Crumpled

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

The Feiry Furnaces...

...stole the heart right out from my chest. Bless their souls.

posted by Elex | 1:28 AM | 0 comments  

Monday, July 10, 2006

bad marketing or good marketing?

As some of you know, I frequent a British site called b3ta.com. There, I interact with many of the innovators of what the culture-coiners (who ever they are) call the "viral video."; those little videos on the internet that just take off, and everybody links to eachother. They are often obsurdist, or crass, or cute, and most often completely pointless.

b3ta was the first place I became aware of a commercial that I immediately forgot about. I don't have tv, the video of the commercial is poor quality, and I thought that the video was edited. I thought also that this commercial was British, because it doesn't seem to fit into the culture that I know as a Native United Statesian.

Here it is.


Then today I heard this:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5546086
(audio not yet available at time of publishing this post)

The commercial discussion opens up again. The commercial was real. Yes, no mention of what the product does.

Have you ever followed a link that ended with ytmnd.com ? ytmnd stands for "You're the Man Now Dog" which I guess is some obscure reference to a parody of Sean Connery, or maybe Sean Connery himself. Who knows. Anyway, the whole basis of the site is you upload a graphic, upload a sound clip, and write a tiny bit of text. These elements come together in the following way: the image is tiled as a page background, the soundclip is looped endlessly, and the text is displayed in the center. there is never a really good reason to follow a link that ends with ytmnd.com. And yet there's a commercial that behaves the same way, on tv, apperantly all the time. This prompted one of ytmnd's visitors to make the following: ytmndontv.ytmnd.com

There are elements of culture that are like a fever enduced waking nightmare. This is one of them. go to that page on ytmnd and bask in it for like 30 seconds if you can. Just remember that I told you that there isn't a good reason to do it.

posted by Elex | 11:08 AM | 0 comments