Cindy By Kartell

via 3rings.designerpages.com

Lights that look like Jolly Ranchers. A nice gift for the holiday’s.

What Marketers Can Learn From ‘Sesame Street’

I’ve been a big fan of Sesame Street since I was a little boy. Bert, Ernie, Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird were my peeps back then.

Did you know that Oscar the Grouch was orange in the original show?

My respect for the show grew to new heights when my wife and I had twins in 2001. We had the pleasure of watching our favorite characters evolve through our children’s eyes. Ultimately though, my interest in the show waned as my twins grew older. They began searching for more mature content like Blues Clues and The Wiggles and just like that, we tucked Sesame Street into a drawer and forgot about it.

But that all changed when my third child arrived 16 months ago. He’s now officially in Sesame Street’s sweet spot and can be found hobbling around my house barking two words over and over again — “Elmos World, Elmos World, Elmos World…”

So when Sesame Street turned 40 earlier this week, I made it my business to learn more about how this show became such a huge phenomenon.

What I discovered was tons of learnings for marketers. That’s right – marketers.

Just as Jerzy Kosinski’s book “Being There” offers life lessons disguised in the form of metaphors, these lessons are nestled away in metaphors too. But when you think about it, it’s all there in plain sight for you to assimilate and digest in your own way.

Here’s a few to tease you, but I encourage you to read and/or listen to this entire piece featured on NPR here:

Experimentation is a Mindset

Sesame Street was always considered an experiment. 40 years later, it’s still considered an experiment.

Change is unavoidable

In the beginning, Oscar was orange. Cookie Monster originally had teeth. Big Bird had a pin-head. Appearance isn’t everything; if the characters feel real, Sesame Street insiders say, kids will follow them through whatever changes they make.

C Is For Competition

With only a few exceptions, Sesame Street had the children’s education market to themselves for years. But with the success of the program, other characters began moving into the television neighborhood. Over the years, as Barney, Dora, SpongeBob and others tugged away at the Sesame Street audience, producers started to plan some major renovations.

Freshen Up

If you only watched Sesame Street in the early years, you’ll be surprised by the look and feel of the program today. It’s brighter, for one. There’s a nice dappling of fake sunshine on the set, the graffiti is gone, and the sound of cars in the distance has disappeared. Carrol Spinney — or maybe the Grouch inside of him — says, “It looked a little more grungy, and frankly I loved it grungy.” In the beginning Sesame Street was aimed mainly at urban kids who didn’t have the preparation to start school. When everyone started watching, it needed to be brighter.

Learn From Your Mistakes

In 1994, Sesame Street started to sprawl. The show built a whole new set for a segment called “Around the Corner.” It was supposed to be a glimpse of what happened on the next street over. Then they added a hotel, the “Furry Arms,” and a whole list of new characters and a great comedic actor, Ruth Buzzi. But it never caught on.

“We ended up with too many characters and too much going on,” says author Louise Gikow. “So they pulled back the characters and went back to the street.”

Keep It Simple

The early Sesame Street was based on variety shows like Laugh-In. Segments varied wildly in length and subject, and you could never quite tell what would happen next, or how long it would last. At the time, researchers thought the unpredictability helped to hold kids’ attention. But with the advent of the VCR and DVD, it became clear that kids could watch one story for long periods of time.

“We were breaking up the narrative,” says Rosemary Truglio, the head of research at the Sesame Workshop, a non-profit organization that used to be known as the Children’s Television Workshop. “Instead of having the children experience the narrative as a 15-minute story.”

Now, the interruptions are gone. The new season of Sesame Street has a bunch of little shows within the show. One long story might be followed by 10 minutes of Ernie and Bert, after which Elmo gets his 15-minute block. It’s calm and predictable for kids, especially the 2-to-4-year-old audience that Sesame Street is now drawing, says Carol-Lynn Parente, the show’s executive producer.

SS+K Featured In Communication Arts

 

We’re not the greatest at tooting our own horn, but when somebody else that matters picks up our horn + blasts a fanfare worthy of Aaron Copeland, even we feel compelled to showcase it.

What follows is a feature on SS+K in the latest edition of Communication Arts, perhaps the most prestigious chronicle of creativity in America.

It’s our story, quite well told by award-winning journalist + author, Warren Berger. He wrote nice words + the editors generously gave us pages + pages showing our work. Lots of it.

Far be it from us to make predictions, but when an agency is featured in Communication Arts, it’s often not so much a celebration of an agency’s amazing past as a prediction of an amazing future.

We follow in the footsteps of the Chiat/Days, Goodby Silversteins + Crispin Porter Boguskys. Big footsteps indeed. But as a friend of ours wrote for the New York Lottery, ‘Hey, you never know.’

You can download a PDF of the entire article here: Comm_Arts_SSK

As always, your comments and feedback are welcome here.

A Trip Into The Secret, Online ‘Cloud’

via cnn.com

Making the complex simple is never easy.

This video on cloud computing and storage offers a really basic explanation of what happens to your digital assets like photography when you store them online.

For those of you not hanging out with the Twitterati it’s worth a peek.

The Way We Live Now – Going Offline in Search of Freedom

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.

That reminded me: I hadn’t read “The Odyssey” since college, and because I was pretty sure that my copy was at the bottom of a carton of books in faraway Minneapolis, I Googled the original text. I browsed several versions before downloading what seemed like the best translation. Because my interest lay specifically with the Sirens (quick Web break to make sure that should be uppercase), I sifted through a variety of classicists’ interpretations of their role. Then — and this seemed reasonable enough — I searched for the “Sirens” episode in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I can’t quite recollect how I got to the video for the song “Sirens,” by the alternative rock group AVA, but that put me in mind of Blink-182 (with whom AVA shares a frontman), so I clicked over to that band’s site to check for any updates on the release of its new album, then watched its reunion performance from February’s Grammy Awards. . . . When I looked up, three and a half hours had passed.

And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”

Freedom, which runs only on Macs, is downloaded more than 4,000 times a month. Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens,” they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a “wiser man.” That is precisely the draw of the Internet.

It is heartening that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings (though it applies equally to obtaining the wisdom of Zeus or the YouTube video on how to peel a banana like a monkey). Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. Can increased knowledge really destroy us?

Well, yes. According to Elster, there are certainly occasions when choosing ignorance could be smart. You might decline, for instance, to undergo testing for the genetic marker for Huntington’s disease, which is fatal and incurable. Or say you were an East German after reunification: would you want to read files that may show that your spouse had informed against you? As a culture, we have banned research on reproductive cloning, fearing how future generations might use the results.

In my slightly less agonizing situation, the trap is more of a bait and switch: the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli.

It could be that sometimes our greatest freedom may be to choose freedom from freedom. I am still surprised by the relief that floods me whenever I bind myself from going online, when I have no option but to ignore the incessant tweets and e-mail messages and videos and news links and even the legitimate research.

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

Posted via web from bradleykay’s posterous

Bolle Bottles by Tapio Wirkkala for Venini

via midcenturymodernist.com

I have one word to describe these glass objects – “gorgeous”.

This series, designed by Tapio Wirkkala in 1968, employs the “Incalmo” technique wherein two different types of glass, worked separately, are fused together to obtain, within a single object, separate areas differentiated by colors. — Moss

Mach 2000 Dark Master Chronograph Watch

LIP watches have been around for over 150 years but were unavailable in the United States until very recently. The company has reintroduced some of their most important models from a modern collection that was first unveiled 35 years ago. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, LIP enlisted a handful of creative architects and designers to design contemporary watches. Among them was the prolific Roger Tallon, who designed everything from high-speed French TGV trains to the 1964 Helicoid Staircase (part of the MoMa Design Collection). Tallon’s LIP designs include the iconic Mach 2000 series. 

Stefan Sagmeister: The Power Of Time Off

Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.

I agree with Sagmeister’s sentiments and think creativity is unleashed when we take a break from our routines.