[by Todd] Seriously, there are some folks at Louis Vuitton that need to be unemployed.

Last fall Danish artist Nadia Plesner started selling the t-shirt shown here on her site to raise money for victims of genocide in Darfur. She calls it a Simple Living t-shirt. And offers this explanation:

My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the medias constant cover of completely meaningless things. My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designer bags and small ugly dogs apparently is enough to get you on a magazine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention.

Perhaps not the most pointed of commentaries, but the shirt makes a nice statement about pop culture and desperation of Darfur's victims. The shirt existed in relative obscurity for five months, that is until the folks at Louis Vuitton got stupid.

In February, the Intellectual Property Director decided this was the perfect time to flex some muscle and throw down a cease and desist letter, complete with patronizing comments. (Here's a PDF of the letter.)

“Although we applaud your efforts to raise awareness and funds to help Darfur, a most worthy cause, we cannot help noticing that the design of the Simple Living Products includes the reproduction of a bag infringing on Louis Vuitton’s Intellectual Property Rights, in particular the Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore Trademark to which it is confusingly similar. We are surprised of such a promotion of a counterfeit bag.”

“As an artist yourself, we hope that you regognize the need to respect other artists’ rights and Louis Vuitton’s Intellectual Property Rights which include the Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore trademark.”

What pray tell could have possibly led anyone, with any modicum of authority, to think this was a good idea? How did they think for one moment that sending a threat would play out well for them? To her credit, the artist wrote back and tried to give them a graceful way out, pointing out that the bag was a generic reference to all such accessories. (Here's her response.)

"However, I must inform You, that the bag in my drawing is inspired by - and refers to - designers bags in general – not a Louis Vuitton bag. If you take a closer look, you will also notice, that the pattern in my drawing is not the pattern which is used in the design of a Loius Vuitton bag. The name Louis Vuitton is in no way mentioned or referred to, neither in my drawing, nor in the campaign as such.”

Correction, the company's name wasn't mentioned, until now. To add insult to stupidity the designer brand, which has invested millions to cultivate its image, is pissing it away by now filing suit against the artist. Go ahead and set a Google News filter on this one, and watch for it on the network morning shows.

And of course the letters and lawsuit have helped the artist's cause. I asked her by email if sales were up. I got a response in 20 minutes.

Yes, all the writing about the story has definitely helped the sales! My lawyer has advised me not to give any numbers just yet, but as soon as I can, I will let you know.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised to see the design licensed and on sale in a civic-minded shop near you soon. Which means others will follow suit, and soon Louis Vuitton will need a pad of C&D letters to keep up with demand.

Now that's brand stewardship.

[by Todd] Time for some exercise. Pick a client's issue you're trying to crack. Got it? Now, stand up, walk around whatever passes for an office where you work and talk to four people about it. Come on back when you're done, I'll wait.

Back already? Of the four people you talked to how many have professional experience outside the advertising or marketing industry? If your answer is two or more then I'll bet you work for an interactive agency.

Less than that, my money says you work for a brand agency. And further more, I'll hazard a guess your company is scared witless about the future.

Advertising has become an incestuous industry that crafts young talent in the image of old hands and mines for talent in the competitor's break room. The result is that agencies lack the diversity of experiences to tackle the challenges they face today.

Yet clients keep throwing challenges on the table and ask advertising agencies to think differently about the solutions. Of course they come back with subtle variations of the tried and true, that's what the collective braintrust knows. Over at Forrester, Mary Beth Kemp (my new favorite source of thought starters) calls it The Conflict of Interest of Change.

Hence the conflict of interest. The challenge to agencies is assuring current operations while building the future. Or, perhaps in some cases, just getting the most out of current operations.

This isn't a conflict of interest, it's a systematic inbred lack of situational awareness. The people who need to lead the change have no point of reference, no varied experiences, no diversity of background.

Just over a decade ago I was cranking out stories about cops, crime and national disasters to hit three deadlines daily for The Dallas Morning News. The guy sitting next to me wore a flight suit in the Marine Corps before considering the exciting world of account service. Our ECD used to work in television production. And the rest of the team is just as random. (The eastern european heavy metal singer probably sets the grading curve.)

So what? When we sit down to ponder a business challenge there is a massive range of experiences at the table. Each of us comes at problem from not just a different approach, but an entirely different direction. And the resulting discussion isn't just splitting hairs.

To be fair, interactive agencies have an unfair advantage. We're new.

All of us came from some other industry, even those who jumped over from advertising agencies. We came here by reinventing ourselves. There was no defined career path that said your next step is to leave behind what you know and jump into a new industry.

But I worry our industry is working hard to give up that huge advantage. Think about the slots you have open today. If someone applied for a mid- or senior-level position and didn't have any interactive experience would you even give them an interview? If not you're killing us.

The interactive business has grown explosively because we made it up as we went, trying stuff because no one knew better. What we DID know was that there HAD to be a better way to do business. If we don't fight like hell to keep that edge then a few decades from now an upstart industry will bemoan our inability to recognize the need for change.

[by Todd] Can someone tell me, in 30 minutes or less, why I should care at all about Twitter? Seriously, I'd love to figure this out. According to Leigh companies need to have their ear to Twitter in order to get the first glimpse of brand nightmares headed their way.

But, try as I might, I fail to see Twitter as anything more than a curiosity among a precious few nerds.

Hang on. Let me back up my rant and try this again.

Leigh is right, every company on the face of the planet should have a plan for responding to consumer outcry. And no plan should be complete without incorporating listening to and responding in the UGC world. But deciding just when and how to respond is the truly tricky part.

Way back in News 105 (a.k.a learning how to write a news story) we were told that key elements of newsworthiness were timeliness, proximity and impact. So that two-car crash that tied up rush hour traffic for you is a big story at home, but not likely to matter much to people a couple hundred miles away.

Of course all this was long before anyone created a blog, or "twittered" (damn, that just sounds wrong). Suddenly geography isn't the easy calculation it once was. And timeliness has been sliced down to nano seconds compared to what it once was. But impact, that remains the gold standard. Which brings me back to my rant.

Companies need to keep a keen focus on asking "Who cares?" whenever an issue pops up on the radar. If person X, blogging on a site with five links raises an issue, then I care a lot less than if it is on a site frequently cited on 100s of other sites.

Double ditto with Twitter. Yes, I want to know what's being said. But I can't imagine ever pulling a play book off the shelf and initiating a disaster response program based on a Twitter. All too often it's just a handful of like-minded technophiles whispering among themselves.

The critical skill required is an ability to understand what makes news. Shame on any public relations agency or brand agency that isn't studying daily how stories move between the user generated world and mainstream media. But never let three executives talking among themselves about something they found on Twitter trigger a full-scale response.

So I would add the following to Leigh's game plan. Call on professionals. Either keep a public relations firm on retainer, or have one in your Rolodex. Then, when you hear a whisper on Twitter, or see your brand on Technorati, call on a pro and ask them to help evaluate the risk.

After all, there's nothing worse than a company taking a spark of unrest and pouring fuel on it to create a full-blown conflagration.

[by Todd] Parents with video cameras are my mortal enemy. And if you work for an advertising agency they should be yours too.

Seriously.

They're making all of us look bad.

Here's the deal. Yesterday my girls were running around repeating, in their best fake British accent, "Charlie bit my finger, again" and laughing hysterically. Obviously this was a lame line from some Nickelodeon show that will be invading my world for the next couple weeks, I figured. Or not.

Chloe explained to me with a very disappointed tone that the saying was from "the funniest video ever."
And indeed, she may be right. Search the phrase on Google and more than two dozen pages of links pop up, all inspired by this YouTube video.

Missing the gut-busting value of the video? Yeah, me too. But it's been viewed 17.4 million times, copied and shown elsewhere tens of thousands more and rated by more than 39,000 viewers. Then there are the spoofs, that dreaded but inevitable measure of viral success.

All of this because some kid gets his finger bitten repeatedly by his infant brother.

What am I missing? There are tens of millions of dollars being spent by agencies and advertisers trying to figure out how to move messages in the viral channel. Books are filling the bookshelves, and newsletters cluttering inboxes, all purporting to expose the magic formula.

And yet mom and dad kick our collective butts.

Yea, yea. I know we should be heartened by magic of how the Internet gives all of us a shot at the magic, our 15MB of fame.

That would be heart warming approach. But this is advertising and people should only feel good when we pay big bucks to make a commercial then interrupt their viewing pleasure. Right?

Hmm, I wonder if that kid is available for cameos.

[by Todd]I may be a bit late to this one, but kudos to Miranda July for the innovative marketing of her book. The site, Noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com, is a testament to the power of a great idea, even if there isn't design to back it up.

That's right, Miranda is left high and dry with no Flash, no podcast, no RSS, nada. It's just her, a Marks-A-Lot and the appliances in her kitchen. Luckily for Miranda, and us, she has a great mind.

How many times have you seen multimedia behemoths that are all sizzle and no steak? You wish someone was in the room when they were being developed to ask, "So what?"

For her effort Miranda has earned praise across the Net, with more than 17,000 links to her site and enough book sales to push her to #289 on Amazon's best sellers list.

Thank you Darryl for highlighting the effort, but I have to say the WestWayne site is more a reflection of an agency that has just quit trying to master interactive than a stroke of genius.