The Strategy Review

Introducing Miss Amelia Bayler - Cultural Commentator and Blogger (and daughter)

Fast Food: Design Classic

 I don’t only drink Coca-Cola because of how it tastes, I drink it because of the way it looks and what it says about me.  It says, ‘I am a consumer of a timeless and classic brand.’ In his article ‘Living in The Material World: Marketing And Meaning’ (Market Leader Magazine June 2012) Grant McCracken pointed out that even sub-cultures or anti-pop cultures are defined by big brands.  Instagram (as hip as lomography but for lazys) is full of filtered photos of Black Milk, San Pellegrino and Nike Blazer’s.  Do brands define us?

First, the paparazzi take unflattering photos of celebrities and then the writers come up with the shocking stories.  What we don’t seem to focus on is the FACT in the photo itself.  An unedited photo is fact.  The photos of celebrities in trashy weeklies are more real than the fictional airbrushed photos in high fashion magazines.  Airbrushing should be accepted as an art form.  We should appreciate the effort that has been put into making Kate Moss look twenty.  If celebrities are our religion, Kate Moss is our God.  We want our God to look good.

Type ‘Lindsay Lohan Coke’ into Google Images and there are several photos of her with white powder around her nose / looking worse for wear.  These are labelled with ‘Lindsay Lohan Breakdown’ and writers create whole articles of bullshit to sell copies.  We will never know what statements are true unless we are acquainted with the stars involved. 

If you search for ‘Lindsay Lohan Coca-Cola’ there are also several search results.

If we look at the photo as it stands we see Lindsay Lohan holding a bottle of Coca-Cola.  That is fact.  But what does this say about her? Perhaps she drinks it because she sees some comfort in a brand that generations of ‘somebodys’ and ‘nobodys’ have consumed before her.  The classic logo is a reflection on her; an accessory to complete an outfit.

Lindsay Lohan has been charged with driving under the influence  (her mugshot was all over the press) but where are the photos of her with drugs? Although there have been years of speculation concerning her personal life, when we look at the sheer amount of images of Lindssay with Coca-Cola we know that one thing is true about her and that is her Coke ‘addiction.’  She enjoys consuming the Coca-Cola brand.

It is known to be used as an appetite suppressant.  A meal in a can - a Guinness a day but a little more sinister.  Lindsay Lohan is under pressure to look good; as consumers we like things that look good (Junk food for example.)

Celebrities and food and drink brands are in a co-dependent relationship.  There are countless photos of celebrities munching on McDonalds.  Britney Spears at the Drive Thru is a good example of a celebrity ‘keeping it real.’ There are old videos on Youtube (amongst Man Vs. Food and Epic Meal Time) of celebrities plugging fast food companies, for example Lindsay Lohan and Jell-O.  Remember Britney’s deal with Pepsi vs Xtina’s with Coca-Cola in the 90s? (So trendy right now.)

Since then Fast Food has gone in and out of fashion (with the help of Supersize Me) in the same way as the Curvy vs Skinny debate.  The internet generation’s consumption of the struggle between Paparazzi/Celebrities reached its peak around the Size Zero Era (when Britney shaved her head.)  Images of celebrities eating Fast Food were trash gold - and still are.  They have connotations with depression and emotional breakdowns.  We have a similar love/hate relationship with Fast Food that we have with these celebrities

The main link between celebrities and fast food is that both are sold as a flawless package while the reality is that they are not so beautiful after all.  A good example is the reality of a Big Mac.  In photos it looks big and juicy but when the goofy guy at the counter hands it over it is small and pathetic.  It is the same for images of Kate Moss.  In the Rimmel London adverts she looks flawless but in photos of her smoking Malboro Lights or taking coke she looks like a normal thirty year old.  She’s not ugly but she’s not perfect.  Burgers still look good in the flesh but it is their imperfections which make them attractive - especially the fake cheese melting all over the place.

Recently a video was released by McDonald’s Canada showing the process that McDonald’s products have to go through before they are photographed.  Should we care? We eat fast food because it looks good, tastes good and makes us feel good (even though it’s not as big or juicy as in the photo.) Burgers are movie stars - ‘Le Big Mac.’

Fast food is a design classic.  Now Supersize Me is a distant memory, ‘Cool’ brands such as Lazy Oaf and Eastpak sell products heavily inspired by Fast Food.  Lazy Oaf stock a t-shirt for a UK based burger blog called ‘Burgerac,’ burger socks, burger wallets, a french fries tote and a pizza jumper.  It’s attractive, it’s appealing and its smell is the Chanel No.5 of the masses.

They tell you to be conscious of each mouthful you eat because it’s good for your health.  Recently I went to a burger joint in Brighton called ‘Grubbs’ and was conscious of how attractive the branding and packaging was..

It was the best meal I ever ate.

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(Amelia tweets at @ameliabayler.)

 

"Polisse" - if you love film, you have to see it ...

Will data finally kill the newspaper star?

Here's my latest column for today's MediaTel's Newsline, an exploration of the - seemingly - profoundly negative implications for quality journalism that derive from personalisation services on one hand, and so-called targeted advertising on the other.

A pretty bleak picture, I'm afraid ... I continue to find that wherever I look, data is clearly not much of a friend to media.

And I can't help but grieve a little - as one must also for the parallel casualties in music, literature and film - for the collapse of "quality for quality's sake" that this trajectory forces on our culture. Would the great journalists of today and yesterday ever have emerged, let alone made a living, in such a punishing climate? Of course not.

Bowling and Pinball ... the ball rolls on!

Very pleased and flattered to see the good old Bowling and Pinball meme that I pushed out in 2007 taken forward into fertile territory by my close friend Peter Sieyes and colleague Rob Malcolm in this very useful piece for Wharton: Knowledge In Action.

It astounds me - in a good way :-) - that the thinking should have such legs ... Though somewhat alarming to imagine my headstone in (I hope) the very distant future: "You know ... the bowling and pinball bloke"!

Here, by the way, are the videos I first used when explaining the model to the great and the good of media and marketing.

The bowling ... and the pinball.

Misconceptions holding back digital, social and mobile marketing

I'm very pleased indeed to have this comprehensive article featured in the July issue of Market Leader.

It combines what I believe to be some of my most incisive observations of the current media and marketing zeitgeist, pointing up the critical conceptual blocks, and providing I hope some meaningful clues for the way forward to credibility, significant brand investment, and of course, growth.

I'll also be speaking around these insights in the coming months, so if there's a slot in an event schedule that might fit the bill, please do let me know.

Download Bayler on Digital Disruption and Value

Download Market Leader cover July 2012

Here also, in a connected vein, is an account of yesterday's panel at Mediatel's excellent Media Playground event, questioning the relative value of data in marketing vs advertising. A hot discussion, too.

More on the "behavioural backlash"

Clearly the subject du jour, consumers' increasing discontent with the new targeting, and the implications for advertisers, are examined again by the excellent Liz Jaques in today's Mediatel Newline.

With astringent thoughts from your humble author for extra zing ...

The new window-smashing French intellectuals ...

For some months now I've been admiring the writing of Frederic Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassee, the French co-authors of The Monday Note.

Today's TMN edition has prompted a rare post in this blog ... Filloux writes a searing yet icily-argued attack on assumptions re Google and Facebook's respective futures in ad revenue terms, using the Do Not Track controversy, and Microsoft's apple-cart-upsetting declarations, as his departure point.

Connected to this, but standalone in terms of its vigour and urgency, is Gassee's equally thoughtful yet brutal body check to what he calls "The $20B Opportunty Mirage" of mobile advertising. I've leave you to read it, but it's bracing stuff.

Overall, their positions (a) that ownership and manipulation of data confer no intrinsic value or entitlement, and (b) that simply pointing to how enormous mobile advertising could/should be consitutes proof of commercial potential, are very much in line with my own views.

They also bring a wealth of evidence to their arguments that make this work credible as well as invigorating reading.

An essential book for students of what's happening

James Gleick's masterful work "The Information" is taking my breath away.

The quality of scholarship combined with the accessibility and the sheer excitement of information's journey from pre-history to present, post-social, day is superb.

Make a point of reading this remarkable book.

"Otherwise Engaged - Branding In A Connected World"

The digital edition of my recent mini-book on engagement is now available to download free of charge here.

Download Otherwise Engaged by Michael Bayler

(If you still feel compelled to own the remarkably expensive printed version, it's available from Amazon here.)

What we talk about when we talk about Engagement

In the light of last week's Facebook IPO, now seems like a very good time to revisit the still-vexatious issue of Engagement.

This article, published today by the excellent MediaTel Newline, attempts to untangle some of the key misconceptions that appear to be holding us back.

A video presentation on branding for startups

I just rediscovered this, a talk I gave for Sun Microsystems a couple of years ago. The video and slides are very well put together, unfortunately the host - who shall remain nameless - inserted himself rather shamelessly into the proceedings ... however, if you jump to 02.18 minutes in, there's some rather good stuff there.

 

A challenge to Big Dada (yes, Dada ...)

With kind permission from the excellent MediaTel Newsline, this is a well-received, rather tiggerish piece I wrote in late April on the true role and value of data for marketers.

The goal was to debunk at least some of the Big Data nonsense, much of which is actually blocking the way forward for what I've come to call "Small Data" and it's crucial future role in creating meaningful consumer value.

The already over-extended notions of "targeting" and so-called "relevance" are also in my sights, I'm afraid. Sorry 'bout that, fanboys ...

Anyway, here is the piece, and I expect to have a second MediaTel article unpicking the conundrum of Engagement online early this week.

Kodak and "The Artist" ... a short essay on innovation and information, past and future

(With kind permission of the excellent Market Leader, for whom I write with both pride and enjoyment.)

Download Bayler on Kodak for Market Leader

Kevin Slavin on how algorithms shape our world

Kodak Syndrome makes it to "Market Leader"

So proud to have piece on #Kodak and #theartist in latest "Market Leader" not least because of the intelligence of all the other writers #in

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) March 7, 2012

A kind note from a good (and clever) friend ...

A lovely review of The Artist and what it means in a world of 'infinite connectedness' by @michaelbayler bit.ly/ygrGEV

— tom gueterbock (@tomgoot) January 25, 2012

"The Artist" - Fresh air ... or musty nostalgia? A bit of cultural context

 

Having grown up glued to black and white Hollywood masterpieces from the Golden Age every Sunday afternoon - at the time, it was that, football in the street, or homework - The Artist draws on references that are almost every one entirely familiar. And of course, like almost everyone, I love it.

It's funny - in a sneaky, better-than sort of way - to hear about the poor punters who demanded money back when they found the movie is - well, 99% of it - really silent. And all black and white.

Take a little Singin' In the Rain - well, OK, rather a lot of it - throw in the better Astaire and Rogers masterpieces and a generous sprinkle of the Pickfair silent dramas of pre-1929, when as we know The Jazz Singer blew silence away forever, and, aside from the genuinely glorious acting that features in every minute of The Artist (and how good to see the great Malcolm McDowell, in a tasty cameo role that surely he'll treasure more than much of his later work) you've got a good summary of the tone and structure of the movie.

There's been - if only prompted by the Academy Award nominations that the movie has earned - a certain amount of soul-searching Way Out West about THE MEANING of The Artist. At a time when the major studios are scrambling to differentiate their still-potent output from the millions of frat-party fart-lighting and cute kitten clips on offer to the less discerning audience via the usual sources, any film this quiet, this unswashbuckling, this unstarridden, and, well, this small, is going to get folks a-talkin'. And a-worryin'.

It strikes me - not that I know much - that THE POINT of this lovely film is to remind us that magic - and Hollywood was always about magic - only works hand-in-hand with severe restriction. An empowered, choice-spoilt audience with all the magic they'll ever need in the palm of their hand, will paradoxically find magic almost nowhere. (Magic is also about the things that you could never imagine yoursself doing. Not just special effects. It's more about writing, in the end, than CGI.)

But put them (well, me, and many thousands of others, anyway) in front of a black and white, silent film for 100 minutes on a cold, wet afternoon, and The Artist returns magic, along with romance, compassion, tragedy, comedy, pathos, cuteness, in spades.

I keep telling anyone who'll listen - for reasons I'll explain below - that in 1929, 95,000,000 Americans went to the movies every week. Of course, like my Sunday afternoons with Busby Berkeley and friends, they had nothing better to do. As the every-tiggerish Umair Haque pointed out some years ago, before moving on to larger econonomic matters, there was a time when attention was infinitely plentiful, and media - stuff to watch - was rare, to the point of being god-given.

And this - actually rather brief, in the grander scheme - Golden Age of the screen was very much built on the profoundly humble, often mundane, rarely privileged, and perhaps above all, physically grounded lives of its audience.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

Any nostalgia that I felt on seeing The Artist was, in the end, little to do with a hankering for the age of the silent movie - those Sunday afternoons weren't THAT much fun, believe me - and all to do with a pang of the loss of a simpler age in the much more recent past ...

One where our infinite connectedness, power to choose, limitless access to channels for self-expression, and our regal bestowing of attention on media objects on the merest whim (with disenfranchised consumer brands creeping around the edges of Facebook, Twitter and the rest, beckoning and gurning like the dancing dads at your 18th) had not yet made us like cranky, jaded children after far too many sweets, allowed to stay up far too late for our own good.

Is The Artist, therefore, one last longing look back, or a sneak peek forward, with perhaps a promise of happier times for moviemakers, beyond today's gruelling battle for the attention of these spoiled, rather unattractive children?

I'll say it's neither, not for me anyway. It's a glorious example - reminder in fact - of what occasionally happens when storytelling and acting talent is left alone to do what it does well, which is not merely to give us yet another expensive, instantly-forgettable chunk of content (I love blockbusters as well as the next bloke, by the way) but to touch our hearts deeply, with a far smaller, more daring, more caring slice of real magic.

Dedicated to the late Jonathan Cecil, who cared enough to dig out and bring me hard-to-find, connoisseur's books about the great silent movie stars when I was a silly South London boy, and who would have adored - and written far more insightfully and lovingly about - this film. R.I.P.

 

The End Of Strategy? Post #1

Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts that will form a rolling white paper, examining and getting to grips with what I have come to think of as the remarkable challenge facing organisations of all kinds - and above all, businesses: the state of perpetual disruption. 

In the two areas I work most in - media and marketing - and in particular at their points of overlap, where questions about, for example, the role and value of advertising, and the true impacts of social media, continue to proliferate without satisfactory resolution, there's a pining for one outcome above all. 

When will things go back to some sort of "normal"?

The Year Of ... 

Every year in recent memory has been "The Year Of Something", hasn't it? The last 5 years have each been The Year Of Mobile, for example. 

And what happens? The devices come thicker and faster, consumers pick them up, run with them, co-create with both each other and the new technology giants - GAFA as I've heard them dubbed (Goggle, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) - myriad new forms of value. It all rushes forward. 

But here's the thing. "The Year Of Mobile" never actually arrives. And no one gets more of a real grasp on things than we had last year or the year before. 

And yes, it has indeed been "The Year Of Apple, Google (incl YouTube) Amazon and Facebook" ... for each year as long as we can clearly remember. But the GAFA giants are now almost ecosystem fixtures, the shiny utilities of some kind of new economy. They'll quite happily take the dollar bill in their respective business and revenue models, but really they have no more useable insights for us than British Gas or Thames Water. 

Asking Google or Facebook what you should do, is rather like asking Lloyds of London where you should make your investments. They're generally nice enough people, but it's not their job to care. (And actually, they don't know either.)

We are, it seems, on our own now. 

The new normal

And there will be no returning to "normal" any more, in the sense of familiar, predictable models and markets for exploiting content, for building brands and above all, for developing and executing strategies. 

I intend no melodrama, but it's really over. 

If strategy is above all about the way we think, then an environment in which what we think - and what we think we see - are  now invariably inadequate, always too slow, and often badly wrong, no longer lends itself to what we can call outbound strategy - where we plan for and then "do things" to our markets that create competitive advantage.

Strategies overall - and strategies for innovation are no exception - are only meaningful when their objects, and, just as crucially as we'll see - the contexts within which those objects exist, and within which value is identified, articulated, productised, communicated and eventually delivered, remain more or less fixed, relative to meaningful market coordinates. 

Things need to sort of stay where - and indeed what! - they were yesterday, if you like, for new forms of value to be confidently developed and placed into the market.

This is no longer the case, and sets up a powerful cause of the perpetual disruption that, I am arguing, will plague businesses and their brands in the post-digital era. 

We learned, at a fundamental level, to view change as occasional, disruption as rare - to be feared, exceptional - and innovation as something elusive but achievable, that businesses "do" to markets, to sustain and now and then refresh what has been, till recently, broadly visible, explicable and manageable positions for their various brands. 

But Normal, from here on, is a state of perpetual - and accelerating - flux. 

Impacts and implications

We are already, for practical purposes, passing through the so-called Information Age. Where are we now then? 

On one hand, I'd feel comfortable calling this "The Age Of Disruption". But that - as well as leaving us despondent and rudderless - implies that there's a plausible end point to this new state of perpetual flux. No, we need something both a little less apocalyptic, and a little more realistic. 

I've written periodically about The Age Of Meaning for the past 6 or 7 years, and while I wouldn't dream of claiming to have had the answer to our profound conundrum all along, I do feel that when we come to grips with perpetual disruption, it will be in part because we have finally - with backs against the wall - learned the fine art of the management of meaning.

I'll be returning to the management of meaning later in this process, but for now, I'm sticking to the exploration of the problem. To jump ahead too quickly, to rush a solution, will be to underestimate the problem and compromise any sort of useful insights and ways forward. 

For now, we have a huge conundrum to deal with. 

The trading context of customers, competition, culture and communications is constantly accelerating in both speed and scale, already far beyond a level at which business can usefully react with so-called innovations .

This context has become, in the end, irresistible. It consists, at its most basic, of billions of connected consumers, the technology giants that both enable and add value to their connectedness, and the second-by-second interaction between them, that feeds and fosters an especially concerning new kind of value. Benckler, in his contemporary economics masterpiece The Wealth of Networks, calls this "non-market value": an inauspicious term, no?

Our issue here is not merely the now-tiresome challenge of how to evaluate and thence monetise, for example, the big social networks. It's more far-reaching, and concerning. 

The new post-digital trading context is more than just value-neutral ... It's "value-hostile", precisely because, unlike any other in history, it's no longer neutral ... passive ... waiting, if you like, for something to happen, for our decisions and actions to stir it up. We have, till recently, been able to take quite well-researched products or services (indeed, more recently, consumer experiences) and push them into the market, accompanied by a fairly cogent but above all confident program of communications.

This happy paradigm - whatever happened to paradigms, by the way? - has been supported and reinforced above all by a context that kindly agreed to stand still while we marketed to it. Channels - even early online channels played nice - were neutral; consumers were usefully bound by a combination of postcode and ponderous research programs; insights were valid and fresh for, well, sometimes years! 

Oh, and data ... Well, there was so little of it, and it changed so rarely ... We were even able to sometimes make use of it, before the music and the dance started again. 

I don't have to bang on, surely, about how little of this comfy value chain remains. Dismantled byinformation, wielded by immensely fluid tribes of flattered, entitled consumers, whose very empowerment and daily delight by the GAFA Crew, is paralleled by the disempowerment and daily dismay of the enterprises tasked with somehow delivering - let alone maintaining (let alone predicting!) - something called shareholder value. 

There will be answers. But first we need to fully explore and grasp where the levers of power have moved to, and which of those we are entitled and able to get a grip on to begin navigating a cultural and commercial landscape that will no longer stand still.

Till next time. Thanks for reading.  

 

The ever-thoughtful Brian Millar ...

The ever thoughtful @michaelbayler beat @theeconomist to it on Kodak bit.ly/xqdJIm

— arthurascii (@arthurascii) January 12, 2012

Bob Lefsetz on Kodak

The great Bob Lefsetz weighs in on #kodak ... always worth a read. lefsetz.com/wordpress/inde…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 9, 2012

A closer look at the implications of Kodak's demise

Billions of utterly unique, deeply meaningful images

The Kodak Brownie transformed personal human experience, in that it enabled people worldwide to capture, own, and share (note, not in the way we “share” today, but at a genuinely physical, intimate level) images of their own lives.

In a sense, Eastman Kodak was the Ford Motor Co. of modern personal identity. And the deep, sustainable and above all personal meaning that those gawky, prosaic, kiss-me-quick shots offered to consumers was nothing short of immense.

When Kodak eventually invested in some formal brand positioning work, they were able, without effort or loss of credibility, to take global ownership of one, fundamentally human idea.

Kodak decided to own “Memories”. Sounds easy, in a way.

But the key insight here is not that a brand agency then created a marketing and advertising manual, that then enabled all sorts of other agencies to create all sorts of brand communications that cemented their commercial monopoly over Memories.

What we need to grasp is the sheer human impact of the Kodak brand and its technology, but most of all, the cultural and personal weight that the process and the images that emerged represented …

… from lugging that bulky clunky item of luggage on holiday or to a wedding …

… through how to load a film without exposing and ruining it …

… then how to take the film out when you’d finished it, again without exposing it …

… to the simple joy of waiting for your prints to come back in the post or from the pharmacy …

… through to the – often awful, sometime happy, but always very meaningful – shared experience of “our holiday snaps”!

So what happened to Kodak?

Did “Memories” suddenly lose their value? Did a Shawn Fanning sweep in with some illegal Napster or Grokster for photographs?

Well, we can obviously say that “digital happened”. And certainly Kodak was terribly slow off the mark when the digital image came to town.

One senses that the Kodak board saw digital – like so many other industries have … let’s make sure we’re not marching in that number – not as the global cultural earthquake it would shortly become, but more as a supply chain issue with minor implications at the consumer interface: digital cameras at one end, CD’s instead of prints at the other, and so on.

No, it was infinite copy and infinite sharing that did for Kodak.

Because, missing from that formerly unassailable position astride all the world’s “Memories”, was a simple fact that has great relevance for our current discussion. It was the context, not just the content, that created and sustained an awful lot of the Kodak value.

Until we were all joined up by networks, Kodak’s Memories (moments of profound personal and family meaning, if you like) were special, unique, one-of-a-kind, and could only be shared with a privileged few.

In other words, it was not just the images themselves (quality of photo, with a nod to the obvious exceptions, never per se made them intrinsically meaningful) but the severe technical limitations within which they were captured, processed and shared, that gave them their rarity, their exclusivity, and, in the end, their commercial value. It was hard to take them, hard to make them, and very hard indeed to share them.

New players, new rules, bad ending

But when Flickr, PhotoBucket (among countless others) and ultimately, that category killer of all category killers, Facebook, became the new platforms for worldwide photographic activity, meaning and value, that rich, snug, primitive context that gave Kodak’s snapshots their wonderful, now lost significance … disappeared.

And of course, the cameras built into mobile phones threw the iconic snapshot into the eye of the connectivity storm.

It’s universal access and shareability, not just “being digital”, that dilute to oblivion the traditional impact and power of the physical image.

When my photos, yours, Britney’s, Robbie’s and Justin’s, are just confetti in the hurricane of billions upon billions of deeply personal, but somehow now entirely anonymous, meaningless snapshots … what happens to the brands, products and the services that supported them?

 

Big lessons from Kodak

Yet more interesting commentary on #kodak ... Folks are seeing the big entertainment analogy: Kodak's digital dilemma latimes.com/news/opinion/l…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

Cord-cutting update

More on this interesting thread ... Pay TV Subscribers Canceling Service, Going Online marketingcharts.com/television/pay…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

The eternal question ... consumer engagement: WTF? SWF?

Good question ... Why Is Consumer Engagement So Hard? adage.com/u/61SVYa

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

Lessons from Sub Pop

Growing a great culture business in the face of digital, an essential read: Sub Pop a bright spot in record industry latimes.com/entertainment/…

— Michael Bayler (@michaelbayler) January 8, 2012

This move by an NYC actor made my day ... superb, subversive and ballsy

 

Jerry Lieber R.I.P.

In a rare moment of star time - at least one that I don't feel silly bragging about - I had lunch with Jerry and his delightful wife. Corky Hale (a jazz harpist ... figure that out) at their house overlooking Hollywood, maybe in 1986.

It's one of the few recollections I have of the music business that gives me unqualified joy, and a sense of real privilege. It's not just about the songs, it's about the spirit of the man, which came through loud and clear while he and his wife entertained a goofy and ill-informed young English guy. Who won't ever forget it.

More on those Chinese Apple stores ...

Y'know, I can't get this story out of my mind. And I'm mystified that we haven't seen a MASS of fuss around it.

If I'm right, at the last count there were 22 fully-functioning, fully-branded bootleg Apple stores that had been discovered in China.

Now, I'm an old music business hand, who recalls when it wasn't consumers (with the hysterical exception of the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign that ran in the 80's when I was still working in retail ...) who were held accountable for piracy, it was Middle- and Far-Eastern factories.

Those appalling quality bootleg cassettes of Police albums that overseas travellers brought back with them still live in my ears.

A very funny twist to the story is that of course, of all the companies that feature more recently in the music industry's "we are victims of the most appalling crime" complaint, one of the most reviled is ... Apple. While Steve Jobs was welcome with joyful weeping when iTunes launched, now almost everybody on the business side hates him. Nothing like a little "you stole my toy" resentment.

So now, we've come full circle in a way that you really couldn't write ... the same relentless commercial amorality that produced those unlistenable copies of Outlandos D'Amour - selling product that of course comes out of the back - or front even - of the factories that make the very same beautiful laptop on which I'm writing this - has produced a fully-working facsimile of the entire Apple brand experience.

Some of the kids who work in these bootleg stores truly believe - or at least want to, or maybe just don't care ... - that they're working for the man. The Jobs man, I mean.

But the thing that tickles me most of all is that, of all the many things that music business hacks lament, right up there is the demise of the old-style, mom-and-pop record store. And guess where all that buzz has migrated to? Well, think back to your last Apple Store visit.

Hmmmmm ....

The fake Apple stores in China

This is the original blog by BirdAbroad with tons of photos and ... well ... pithy commentary. A must read.

MySpace sold finally

MySpace sold for more or less nowt ... News Corp to retain a small stake: as you would ...