Digital Hive: The Medium is the Message

What we're reading for inspiration

Gerald Zaltman: How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
We heart Jerry. His groundbreaking methods reveal the true drivers of customer behavior. You'll never be satisfied with a focus group again. (*****)
Ben McConnell: Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message
Could we heart this book (and its authors) more? NO. Essential reading for anyone in marketing in 2007.
Martha Barletta: Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market Segment
Fantastic description of the biological drivers of the differences between how men and women think and behave.
Radu Stern: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930
Fascinating description of how fashion expressed underlying social values and tensions. Wonderful visual history of fashion in the western world 1850-1930.
Eric Ericson: Design for Impact: Fifty Years of Airline Safety Cards
A fascinating visual history of how graphic designers have tried to equip airline passengers for disaster
Charles Yang: The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Fascinating description of how humans learn language skills.
Sina Najafi: Cabinet 22: Insecurity (Art and Culture)
Cabinet magazine (it's a quarterly) is a provocative roundup of interesting cultural phenomena
Ron Galella: Disco Years
A larger than life homage to the personalities and habits of Studio 54's most infamous patrons. A fascinating document of American culture's excess and quest for self expression.
Adam Morgan: The Pirate Inside: Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within Yourself and Your Organization
What can we say, we heart Adam Morgan. A primer on how to blow up the old push marketing approach to brand and substitute a customer-driven "listening" approach.
Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things
A manifesto for the future of design, impeccably crafted by Bruce Sterling and ehnahced by the delicately emphatic graphic intelligence of Lorraine Wild.

February 21, 2005

The Medium is the Message

For 3M's new outdoor campaign, $3 million in fake bills (with real bills on top) was placed between panes of transit glass treated with a shatter-resistant coating.

Yes they could've just done a nice poster saying "hey, trust us, our new glass is shatterproof, isn't that lovely." But they took it to the next level by engaging passers-by in the delectable task of trying to get the money out of the display. One can only imagine the attention this creative is getting.

Thanks to Brand Noise for flagging this Active Branding classic.

Here's another- in which a real $100 bill was placed behind shatter-resistant glass in a washroom ad. See more of this interesting work here: http://www.rethinkadvertising.com/