That’s what happens to my Cheez Its all the time. Interesting juxtaposition of several articles today – all of which arrived in my Inbox within a few hour period. The first was an analysis of the Amazon announcement that their sales of E-books have now surpassed those of print books by about 5 percent. That […]
Finally we’re back on the plane after a long week at the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas, I think our tenth time exhibiting. Day One of the show was a very good day for us. A measure we use to judge show traffic is the time we actually manage to eat something – Ronnie brought […]
The concept of a market “bubble” is actually hundreds of years old, but over time it has proved to be a recurring phenomenon that is now generally accepted as a part of the business cycle. Bubbles occur across a wide variety of categories – look at the dot.com companies of the last decade, the real […]
Interesting lawsuit in the news today over Warner Bros unauthorized use of a copyrighted tattoo design in the upcoming Hangover II movie. Apparently they duplicated – almost exactly – the tattoo that artist S. Victor Whitmill inked onto Mike Tyson’s face years ago. It may be a tough one for Warner Bros to wiggle out […]
So as we taxi to the runway in Newark they suddenly spin around and park us on an open piece of tarmac. If you travel much you know this rarely turns out well. Sure enough, after a few minutes we get the news that a radio is not working and they have decided to take […]
The misuse of the terms “brand” and “branding” has long been one of my pet peeves, and I think it hit a new pinnacle of ridiculous today. The story (from Time/CNN) was about the future of Al Qaeda, the headline was “Will the Brand Survive?” Really? Kleenex is a brand, John Deere is a brand, […]
This morning we were going through a stack of decorated kitchen calendar towels that we rescued from my parent’s house – apparently my mother had been saving them for years. What was striking about these little gems was how often you could recognize the era by the design and color palettes – no chance of […]
There is an interesting new study from the University of Pennsylvania regarding marketing and kids. They had children ages 4 to 6 “taste test” a healthy cereal that was served in boxes labeled “Healthy Bits” or “Sugar Bits”. They also tried both names with and without cartoon characters on the box, but it was always […]
Sorry to have gone missing, but we have given new definition to the phrase “crazy busy” over the last few weeks. We have moved the contents of an office, a house and also dealt with the passing of my father and everything that goes along with that – all in the last month or so […]
So if you ever wanted an indication of how the market works nowadays, look no further than Guitar Hero. The EPM Licensing Letter yesterday reported that Activision is disbanding the game and ceasing development because sales are (horrors!) declining. Now I suspect that even those declining sales would “wow” any of us in art licensing, […]