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July 03, 2005
That's What's Up
Ibiblio director Paul Jones recently discovered that his former student employee Marisa Brickman is the main subject of a new BusinessWeek article about "lifestyle marketing" and hipster-focused "product seeding". When she lived in Chapel Hill, Marisa DJ'ed at WXYC and started up the zine 'Sup. Now Brickman is the director of event marketing and public relations for Cornerstone Promotion, the company that publishes the overly consumption-focused but really well-designed and generally on-point music magazine The Fader.
Someone with a black-and-white worldview that is more purist than mine could probably go on a tirade about Cornerstone's brand of cleverly insidious "lifestyle marketing" or whatever. Personally, I'm not going to go there since I regularly enjoy flipping through The Fader, skipping over most of those ads in favor of the lengthy photo spreads, and reading up on all of the hip new artists that I may or may not actually end up liking. Plus, I entered a Fader contest a few months ago and wound up winning a copy of the new Public Enemy "London Invasion" DVD autographed by none other than Chuck D himself. If Marisa and her coworkers want to regularly send me free stuff like that, they can "product seed" me all day long!
Anyway, the most surprising thing that I learned from the article was not that the ever-ambitious Brickman is now in charge of event marketing for Cornerstone Promotion, but rather that ex-Bitch Magnet guitarist, avid metal fan, and all-around-nice-guy Jon Fine is now writing for BusinessWeek online! Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Man cannot live on music alone...
Posted by Tim at July 3, 2005 02:51 PM
Comments
Does "product seeding" mean "giving free shit to people so they'll maybe like it and talk about it with their friends"? 'Cause if so, that's not much different than a lot of modern business practices...and I'd like someone to send some product seeding my way!
Posted by: robin at July 6, 2005 09:32 AM