If your once glittering suburban mall seems darker, colder, escalator-challenged, and keeping shorter hours, it’s because it is. A piece in the Chicago Trib outlines the full range of measures that mall proprietors are taking to keep costs down. By the way, while researching the book I discovered a ghoulish but fascinating web site: deadmalls.com.
Monthly Archive for February, 2009
Gail Collins’ Times column today tries to whip up some populist outrage over ubiquitous product placements that have all but consumed television programming. A tall order, beating back the scourge: (1) media companies need every last nickel they can shake out of the pockets of advertisers; (2) I’m not sure there’s much outrage left in our tanks given the need to keep hosing greedy bankers and lax regulators; and (3) it’s a little late in the game. Over the past couple decades, advertising masquerading as “entertainment” mushroomed faster even than home prices, from glaringly obvious cases — those big red Coke cups on the set of “American Idol” — to Cisco buying a single line of dialogue on an episode of “CSI” a couple of years ago. There’s no turning back now.
For a piece I just wrote on upmarket haggling, visit The Daily Beast.
Howard Zieff, one of the bright lights in the so-called Creative Revolution on Madison Avenue, died the other day. The golden period occurred in the Sixties and Seventies when a new breed of ad men brought irreverence, wit, and intelligence to advertising, a movement that would fizzle when leading-edge agencies were merged into giant global holding companies in the 1980s. The result: the generally predictable and puerile advertising we have today. Zieff produced many now classic campaigns, including “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye.â€
One of Zieff’s best known commercials, which instantly gave rise to a national catch phrase:
I keep looking for signs of an upswing in freeganism, the ideology by which we employ “alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed,” according to one of the movement’s leading web sites. Just short of all-out freeganism is adherence to a life of “voluntary simplicity,” which more or less was the foundation for argments advanced a few years ago in Julet Schor’s bestseller The Overspent American. The web is now brimming with sites that point the way to specific strategies and tips on how to lead a fulfilling if frugal life in America, which for some has been oxymoronic until recent events. If you’re looking for ways to pinch pennies, save on energy, and otherwise frugalize, click here for a treasury of helpful hints.
Last week’s episode of HBO’s irresistible “Flight of the Conchords” (must-see TV in our home) was directed by Michel Gondry, whose hyperkinetic movies (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and music videos have won an international cult following. Gondry also boasts a portfolio of distinctive, visually compelling commercials produced for advertisers ranging from Air France to Smirnoff. Among the best known, a series of spots Gondry produced for Levi’s, the most notorious being the one below, directed by Gondry in 1994:
“I meet people sometimes and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know J. Crew, I have a roll-neck sweater. And I’m like ‘Oh, no, no, that’s not the J. Crew I’m talking about!’†– Jenna Lyons, creative director at J. Crew, quoted in the New York Observer.
“Buying is not a creative occupation; nor is caring for superfluous possessions productive effort.” — Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The American Family in a World at War.
I’m rooting for Frank Langella and “Frost/Nixon” at the Oscars but fashion winds seem to be blowing in another direction. Is “Slumdog Millionaire” doing for the traditional sari what “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” did for the little black dress?
AÂ survey just released by one of the thousands of firms that collect consumer data (in this case, America’s Research Group) confirms that not all stores are suffering from declines in customer traffic. Big box discounters and the membership warehouse clubs are actually enjoying a higher rate of traffic than a year ago. Mall apparel-store traffic, however, is down by single digits, while major department stores and jewelry stores are, well, you don’t want to know.
