PSFK Author:
Guy Brighton

The Daily Ad Biz points to news that Heineken’s use of photos from Flickr for a promotion got them in hot water. For a micro-site, the beer company took photos from Flickr that featured the Heineken sponsored Oxygen music festival - but found themselves getting sued for copyright infringement.

More here

Here’s the latest promo from Santogold. It’s interesting to see stylistic similarities between this video and the one for Ladytron’s runaway that we featured last week.

Santogold

PSFK is proud to announce that on Friday October 10 2008, we will host our next event - in Singapore. PSFK Conference Asia will celebrate creativity and ideas that make change.

This event will be PSFK’s 6th conference following successful installments in London, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. In Singapore we aim to inspire an audience of creative thinkers with some of the world’s leading visionaries in a variety of fields.

The day will consist of panel discussions and engaging presentations from representatives from Flamingo International, Wieden Kennedy, MTV, Panasonic, Profero and many more. Our audience will be made up of senior professionals from the advertising, design, digital, entertainment, media and marketing industries.

If you’re in the region - why not come for a passionate dose of inspiration?

www.psfkconferenceasia.com

John Grant says planners need to start to believe in something.

John Grant: Planning’s Midlife Crisis? from JWT on Vimeo.

[via zj]

BVD in Sweden were asked to by Turesgruppen AB to create a strong and totally unique café experience: from concept and name, to graphic profile and packaging. The concept needed to be warm, welcoming, honest and genuine and targeted to young professionals.

They created an image that mixed black, white and stainless steel with “warm” wood and other simple nostalgic cues:

The old fashioned café-feeling [is] expressed by things like a board with old, detachable letters and traditional cups and trays. The graphics are clean and simple, but at the same time surprising and playful. The design exudes personality, quality, style and a big city feeling.

Photos and more: BVD Case Study

Monocle magazine has opened up a branded newsstand in Fitzrovia, London. The shop is done up in full Monocle style, offering a clean and stylish way to browse the latest publications. Going forward, the magazine is looking to continue building a network of branded news outlets around the globe.

With speculation running wild over the fate of printed matter, this is an interesting move in favor of it’s future. With environmental impact concerns and production costs rising, along with Monocle’s high end reputation in mind, perhaps it’s a sign that print is going to end up being a luxury item in the future?

Monocle

There’s been some good to and fro going on in media-land. LA Times proudly produced figures that their traffic had increased by 66% and then Gawker Media stirred the pot by pointing out that they had double the traffic with a fraction of the staff.

With an editorial staff of about 700LA Times produces 127 million page views a month, while Gawker claims to create 254 million page views amonth with 8- staff. Silicon Alley Insider published this list of traffic for their sites:

Gizmodo 73.5m
Kotaku 44.3m
Lifehacker 25.6m
Gawker 18.9m
Fleshbot 17.4m
Jezebel 15.5m
Consumerist 13.7m
Jalopnik 13.4m
Deadspin 12.6m
io9 8.8m
Defamer 6.4m
Valleywag 3.3m

A traditional publication itself (though read by this writer online, naturally), WWD reports that magazine circulation has fallen by alarming rates over the past year. We’ve reported on this trend before, and we’re not the only ones by far, but the WWD article paints a more complete picture of which magazines are struggling, which are rebounding, and which are very near total failure. Plus, the article really gets down to the nitty gritty of the numbers, analyzing newsstand sales vs. subscriptions, month-by-month sales, sales by vertical, etc. Here’s a snippet:

That Men’s Vogue’s newsstand is down 39.1 percent, for example, even as it’s raising its rate base to 400,000, can be explained several ways: first, that it suffers from an apples-and-oranges comparison between five issues published in the first half of 2008 and three in the first half of 2007; second, and more significantly, that it’s growing its audience the expensive way, through subscriptions, and not wowing on the newsstand.

Also, unsurprisingly, the article points out that magazines are trying to raise their subscription bases online as a cheaper way to add subscribers than direct mail. Ironically, the WWD article we’re reporting on here requires a subscription to read, but is that honestly the way publishers should be going? The walled-garden strategy proved to be a giant failure many months, if not years ago. And when you compare these stats about tumbling magazine circulation with the piece Piers posted earlier about how blogs are getting double the page views of traditional publications, perhaps magazines should be taking a different approach to things.

WWD: Magazine Circulation Falls in Half (subscription req)

We got shipped these bottles from Mountain Dew’s Green Label Art Range. They’re Volume 2 in a series. Sure, the art’s ok - and we’re not against artists getting paid. Good luck to ‘em. It’s just the this promotion annoys us because:

• It’s straight out of the 2005 Brand Manager manual, in the chapter ‘Let’s target the influencers with cool underground art shit’.
• Pepsi thinks it’s better to spend money on this to get the kids to drink more Corn Fructose (Corn Fructose is the principal ingredient in this drink after water) rather than spend money retooling.
• Maybe it would have been quite fun to discover these cans in the stores rather than the usual - let’s send it to the cool blogs to start a buzz.
• No-one needs to be shipped 8 bottles of pop with so much non-recyclable plastic.

Green Label Art