Weekly Reading 11/22
Nipples, Nudity and a Small Striptease: American Apparel’s New Ad Campaign
“We’re mainstream in the sense that Obama is mainstream — we are connecting lots of small groups together into a big audience. We also advertise very heavily on sites like MySpace and Facebook. We did a big campaign on the Sartorial,” says Holiday.
“To understand Facebook’s dramatic growth—and the pressure Zuckerberg is now under to make something of it—it’s useful to start with the site’s fundamental insight: Social networking is most effective when it mirrors the real world.”
Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million
“Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.”
“The fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored. Of course that means the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge. A few companies realize that. They embed mentoring and coaching in the culture, develop employees’ careers through carefully chosen growth assignments, and increasingly put people through high-fidelity simulations, among other steps.”
“At google everyone acts as one, at yahoo it seems everyone acts for themselves. I have always followed a google like model since the very start. Name me a single hugely successful internet company that is driven and built by user suggestions. I can’t think of a single one, but I can think of a lot of sites/companies that have been created based on ones persons vision/execution.”
Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy
“For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context—it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.”
“The S&P 500 closed at a 68-month low today. Given that the CPI report came out today, here’s an interesting stat. Adjusted for inflation, the S&P 500 has advanced just 23.9% in 40 years. Annualized, that’s 0.54%. This means that almost the entire gain came from dividends. I should add that this is a bit of playing with numbers since 40 years ago was a cyclical high, and I hope we’re near a cyclical low. Inflation over the last 40 years has increased by 513.5%. The S&P 500 closed today at 806.58. On November 19, 1968, the S&P 500 closed at 106.14. So the index has grown by 660%.”
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