicht an die große Umkehr, nicht an eine offene Zukunft; denn man hört zu oft, die Art der Krisenbewältigung sei “alternativlos” …

… Walter Benjamin hat gesagt: “Daß es ‘so weiter’ geht, ist die Katastrophe. Sie ist nicht das jeweils Bevorstehende, sondern das jeweils Gegebene.” …

… Die Frage ist also nicht, welche Zukunft man hat oder erduldet, die Frage ist, welche Zukunft man haben will und wie man darauf hinlebt und hinarbeitet.

Das wäre eigentlich eine Sache der Gestalter des Großen und Ganzen, also der Entscheidungsträger in Politik und Wirtschaft. Doch die sind gefangen in ihren Machtinteressen und “Sachzwängen”. Also müssen wir Bürger ran, und damit auch die ganz “kreativen”: die Architekten, Fotografen, Designer, Werber, Filmer, etc., die ja auch mal eine vernünftige Gegenwart und eine attraktive Zukunft darstellen könnten, anstatt zu mehr Konsum und Coolness zu verleiten. Auch die Dichter und Denker sind gefragt: weniger Selbstbezüglichkeit, mehr Welt! Weniger apokalyptische Phantasien, mehr konkrete Utopien!

Vorbilder hierfür: Florian Pfeffer’s “To Do: Die neue Rolle der Gestaltung in einer veränderten Welt”, am besten parallel zu lesen mit “Transformationsdesign: Wege in eine zukunftsfähige Moderne” von Harald Welzer und Bernd Sommer. Mehr hierzu auf den Blog By Design or by Disaster.

… und ab jetzt: JEDER SONNTAG AUTOFREI!

(und jetzt geht’s raus, Quellenverweise von Bildern mache ich später noch)

… also her damit, für ein Magazin, dessen nächste Ausgabe zum Thema Macht* mit einem coolen Video von Graw Böckler beworben wird. Kunst ist schön, macht aber viel Arbeit” … dabei sollen die Macher zumindest nicht drauf zahlen. Also, bitte, unterstützt die Leute von 39null, damit sie so schön weiter machen können. Auf zur Crowd-Funding Kampagne!

* mit dabei: Eine Anleitung zu Selbstverteidigung gegen die Macht von Images und Brands.

I don’t find Russell Brand particularly sympathetic, nor i think he is funny, but this one is good. He is summarizing drastically a few issues of about the power of business and media, and how they are influencing public opinion, managing to marginalize alternative ideas and action.

I have no idea how Russell Brand’s book is. But the topics he touches are relevant. And if he really is able to communicate them to “ordinary people”, then i even agree with his sense of humor, which does not work for me.

Noam Chomsky does not give us much hope about the future of human civilization, in his article “ISIS and Our Times“. If he is right – and i fear he is – we should prepare for more than just a crisis. How to prepare (my guess):

• learn self-sufficiency
• learn to get organized (with peers, not depend on institutions, companies and other big structures)
• learn self-defense (not only physically)
• learn to hack (not only code)

in a short: learn to get organized in networked communities, which are independent of big structures

“Die Süddeutsche wird ja immer besser: Jetzt koordinieren sie bereits Titelbild mit Werbebeilage auf erfrischend subtile Art und Weise.” schreibt Frank Hutter heute Frueh via Email.

Das erinnert mich an eine alte Arbeit von simonex, die collection esthetique (Web’Kunst anno 1999), die auch Aehnlichgkeiten von Bildern aus Kriegsdarstellungen und Mode sichtbar macht.

Motherboard is writing about implants that heal, optimize and monitor soldiers, a project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – another Man Mashine Interface that makes us melt more with technology. But not only with technology, but with the powers that control it. In this case the military, but generally it can be imagined as a power conglomerate of governments, insurance and health companies, big data firms and other big industry actors.

Intelligent pattern recognition connects images of people and brands with users in the “social web”. Imagine this combined with frictionless sharing of daily life – the Inter-Face between online and offline Identity.

image by ditto

Though the system doesn’t necessarily identify individuals in their corporeal form, it can pinpoint the top influencers on a given social network and give their online identities to companies looking to partner with their biggest fans in promotional campaigns. […]
… users are being sold off to the highest bidder, without any kind of tangible return.
Founded in 2007, Tumblr has long been a sanctum for misfit millennials meticulously crafting identities for themselves by posting and sharing images. Surely it was only a matter of time until the site figured out a way to monetize its sizable cultural cachet, but for a platform that prides itself on facilitating self-expression and a degree of anonymity, it’s an unsettling move at the very least.

thanks Matteo for the link

“These Cycling Desks Charge Your Phone–And Your Muscles–While You Work” is the title of the article on fastco about an installation that reminds me  of “Fifteen Million Merits”, the 2nd episode of Black Mirror, where inhabitants pedal all day in front of screens to power their casting show world.

This might not be exactly the intentions of the designer at WeWatt. It seems they made a piece of critical design without intention.