360 DEGREES Weblog

Simply brilliant.

Jamarcus Marshall, a 17-year-old high school sophomore in Mansfield, Louisiana, believes that no one should be able to tell him how low to wear his jeans. “It’s up to the person who’s wearing the pants,” he said.
Marshall’s sagging pants, a style popularized in the early 1990s by hip-hop artists, are becoming a criminal offense in a growing number of communities, including his own.

Starting in Louisiana, an intensifying push by lawmakers has determined pants worn low enough to expose underwear poses a threat to the public, and they have enacted indecency ordinances to stop it. (INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE)

Your sleek, shiny car screeches through a turn in the popular Need for Speed: Carbon video game and there in front of you is a gigantic Pontiac billboard.
Two months later, you round the corner again and see yet another ad, pointing out the features of a different car. This one surprises you: The model it is advertising did not exist when you bought the video game.

Advertising and product placement have been common in video games for years, and the auto companies have helped to lead the way, buying ads inside of games and producing games themselves that are interactive ads for their cars. (USA TODAY)

British architect Will Alsop’s design for the new Filmport complex in Toronto has just been unveiled and is set to be one of the largest film studios on the North American continent. The building is a giant sectional arc, its outer face wrapped by punctuated Cor-Ten Steel and its inner face a glass curtain wall that, with the arc, bends to form a large outdoor space. The building, as Alsop says, “curves as it rises.” A primary goal has been to create public space in the surrounding emerging neighborhood—an admirable one, though we do wonder how much steel, and how much embodied energy, will be used.

Louis Vuitton lovers will have a unique temptation this fall. The next issue of the pricey periodical Visionaire will be guest edited by Marc Jacobs. The issue will feature photos of the famously fashionable (Drew Barrymore, Selma Blair, Lil’ Kim, Scarlett Johansson, Stephanie Seymour, Gisele Bündchen et al.) by noted fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. The biggest draw for the 192-page edition will probably be that it comes in a limited-edition Louis Vuitton gold Monogram Miroir case. You can get yours starting October 1 for $375.

Here’s a wild idea for a design concept: put together a speaker with 12 sides, otherwise known as a dodecahedron, and you’ll get a 360-degree blast of music. These spacey-looking Quasar speakers send their sound all over the place, so no matter where you are in the room, their sweet audio will be spilling out from within their crystalline confines, heading right for your ears.

What’s up with those crazy neon clodhoppers on everyone’s feet these days? The brand phenomenon known as Crocs has been chomping away at the footwear industry at breakneck speed. The barely five-year-old company reports sales topping US$ 354 million dollars last year—proof that it has successfully set about making its “unique” looking shoes all the rage among men, women, and children all over the world. (BRANDCHANNEL)

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Who doesn’t like ketchup? Everyone uses the stuff - it would be safe to say that it’s a household staple in every country in the western world. Heinz decided to let their huge fan following take the lead in marketing the world’s favourite red condiment.

Through the use of YouTube, Heinz asked the general public to submit their own videos of ketchup, and what they like to use it on. About 8,000 entires came in for the innovative campaign, only about half of which were submitted to YouTube. The amateur commercials have received more than 2.3 million views, and over 80,000 hours were spent watching them. A few examples: squelching a toddler’s tantrum; inducing states of bliss; uniting an irate couple; and comforting a soldier abroad. Contestants are vying for the chance to win $57,000.

This isn’t the first “make-your-own-commercial” contest done by a big brand, but it has drawn in the most contestants. Malibu Caribbean Rum only had 270 entries (only 84 hit YouTube) and the Doritos Super Bowl ad contest received about 1,000. Other similar contests were held by Pepsi, Jeep, Dove, Spring and Converse.

Continuing the tradition of using shipping containers to house all things pop-up, a spotting from the Netherlands caught our eye. At music festival Lowlands, which took place this weekend, jeans brand Wrangler offered festival goers a much needed service: laundry. And at 18 meters wide and 9 meters high, the Wrangler Laundromat was hard to miss.

People dropped off their mud-encrusted laundry and were sent a text message the moment it was ready. No spare change of clothes? Wrangler came up with a generous solution to that problem, too: they handed out black overalls to anyone who used the laundromat. Like most other pop-up ventures, Wrangler Laundromat is an exercise in experiential marketing, aimed at surprising and delighting consumers in a way that magazine ads or TV spots usually can’t.

Wrangler isn’t the only brand to have tackled dirty laundry at pop festivals. In Slovenia, home appliance manufacturer Zanussi-Electrolux has been offering free laundry services at Rock Otočec for several years and has cleaned thousands of muddy t-shirts and jeans. After picking up their spotless garments, visitors are given a “Dear Mom, I’m clean” postcard to send home. All of which makes for a fun and memorable example of tryvertising: letting consumers try out your product in a relevant setting.

For most of us, buying an old campervan normally involved some sort of cash-in-hand deal with a man called Stig and the crushing reality that the reason why a car costs only $100 is because it doesn’t have an engine.

For mega-brands like Adidas however, buying an old Volkswagen presents a unique sales opportunity. The label’s new skateboard clothing range will be marketed via this old jalopy that has been customized with prints inspired by skating legend Mark Gonzales. The ‘Kombi’ will cruise the streets of Sao Paulo with its custom interior throughout August, before it goes on tour to promote the new range