Making sarcastic comments about the intellectual and philosophical qualities of advertising or financial people is taking cheap shots in front of an open goal. But if they are asking for it, they are asking for it. Last weekend I drove past a billboard of the Belgian financial multinational Fortis on which I read in big letters (images on billboards are overrated anyway): “Life is a curve, where on this curve are you?” (and where on his curve is their new shareholder, the Libean leader Khadaffi? Or, where on this curve is Fortis itself? I’d say on a downslope….).

My first thought was: “Life is a curve? … No, it isn’t” Actually, it may be one of the most stupid comments ever printed on a billboard poster. Many beautiful, insightful, philosophical things have been said and written about life. Socrates wrote that true wisdom is in knowing how little we know about life, I wonder if he would have thought that deeming life ‘a curve’, was perhaps oversimplifying matters a bit. We all know the analogies that have become bad clichés: how life is a rollercoaster, a river. Or perhaps the bizarre quotes like “life is like a tin of sardines, we are all looking for the key.” Every era gets the quotes it deserves and these times may not be bizarre, a cliché, or wise. Our era might deserve populist, unintelligent quotes. Actually, I don’t know who to feel more sorry for, the idiot copywriter that wrote it, or the idiot that approved of it and paid several million euros for this campaign.

At the same time I felt rather offended actually. “Where on this curve are you?” they have the nerve to ask me. Not only do those arrogant people at Fortis have the poor wit to inform about the alleged ‘curviness’ of life, they immediately try to convince me that this is a given fact and, since I undoubtedly accept this fallacy, ask me about my location on this curve. For the sake of argument: would life have been a curve (which, by intelligent and logical lines of reasoning, it isn’t), it would have been completely impossible for anyone to say where on this curve you are. Theoretically, it could be possible to say where you were in life at a given point, after your death, but I doubt that Fortis has informants in the hereafter.

In a press release Adrian Martorana, the Fortis exec that is guilty of this so-called ‘corporate campaign’, states”The ‘Life is a curve’ campaign encourages people to think about their financial needs today and plan for tomorrow, with the help of a trusted partner such as Fortis.” And to make matters even worse: “We carried out extensive global research over 12 months to make sure our message was relevant in today’s environment.” I don’t expect bankers to be good philosophers, I do expect them to able to do a bit of decent research, draw some solid conclusions from it and act according to them. I might be expecting too much.

I should mentally have linked Fortis with qualities such as ‘future financial needs”and ‘trusted financial partner’. How on earth this should have been done by bad philosophy is beyond me. The creatives at their advertising agency Grey EMEA were probably a bit too high on bad cocaine. When they listened to the lyrics of their superior in philospophy, Jessica Simpson, who begins her song “Walkin’ Round in a circle” with the sentence “Life is a curve BALL”. There is virtually no job easier than that of creating a corporate advertising campaign to build a brand image. That’s why, when you fail as a proper artist or writer, you can still work in advertsing (and if you even fail there: ‘corporate advertising’).

But perhaps all this is my mistake. The fact that all I think about is their poor ability in logical reasoning, and not their superior qualities in banking, is all my mistake. Or maybe I just have it wrong. Maybe ‘life is a curve’ actually makes wonderful sense. I don’t think I’ll be taking any of my banking to the lovely people at Fortis. But they probably don’t care anyway. I don’t have a clue about where I am on my curve.

This just in: Rumour has it that the former Dutch alternative popband ‘Long Evans’ are regrouping for a new album and international tour. Sources around the band reveal that both album and tour might be called: “Music 2.0″.

Their new album will consist of an empty CD-R on which you can record your own music and an empty inlay in which you can write your own texts. The band are currently rehearsing their new material for the live performances. They plan to stare mindlessly into a void while the audience generates it’s own content in the ‘Long Evans environment’ on stage. Design for the tour however, will be impecable.

Both the music-journalists and the financial analysts I we have contacted about this press release have responded enthusiastically. It is expected that Long Evans will sell their new works to Google, AOL, Yahoo or any other of these User Generated Content/ 2.0 believers for several million dollars within a year.

For more information on the new Long Evans release, please contact their management at: longevans@cultblender.org.

I’ll admit it right up front; my computer and laptop run on Microsoft software. I do not own an Apple notebook, nor am I a hip Ubuntu user and I don’t even have a clue about what Unix is. however, I do believe I’m a slight notch higher up the os-foodchain for not having installed Vista and specifically asking for XP. And when I saw the below video on the Wired Gadget Lab blog… I could not have been happier. The thought to be linked to that awful piece of video. To quote mr. Brando: “The horror, the horror…”  Would someone slap the makers of that clip with a wet fish please?

Radiohead has been one of the most innovative bands for years. In the evolution of music since the release of OK Computer and since their latest album ‘In Rainbows‘ when it comes to ‘making a living for yourself as a rockband‘.

It’s a good thing I’ve taken up the habit of actually going through the thousands of spam e-mails I receive every wee, otherwise I might have completely missed the e-mail that had the subject line: ‘Remix nude for Radiohead’. (Tip: The word ‘nude’ doesn’t do well in most spamfilters.) What’s the e-mail about? Well, Mr. Yorke and friends give their fans the opportunity to buy the several stems of the track (A stem being the separate track of one particular instrument, like the drums keyboard, guitar, bass or vocals).

Buyers are invited to use these tracks to make their own remix of the song ‘Nude’ by Radiohead which is their next single in the UK. These remixes can be uploaded, Remixers can install ‘widgets’ on their personal sites (myspace, facebook etc) to atract extra traffic, their remixes will be judged, visitors can vote for their favorite remixes et cetera. Basically: it all sounds like a very clever and good idea. Radiohead makes a little extra money on their track and by providing a product that their fans will actually love (talk about marketing!) and they will also get a lot of extra PR because of this, which is also very useful when releasing a new single. And all this without losing any ’streetcredibility’. If there is one thing Radiohead is not, then it’s a bunch of corporate sellouts.

After their innovative ‘download our album and pay as you see fit’ and their In Rainbows video competition, they’ve added another new chapter to ‘music for you and me, not the f#@ing industry.’

You may click here for more information about the Nude remixes.
And should you for some inexplicable reason have a hard time locating it, the top 10 of most popular remixes can be found (naturally) here.

I believe that over 85% of all e-mail traffic consists of so called ‘unsolicited spam’ (what ’solicited spam’ would be… I have no idea). You would think that if an industry is as big as the spamming industry, where you reach so many consumers just waiting to spend their money on stuff they don’t need, that it would employ state of the art copy writers. Writers of spam e-mail can potentially reach an incredibly large audience. With just a little scientific research you could upgrade the response on your spamming from, I guess, o,0001% to 0.001%. This would make you a tremendous amounts of money! I know spam sucks and we really shouldn’t advocate it, but all the other advertising sucks too and that industry brought us beautiful artists and philosophers like Roy Lichtenstein, Matt Beaumont and Paul Arden. ‘Even evil will spawn good’ which sounds like an awful quote from a Star Wars film, but in fact; I just made that one up. I apologise.

For an art project I decided to jump into my spamfilter and read the spam I received (over a weekend, this amounts to over 1500 messages), or actually… I just read the subject lines. I was very eager to be seduced into actually opening an e-mail that I thought would make interesting reading. “Come on, show me those creative, witty, intriguing subject lines that lure me into worlds of pleasure, self fulfillment, comfort and profitability!” Instead, I found creative, lingual carnage.

“‘Do you want a -insert designer name- replica at -insert number-% discount?” How is that going to seduce me? Personally, I am not triggered. Or how about ‘university small business loans’ (you can replace university with government, insurance, national, small business or whatever) as a subject line. That’s not really going to make anyone think that’s an e-mail worth reading, is it? Not even an attempt to target on sex: ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating girlfriend‘ with could appeal to me, being a man - even though I don;t have a cheating girlfriend, as far as I know) became ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating partner’ thus making it even more impersonal. ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that girl in bed’ is turned into the hideous ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that person in bed’. Yep, that makes me curious… NOT!

Personally I think that that is adding insult to injury. Those b#*tards are clogging up my e-mail server and they’re not even taking it seriously. Come on guys; if efficient communication was that easy, would Coca Cola spend all those millions of dollars on making their 3D commercials? Just put a little effort into it, you lazy slackers.

A raw selection of poor copywriting material is being refined at the CultBlender site.

Hello reader, do you have internet access at your work? Then you are probably a thief. A couple of weeks ago (yes this is old news, but hey: I have a life too…) the very creative accountants at Ernst & Young calculated that the average employee spends five and a half hour per week on all sorts of personal stuff during work hours. I only know for sure that this information applies to the Netherlands, but we’re usually not much worse than the rest of world. And since you’re probably reading this posting at work yourself… who are you to judge, right?

E&Y has a VP for ‘ICT Leadership‘ (that guy must be AMAZING at excel sheets, the music on their website is pretty cool too) a mr. J. Verschuur and I say him on the news saying that ‘workers that do personal stuff while at work are thieves’. Working at a large accountancy firm I think it is safe to assume that he knows a thing or two about theft. So, what should we do know, corporate monkeys? I say; block all and every site that resembles anything like ‘gmail’, ‘myspace’, ‘wordpress’ (yes, that one too) and let’s all start staring at those excel sheets again, for eight hours a day.

Or, in case you have missed the irony, we can conclude that E&Y are idiots and mr. Verschuur a bit thick. I am not always this cool and talented blogging, visual artist. Three days a week I have a regular job (at an NGO, I’m still credible…) and my employer seems to be very happy. I do what is asked of me -and a little extra-, I don’t mind to be called during my ‘days off’ for a quick question, and I have become very handy at working with computers. Which is good, since at our offices we don’t have an IT person, and I can solve a lot of problems for my colleagues. Last weekend I was thinking about my NGO-job for almost two entire days because some nitwit at a conference we were supposed to be attending f-ed up and I wanted to solve things.

I would like to welcome E&Y to the twenty-first century. A lot of employees nowadays, especially the ones that have creative or communicative jobs (so perhaps not accountants) have a very thin line between work and their private life. Those couple of hours during the week I spend on last.fm, flickr.com or imdb.com I easily make up for during the days that I’m painting or blogging.

Oh, and in case my boss is reading this as well… it’s my day off today.
And in case you’re an E&Y employee; stop losing those laptops…

In 2002 the architect William McDonough and the chemist Micheal Braungart published a book entitled ‘Cradle to cradle’. Now, a little over five years later their ideas about environmental friendly production and consumption are taking over the world. Why is their philosophy so popular? Because yo get all the benefits the ‘old school’ environmentalists promise, but give you none of the scary doom-scenarios. Cradle to cradle is no about reducing our pollution of this planet, it’s a non-polluting philosophy. Actually; it’s not jut a philosophy at all. All their ideas work in practice too as a growing number of governments and multinational companies such as GM, Herman Miller, and Phillips are finding out right now.

The central ideas of the cradle to cradle concept:
- No company will produce waste on purpose; waste has no monetary value (a lot of times it actually costs money) so if you can reduce all the waste to zero; companies will benefit financially straight away. A VP of the Ford company said that it takes 50K pounds of materials to build a 3K pound car. They are no working on building a 3K car out of 3K of materials. That would definitely save a lot of money.
- Waste = food: all the by-products as well as the product itself will eventually have to be taken up into the ecosystem, where it should be non-polluting at least and even adding food to the ecosystem at best. In the latter case: the more waste you produce, the better it is for the environment. Think of cars that run on compressed oxygen: the more you drive around, the cleaner the air gets
- Traditional ‘recycling’ is actually down-cycling; discarded products get turn in to lesser quality products before it eventually gets burned anyway. At the design stage you should consider how you can use all the different parts of the product when the product itself has reached the end of its life-cycle. Reusing the soles of your sneakers as a gym-court floor is not recycling the stuff, that’s down cycling, taking of the sole and building a new shoe on top of it; that’s recycling.

Obviously, there’s only so much that McDonough and Braungart can do themselves. The main part of the work has to be done by the producers and governments… and by -erm- … ‘us’. Anyone got a thought on how we can create cradle to cradle art pieces?