Winning elections in America is a business. You need strategy, consultants, huge budgets, catchy ads, dancing girls, pompoms, ticker tape, more ads, debates, more huge budgets and brand postioning.

If people like what you’re selling – you win the contract for a few years.

In South Africa – sticks and stones win elections, in the US it’s psychology that works.

BTW – Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital is the majority shareholder of the Edcon Group.

Coca Cola hosted a ‘Lucky Strike’ style secret gig last Friday as part of their involvement with the Olympics. Featuring producer Mark Ronson and singer Katy B – it’s interesting to see how advertising is going niche rather than the traditional mass reach route.

Controlled by a Nike shoe that’s been wired up with a bunch of pressure sensors and plugged into an Arduino board – this building mapping is an effective  interactive promotion for what the shoe does.

You’ve gotta love these shoes that can literally double over on themselves. It’s an impressive feature, but seriously how often is this needed when your foot is actually in the shoe? Podiatrists would be making a killing if everybody was subjecting their feet to the capabilities of what this shoe can do.

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Previously: Cherryflava conference projection mapping – Cherryflava

We had a cat once that used to love the idea of burying her claws into the cushions of the couch and then joyfully bounding after the goose down that flew all over the place as a result. Not sure how her next owners enjoyed that trick, but it was slightly annoying to us.

McDonald’s seem to have tapped into the same strange phenomenon with kids. Fuelled by abnormally high levels of sugar and processed trans-fatty acids – that same thing seems to happen to the children when placed in a home-like environment.

Don’t have the party at your place? Rather don’t have the kids in the first place!

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Social media monitoring company NetBase put 365 days worth of its own data about online conversations up against a recent Harris poll that asked, “What is the one thing you want right now?”

The results show that people are generally emotional sharers when it comes to social media, but they are much more logical when asked a direct question. For instance, 80% of the “I want _____” updates were about food, whereas 50% of the survey responses were related to personal finance (money, financial security, a new car). via

The conclusions are fairly pointless however. All it really indicates is that when you ask loads of people what they want – you realise that everyone is just a 6 year-old trapped in the body of a grown up.

Music + snowboarding. That’s all.

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First Barack Obama came out in support of gay marriage and now Time magazine has a graphic image of a woman breastfeeding her child on its cover. More here.

What the hell is going on? With all of this – we just might not notice that Jamie Dimon and his JP Morgan buddies have just been bust for doing very bad things with other people’s money…again.

Of course nothing will happen to Mr Dimon and the world will carry on trying to earn an honest living in spite of the massive corporate theft on Wall Street, while the masses squabble over crumbs. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

What exactly is a hipster? The term seems to be thrown around a lot recently, but is there a clear definition of what this creature is?

When Lorena arrived to New York City from France last August, she’d never heard of hipsters. And when she asked, she got vague, often contradictory responses: Hipsterism is a lifestyle. No, it’s an attitude. No, it’s a pseudo-attitude. Hipsters are penniless creative types. No, they’re just rich kids pretending to be. Hipsters are environmentally conscious. No, they pose as tree-huggers but shop at Wal-Mart.

She was confused.

This video attempts to de-code the hipster for the clueless foreigner, like Lorena. In this piece, she invites viewers along for the journey as she hunts for the meaning of the term “hipster.” This quirky piece takes viewers around the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they are guided by an “accidental hipster” blogger. It also incorporates the voices of the Journalism School’s own Prof. David Hajdu, as he delves into the term’s jazzy origins.

According to Wikipedia…

Hipster (also referred to as scenesters) is a term frequently used to refer to a subculture of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers.

Usage of the term reappeared in the 1990s and persists to the present. The subculture is associated with independent music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, and alternative lifestyles. Interests in media would include independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media.
Hipster culture has been described as a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior. Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York argues that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” elements of all of the “fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge,” and draws on the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity,” and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.”

Others, like Arsel and Thompson, argue that hipster signifies a cultural mythology, a crystallization of a mass-mediated stereotype generated to understand, categorize, and marketize indie consumer culture, rather than an objectified group of people.

Now you kinda know.

Food – it seems- has become the cause of a global epidemic that we all seem to be casually ignoring. The marketing of junk to kids, the rewarding of junk as a treat and or ignorance as to how this crap affects us is alarming. But the debates surrounding the issues are complex. We don’t have enough of an understanding of them to offer an educated alternative in this forum, but what we do feel however is that money and greed seems to be put before people in countries around the world struggling with this ‘problem’.

The blame seems to be squarely put at the door of the individual [as is the case in this HBO documentary called 'The weight of a nation'], but what connection is being made with the lies that food marketers are selling people. Sugar-laden breakfast cereals supposedly sold as ‘low-fat’, corn starch-rich rubbish marketed as a ‘healthy’ alternative, should be outlawed.

Products packed for ‘convenience’ are killing people without them even realising that these are the things causing their illness. People are ignorant, but ‘trusted’ brands are not exactly helping matters. Do yourself a favour – next time you’re in the supermarket queue, look around at what people have in their baskets. It’s a bad habit of ours, but one we have difficulty resisting.

Our personal observation – if it comes in a package with bright colours, cartoon characters or ‘loud’ typefaces – it’s most likely crap.

Keep in mind however – that a lot of people are making a lot of money ‘solving’ the obesity trend at the same time. If you talk it up enough – you’ll convince a generation that they need to do something about it to solve the problem.

Additional resources recommended by Treehugger:

• A critical thinkers guide to the HBO series
• Deconstructing HBO’s Weight of the Nation
• Linda Bacon’s book, Health at Every Size
• Health at Every Size Community

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Internationally renown street artist DALeast has left a few classic pieces around Cape Town recently. This one, of a herd of buck running through Woodstock, is incredible. The sense of movement that the work gets across is astounding. You can find it in William Street, Woodstock. 

There’s more up in Vredehoek too.

More pics here and here and here

Here he is, in action with Cape Town’s own Faith47, in NYC.

via Wezzo