My DJ Fantasy: Sexy Flash App

Ralph Lagnado, Senior Planner of International Digital Media at Woo Agency posted his company’s latest project for client Samsung on the Music Industry Forum on Linkeding.com. Its called My DJ Fantasy and it involves a limo, drinking, and VIP treatment, for the user. This super slick marketing campaign is to help launch Samungs new Q1, which is a phone/pda/gps/portable MP3 dj mixing handheld device. It’s large for a handheld, not something you can easily slip into your tight hipster jeans or Louis Vuitton clutch. However you could use it to chop lettuce for burritos after a night at the club mixing for the inevitable after party crowd. Anyway, this is the slickest, quickest flash app (the DJ mixing part if you follow it to the end) I’ve ever seen. The whole ‘choose your own adventure’ is a nice touch but cheesy.

The product itself is very intriguing, being a musician it has some fascinating possibilities, though I’m not sure it’d be any better than an iBook with Logic and Abelton Live. It’s a great example of engagement and for those in the demographic that this touches they’ll probably spend some serious time with it and possibly have repeat visits. Also, Cut Chemist is the celebrity DJ involved, so any fans of Jurassic Five and quality hip-hop will be stoked.

Really liked it with a few exceptions; there should be an option to skip the ‘choose your own adventure’ and go straight to mixing and it would be helpful to see a video of the product demoed in real time, if it was there I missed it because I’d already spent too much time playing around. I wasn’t clear what the product was right off the bat but it was really fun. Best product integrated flash app i’ve ever seen. Kudos to their development team. Now if they could integrate the fantasy into a sharable, social platform, they’d really get some life out of it.

This was a huge leap for a large company like Motorola to launch their product and I’m happy to see they put this kind of trust in web technology. Maybe iteration 2 will actually let users of the Q1 enter a mixing contest that Cut Chemist oversees and the Fantasy becomes reality.  Yo, throw me a new Sliver if you use that idea Motorola, I’ve dropped mine too many times! 

www.mydjfantasy.com

Wading through the Static

You too can look ten years younger – in 60 minutes no less! Tha’s righ’, REDUCE wrinkles, REDUCE crow’s feet, REDUCE laugh lines! Your gun turret mounted Toyota Yaris can get something like 40 miles per gallon in the city AND with its 50 caliber machine gun, trips to the drive thru have never been FASTER…As if all the static on the net and snow of television weren’t enough…Condoleezza warns against Armenia Bill, a bill that declares the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians to be genocide…Turkey, of course disputes the claim [like 1.5 million Armenians just dropped dead from the ‘chaos and confusion’ of the collapsing Ottoman Empire during WWI] and the guys in System of A Down must be tugging furiously at their elaborate goatees and cursing Rice for not being more granular. What could you expect from a country named after a bird that drowns in the rain from looking up during a storm?

Just another example of imperialism and the power of the military industrial complex sweeping unsightly ‘dust’ under the atrocity carpet, where ghosts of Darfur await release, 800,000 dead Iraqi civilians from the illegal invasion await justice and Americans prep for the x-mas buying season. This little capitalist piggy laments; It’ll be a tight year dear…might not be able to get Jimmy that new X-Box 360…poor little Sally won’t be getting that iPod Touch…we’ve got this foreclosure that is inevitable and it looks like the guys down in the factory are going to walk off the job again cause all of our parts that were made in China have been recalled…it’s a rough existence to be middle class and brown/black/yellow/mostly white Dear, yes – rough indeed. The new Radiohead will be in my inbox this morning…tha’s nice honey, burn a couple copies for the carpool group….

Consumption Junction: The Cultural Significance of Britney’s Ass or can I get a Ringle?t

I caught this post on Tech Crunch and in light of the hilarity of the 2007 VMA’s recently I thought it’d be appropriate to expound my opinion on a couple of things. I’ll address the Arousal Industry’s latest blundervestment: making ringtones available on CD and selling them as ‘Ringle’s.’ If you haven’t followed the rapidly declining sales of the dinosaur-wearing-gucci-industry into the rabbit hole of failure you’ll know that these gentle giants and habitual employment curtailers are scrambling for the next best thing to supplement their bottom line. For that they have thought long and hard while on the toilet, squeezing out a seared ahi and quail egg champagne shit as the collective stone was passed from urethra, chinking on the porcelain, inspiring the latest money maker – The Ringle.

 

To the uninitiated or layperson, basically the ‘Ringle’ will, “contain three songs: one popular track, a remix, an older track from the same artist and a ringtone.” The distro method will be a “CD with a slip-sleeve cover.” If you’re smashing your balls with a meat tenderizer right now in light of that news, well sir, you’ve been paying attention to the comings and goings of the music industry. If not, don’t despair. This can still be considered one of those ‘what the fuck’ moments. The first of those will be a single from recently re-celebritized Britney Spears, her song; “Gimme More” is already testing really well in the major markets. Sony and Universal are going to pump titles into the stream this fall and they’ll be available at your favorite wallet raping store. The propensity for continued revenue loss in the face of continued bad decision making isn’t as appalling as the fact they’re going to sell singles by CD. CD???  Or is Britney’s gunt more appealing packaged as a pitch corrected ringtone. I dunno.

 

Okay.

So now that your brain has come to a nice simmer and your eyes are bleeding a bit, drool slowly congealing somewhere on your shirt or blouse, hands limply at your sides, legs prostrate beneath you, a jolt of pop narcotic will bring you back. A shot to the jugular with a syringe full of excitement – a glass pipe filled with potent crystallized entertainment – a tincture of attention drawing, edge of your seat mayhem filled with blinking lights, celebrity and pageantry. For the kingdom of your brain we present the 2007 VMA’s. A nightmare ride into The Palms casino/hotel in Las Vegas for an amalgam of hyper stylized vampiric pop-lust orgy of coordinated chaos – presented by Chevrolet. That’s right. America’s car company. The company that brought you the Tahoe, and the tagline “An American Revolution.” AND John-fucking-Mellancamp leaning his jackboot on the fender of a truck while a montage of ‘life style images’ flood the screen. Look! Some sepia toned portraiture of African Americans that look doggedly low income smiling bravely for the high paid photographer, middle-American white folks ‘eating’ hot dogs, and team sports! Yes. Chevy has now taken it upon themselves to sell us cars by insinuating that this whole “save the world thing” is a punch line for some smog breathing fat cats with pockets full of cash.

 

Those genius marketers at MTV and Chevy teamed up for what they’re marketspeak calling a, “…Superserve Key 12-34 demographic with creative integration and multiplatform innovation campaign.” Essentially, they’ll use the power of their marketing muscle and advertising budget to sponsor something that MTV knows is well worth every penny for hooking new consumers. So they show a series of seemingly Eco-friendly spots. The spots are kinduh irreverent, edgy; MTV’s demo will totally jibe with this posish. (WOW 30MPG on highway! I can hear dolphins singing as baby seals swim in crystal clear water and unicorns shit rainbows).

 

This is part of MTV and Chevy’s “Break the Addiction” campaign, which sadly promotes the benefits of Flex Fuel or E85 and touts their continued development Hydrogen Fuel Cell technology. Want to know about E85? Click here < http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200701/decoder.asp>

 

MTV has always been the bane of my entertainment consumption. They’ve had some good shows and of course they used to play those dinosaurs of the entertainment dietary pyramid, THE MUSIC VIDEO but if the fact they’ve been dictating youth cultures taste in music doesn’t make you vomit your righteous indignation instantly, these commercials will. One example in particular is a scene of a young woman with dyed hair, fairy-winged, and glossy eyed. Hers is a character meant to exemplify some green friendly tree hugging marijuana addict blowing a tune into some plastic bottles strung together while a voice mockingly says something like “You can still save the environment without having to drive an ugly car you little sheep.”

 

And this brings me to Britney Spears ass. It has always been a shining example of slutty suburban chicks everywhere. Her ass is insignificant. Her music represents an industry’s reliance on tone corrected voices. It is robotic. She is ubiquitous. You could interchange her with Rhianna and only by ear you’d never know the difference. The reason she and Rhianna lip synced their shitty songs was because in the fantasy world MTV has made for viewers and the public, they’ve instituted a zero tolerance policy on imperfection. This is smoke and mirrors. It’s no wonder Viacom’s ad agency shares similar tactics as the US government’s agency that handles all of their “Be Army Strong” campaigns, or Chevy’s highly insidious and clever “Break the Addiction” campaign.

 

Britney Spears showed us all that you can sound like robot, dance like a star in a giant production but if you gain just five pounds you can lose all credibility. She also showed the world our addiction to perfection through her socially imposed imperfections. Soon we’ll see teen stars, weighing 90 lbs., chain smoking Marlboro Reds, eating a leaf of ice burg lettuce a day, while a Ringle from Mastodon plays “Holiday in Cambodia” on my sweet new iPhone.on. Chevy and British Petroleum will be champions of the Green movement and George Bush will go down in history as one of the most thoughtful presidents in history.

 

This isn’t science fiction.

 

This isn’t the future.

 

This is the perpetual “What the Fuck?”