“We live at that moment in history when someone who has made a lot of money in the ad biz refers to fortune cookies as ‘a new marketing medium’ and ‘one of the last branding frontiers.’ And he is completely serious. His name is Mark Hughes. He is the CEO of Buzz Marketing, a firm specializing in that most desirable and elusive form of publicity – word-of-mouth, people talking to one another about your product. In a word, buzz.”
Tag: 07.02.03
And Could The Conductor Wear An “Everybody Loves Raymond” T-Shirt?
Apparently, the “1812 Overture” is just too much music for CBS’s tastes. The network, which is supposed to be televising the Boston Pops’ annual 4th of July concert, has decided that it only wants the big, loud part of the Tchaikovsky overture – y’know, the part everyone can sing along to – and so it will ‘cut in’ to the performance near the end of the work, just in time for the cannons and the fireworks. The 1812 is approximately 20 minutes long when played without cuts, roughly 15 minutes longer than television executives believe that Americans are capable of paying attention to anything.
Baltic Director Resigns
“The man behind the Baltic – Europe’s newest contemporary arts complex – has quit as its director. Sune Nordgren steered the centre for contemporary arts in Gateshead, through it’s first turbulent year… The £46m project transformed the former Baltic Flour Mills, a disused 1950s grain warehouse, into an international contemporary arts venue.” Nordgren is heading home to Norway, where he will become the director of the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design.
Hogwarts Students Not Welcome Here
The Harry Potter series has been banned again, this time in Australia, where a Christian college is concerned that “the books promoted wizardry as normal – not a message to which students should be exposed.” Since Harry’s wizardry is not only not normal, but, in fact, fictional, one might be tempted to dismiss the Maranatha Christian College as a bunch of fundamentalist yahoos, but the school is only the latest in a long string of institutions worldwide which have discerned some grave threat to followers of Jesus in the works of J.K. Rowling.
But CDs Are Still $18, Hmm?
Who would have thought that a 20-cent price cut could make such a difference? In the month since the (legal) digital music service Listen.com cut the price of its downloads from 99 cents to 79 cents, it has nearly doubled the number of songs it sold. The price cut was initially a response to the much-ballyhooed new download service offered by Apple, but Listen.com (which is owned by RealNetworks) wound up with 11 million songs downloaded from its servers in the month of June.
China’s Great Wall Crumbles In Obscurity
Chinese officials are scrambling to deal with the discovery that large chunks of the famous Great Wall are no longer standing, and more will likely be gone in the near future. “Of the portion built during the Ming Dynasty, less than 20 percent is still intact. A probe of 100 sections drew the alarming conclusion that a third of the structure has already vanished.” Survey teams were shocked to find “local farmers living along the Great Wall simply unaware of what it is. They witnessed bricks being carted away by people to build houses, sheep corrals and pigsties. One 1,000-meter section in Hebei Province, which neighbors Beijing, vanished in the space of a year after locals took stones and foundation materials for repairs.”
Classical Recording – Disfunctional Scarcely Describes It
Even when recording a classical artist seems to make economic sense, it’s not happening anymore at the big recording labels, writes Norman Lebrecht. And of course there’s no tolerance for developing new talent or helping to make careers. So what’s a talented young violinist to do?
Rogues Gallery
Wonder where those garish statues of former dictators end up? “Nearly 20 statues of leaders and heroes of authoritarian regimes occupy the rolling private garden of Harlan R. Crow, a Dallas real estate investor. Heavyweights like Stalin, Mao and Lenin stand among lesser-knowns like Klement Gottwald, the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia. Many of the statues, some as tall as 20 feet, were bought from the sculptors or from public officials as regimes crumbled. A few, like the large bust of Princip, were acquired as bullets whizzed by.”
Conflicts of Interest At The Barnes
In a report withheld for three years, an audit of the troubled Barnes Foundation is deeply critical of the way the foundation was managed. It is particularly critical of former director Richard Glanton. “Under a section titled ‘Conflicts of Interest,’ the audit outlined a series of Barnes transactions that it said Mr. Glanton engaged in with outside business partners, without informing the foundation’s board. It said he ran up more than $225,000 in travel and entertainment expenses; tried to barter the foundation’s banking business for support on the board; and let two women live in Barnes properties under unusual circumstances.”
Canaletto For A Day
A couple of London brothers have won a contest to hang a rare Canaletto painting in their home for a day. The program is intended to win new audiences for art, and the painting arrived with a curator and security guard. One of the brothers “admitted he had not been a huge fan of Canaletto before winning the painting. He said he now thought Canaletto was ‘awesome’. Though the painting is returning home in the evening, Alex said the art fund was giving them a copy as a reminder of their day as blue-chip art collectors.”