cmyplay

What is advertising?

Is it the promotion of a viewpoint through the construction and dissemination of a message in exchange for money? Is the end goal of a professional advertiser to aid their clients to make money by selling a product, an idea, an experience to the consumer?

With that in mind I sincerely ask is this man the greatest advertiser?

Is a message created by a culture inseparable from the ruling ideology of that culture? Whether the stance of the message supports or opposes this ideology, does the message not lose meaning when it is removed from it’s context? Considering that Advertisers accept money for crafting messages, does this not make one complicit with their client’s activities?

Isn’t there system set in place to inform the individual when these activities wander into the grey moral area? I believe that this system is called Ethics. Ethics are sets of principles that inform behaviour. Principles that form the foundation for a belief system. When a discipline starts pushing the boundaries of what is possible, naturally ethical principles are called into question:

This may be true for matters of science, but what excuse is there for Advertising? While beliefs are considered to be sacred and above scrutiny, don’t the bedrock principles that inform these beliefs seem to be more malleable and adjustable to circumstances? While people in the media industries grapple with how to create or change public perceptions, why is there not more stringent accounting for why such perceptions are created or changed? The general consensus on diamonds, for instance, is that they are so valuable because they are rare:

In the case of diamonds, the most destruction happens in their mining. Is the long term destruction caused by the design profession not just as destructive and long-lasting? How can products destined for the landfill be force-fed to consumers by slick marketing that aims to transform “wants” into “needs”?

Clearly there are individuals in the industry who realize what is happening. People who disagree with the way that things are being done. If there was no merit to this viewpoint then why is there a popular movement creating images like these?

Is the highest achievement possible in Advertising a successful campaign? And what defines a successful campaign anyway? Is it the effect that a campaign has on increasing demand? Is it a campaign that affects the behavior of consumers that exist outside of the initial target market? Is this not then the best possible result of any campaign?

These questions become all the more difficult to answer when the economy looks like ours does. Or does it make it easier to chase the money regardless of the consequences? Maybe we can sleep easier knowing that we aren’t the only ones doing this. Maybe we’ll get relief from future historians who will believe that we thought that we could fix anything with enough money. Or maybe we’ll get relief from the neatly bottled products that we promote.

This is a proof-of-concept I completed to present the style of illustration that I would like to use for the various children’s sections at a book retailer. I’m very excited by the prospect of working on more illustrations, and while the start to this project was a little rough it promises to be rather rewarding.

Let’s start the year off with an infographic, shall we? While busy searching for the best price for a MacBook, I became curious about the pricing for Apple hardware in other parts of the world. I navigated to all of Apple’s official sites and this is what came of it.

This infographic is a representation of the comparative price for the entry-level 13˝ MacBook Pro 2.26GHz notebook. I wish I could include information for all 31 countries that I researched. I believe that stripping down the data set to a handful of countries makes the information more digestible. [I don't think that I need to point it out but this isn't a strictly rational graph since it wasn't conceived to be mathematically correct]

I was conviced that South African prices were the highest in the world, owing to the lack of an official Apple presence in the country. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Brazil’s prices were between US$300.00 and US$1,200.00 higher than here. This in a country with official Apple representation no less. [EDIT: In Apple's defence, I must say that from all of the feedback that the numerous postings of this image has received, this price appears to be the result of a high import duty applied to high-involvement purchases.]

Interestingly though, prices for certain MacBook Pro models are cheaper in Hong Kong than they are in the US. This could however be on account of fluctuation of the exchange rate. [EDIT: In fact, because of the tax implications relevant to the different nations, .hk prices are most likely to be cheaper than .us prices. The graphic has been updated to reflect feedback and to correct a major oversight on my part. Thank you for all of the attention, which for the most part has been positive. And to the special little coward , from the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, thank you for your piqued insight.]

I’ve had little previous experience with database software. And after reading about an iPhone application that catalogues things that one may lend out to a friend, I thought it high time to start taking stock of my current literary situation. One of the more useful features of the application was that it can automatically send an sms’s to a friend, notifying them of the impending deadline for the return of the borrowed item.

After looking around a bit on Versiontracker, I came across an application for the Mac called Bookpedia. I downloaded the installer and tested out the app. Immediately after launching Bookpedia, I was struck by the familiarity of the interface. It looks like a version of iTunes for printed material, right down to the bar across the bottom of the application window showing the amount of books in the Library, how many of them are either on your wishlist or are currently being lent out, and the total number of pages in the Library. There is even a coverflow view mode.

Adding books to a library is as close to seamless as one can hope: select the Add a New Book option, enter the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for a particular book and the program automatically searches various book databases (from Amazon to the University of Sydney) to assemble not only the title, author and publication details, but it conveniently downloads the book cover as well. A new Library can be set up in much the same way as new Playlists, and you can rate the different titles (1-5 stars). Fortunately being a Mac based app, Bookpedia integrates ISBN scanning features by making use of the iSight camera built in to most current Macintosh computers.

I fired up the iSight feature on my iMac, but I had some serious trouble actually scanning anything. I tested another application that provides a barcode scanning feature, and it also had trouble on the iMac. I decided to try the feature on a MacBook, and it worked straight off – indicating either a problem with my iMac’s iSight or difficulty the feature has with iMac iSights in general. On the preview screen, an array of horizontal red lines provides you with a guideline of where the barcode should be held. The lines turn green and a chime indicates that the barcode was successfully scanned. While this feature is not entirely perfect, it is a very welcome one nonetheless.

Throughout the course of my cataloguing, I found that the covers for a number of my titles were different from that provided by the book databases. Editing an entry is as easy as double-clicking the library listing for the title, and in my case correcting the cover art entailed scanning the book cover (I couldn’t find my particular one on the internet), and dragging it into the Cover Art window.

Because of the time I’ve spent working at a bookshop, I’ve become rather reverent of my own books. So in the event that I actually end up lending a book out, I will most certainly be making use of the Borrowed tracking features. As with the iPhone app mentioned at the beginning of this post, there is a convenient emailing facility that allows you to send a friendly reminder of the outstanding item, come deadline.

Once your cataloguing is complete, the information can be exported in a number of ways. It can be archived, backed-up, shared on MobileMe, uploaded to a website or even added to an iPod as a collection of notes.

The Statistics feature piqued my interest, considering my affinity for infographics. This feature arranges the catalogue into a number of different data sets represented by bar graphs. My initial reaction was “Who is Alan Martin and why do I have six of his books?” It didn’t take long to find out that it was the copies – and duplicates  - of Tank Girl that he wrote with Jamie Hewlett. This brings me to the only gripe I have with Statistics, the display is only as good as the data it represents: while Martin is rightly credited as the writer of the work, I feel that Hewlett holds more weight as the titles’ author; different databases categorise their items in slightly varied ways (of the publishers in the top 10 in my collection, Penguin appears five times). This all reminds me of a lecture by Hans Rosling about the problems concerning data.

The great thing about Bookpedia is that Bruji have developed applications that mirror these useful features for not only CD’s and DVD’s, but for Games as well. And once all of those collections have been catalogued, keeping track of your Borrowed items and your various Wishlists becomes even more convenient with the advent of Pocketpedia for the iPhone/iPod Touch.