CREATED
Hot fashion labels love to merge glamour with sinister images: expensive and eye-catching photos of people in cool clothes being impaled, say; or tottering models with eyes smudged darkly as if from a heroin habit. It means instant street cred, or so they believe. But a new gallery show on the Lower East Side in New York serves up a reminder that real menace can be marketed in the most rudimentary way. Heroin Stamp Project, on for one week at the White Box Gallery, exhibits 150 discarded glassine drug packets plucked from the city's streets, bearing logos of their purveyors' brands. (No Pain features a coffin and a cross.) Dealers have been branding their merchandise for decades, and addicts respond to their favourite logos - such as the Sex and the City gals cooing at a new display of Jimmy Choos - with pulse racing and lips smacking. It could be dangerous to get between them and their fix, of course. But now we can't remember if we're talking about the drug users or Carrie & Co.
NOTED
Are we the only ones confused by the new tagline for Astral Media? After about a year of build-up, the Montreal company finally unveiled its new corporate image last month, kicking it off with a big out-of-home campaign to get the advertising community excited about the company's multiple platforms. The pledge? "We love what you love." But how does that work? Do they love everything that everybody loves? And isn't that sort of a cop-out? Sure, everyone loves kooky websites featuring adorable kittens. But what if we love, say, dressing up in a lobster outfit and letting a naughty grill chef have her way with us? Or, spending our weekends memorizing Mao's Little Red Book and plotting a revolution? How could they know what we love, unless they've been spying on us? Which, come to think of it, we sort of love.
Fiona Laffan, Goldman Sachs
Investment bankers are people too. At least they want you to think they are. Which now leads to the curious prospect of Goldman Sachs considering a corporate branding campaign to improve its image. This week Fiona Laffan, the bank's head of media relations for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, told reporters that people felt bad for CEO Lloyd Blankfein after he was grilled by a Senate hearing (which people? we wondered), and some Goldman executives were mulling new methods of shining their collective face, such as sending Mr. Blankfein for a sit-down on Oprah's couch. We had a dream about that episode: It begins with Lloyd and Oprah running out on stage and telling the audience that, instead of being given free Pontiacs, they're all going to be made Goldman partners. Then they point to each person and shout like crazed carnival barkers: "YOU get five million! And YOU get five million! And YOU get five million! …"
Simon Houpt