Utopia or Bust

Posts Tagged ‘marketing

Notice to the Civlized Concerning Greenwashing

Posted by: lettrist on: August 1, 2009

Oh no what can the “consumer” do about greenwashing? Let’s ask a greenwashing marketing firm to find out.
Terra Choice is a marketer which specializes in introducing inexperienced firms to green advertising. On their sinsofgreenwashing website, you can send “protest postcards” to companies you believe have greenwashed their products. The postcards link [...]

Fiorucci made them Hipster

Posted by: lettrist on: July 29, 2009

Mark Leckey is a British artist and professor of film studies in Frankfurt. He’s best known for manipulating pop images and music into dreamy, druggy, disjointed variants on music videos. The 1999 club-life video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in the ubu.com archives is a long meditation on the 90s club scenes and hip fashion.
Today’s hipster [...]

“Your Beauty Is Our Business”

Posted by: lettrist on: July 5, 2009

Advertisement for Southcenter Cosmetic Surgery I found at the South Center Mall in Tukwila

The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work [...]

DisneyLand! “The Place Where Dreams Come True”

Posted by: lettrist on: June 7, 2009

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carcereal). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to [...]

How Capitalism proves its own arguments

Posted by: lettrist on: May 17, 2009

The spectacle proves its arguments simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed, and believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness.
- Jean Baudrillard, Comments on [...]

Chevron, isn’t it time to slow down!?

Posted by: lettrist on: May 10, 2009

In the beginning was the secret, and this was the rule of the game of appearance. Then there was the repressed, and this was the rule of the game of depth. Finally comes the obscene, and this was the rule of the game of a world without appearance or depth – a transparent universe.
- Jean [...]

How to address climate change with Business ethics

Posted by: lettrist on: February 25, 2009

This is a follow up from the previous post on the way business marketing authors approached the Viread retro-viral drug and its use in Africa during clinical testing trials. In the chapter on business ethics in this textbook, International Marketing, the authors subtly discuss environmental ethics and its effect on business.
Activists are the bane of [...]

Olympic Bobsledding Advertisements – a case study

Posted by: lettrist on: February 17, 2009

Perhaps you are not watching the 2009 Utah Olympics. But I did for a very, very brief moment and here is what I noticed.
Your vantage point is not exactly the one most suitable for watching sports, so much as watching ads. To view your favorite Olympic team get the gold, you must experience this event [...]