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We’re not gourmet anymore…or are we? A recent article in the New York Times serves as an interesting follow-up to a recent W5 blog post regarding the cancellation of Gourmet magazine. According to the NY Times and publishing company Conde Nast, we haven’t see the last of the lauded foodie mag.
Gourmet’s second chance at survival arrives neatly wrapped in a digital package as an iPad application called “Gourmet Live.” The app will be fully loaded with recycled cooking tips and recipes from Gourmet’s current archive while an occasional sprinkling of new content will be used to spice things up.
Interestingly, the app is not intended to serve as a digital form of the magazine, but as a new way for consumers to engage with the brand. Given Gourmet’s dedicated following and the widespread disappointment with the magazine’s cancellation, repackaging the magazine in the form of an app appears to be a brilliant move. Not only will the app reintroduce a trusted brand in an entirely new way, it will fill the void for dedicated readers who have yet to find a satisfactory substitute. In addition, the app well help the brand reach a younger, tech-savvy audience. The trick will be keeping the content fresh enough to attract new readers and familiar enough to satisfy older fans. With Gourmet’s culinary legendary expertise and reputation, balancing old tastes with new textures should be as easy as cooking “Easy Seafood Paella“.
Since everyone else seems to be talking about this spot, I figured I’d throw my two cents in. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s simple…Tiger stares into camera. Tiger’s dead father provides the voiceover. Cameras flash. Simple.
Most of the comments I’m seeing are critical, to say the least. Take this New York Times article:
“Did you learn anything?” Earl Woods asks. A valuable question, and one that his son has attempted to answer in his no-questions news conference in February; his brief interviews with ESPN and the Golf Channel last month; and his pre-Masters news conference on Monday.
But the answer to the father’s question appears to be that serial philandering and addiction rehab can be positioned as a commodity — and that you can roll it out in phases leading to the Nike amendment to the 12 steps: a TV commercial.
Personally, I like the spot. It’s an apology, a glimpse into Tiger’s conscience, and a return to the spotlight all rolled into one. When I read the criticism, I have to wonder what people expected. Short of keeping one of their marquee endorsers on the bench, or cutting him loose altogether, this was the only thing Nike could do.
Nike frames him as the fallen hero. Anything else would have been an outrage.
“I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.” Michael Chabon
Until recently, the most accessible and practical means of cataloguing memories was through photography. Pictures became the medium through which we told stories about our past and thus became our most cherished possessions.
The irony is that the amateur, point-and-click photographer in all of us is not very good at taking pictures. Our natural impulse is archival rather than expressive. Our subjects are often posed and detached from the experience, as if they are taking break from the moment to stand and smile. Only a rare photographer can capture the depth of emotion that happens in a given moment and tell a story that exists outside of the frame.
Thus, pictures are a starting point for memories, a prompt for thinking about our past. Our strongest memories are actually associated with our “chemical” senses, taste and smell. Our sense of smell is overlooked, but the human olfactory sense is controlled by the limbic system, the part of the brain also responsible for emotion, memory, pleasure, and motivation.
This is the Scenter, a project of the Kawamura-Ganjavian architecture and design studio. It stores smells in tiny cartridges and releases them when the bellows are squeezed.
We tend not to notice our sense of smell except in cases when an odor is surprisingly strong, pleasantly or unpleasantly so. But there are also moments when a scent is so familiar, so close, that you feel as if you are experiencing something again.
The Scenter is a remarkable achievement then: a sensory device that can capture a tremendous part of our daily experience where technology of the pixilated sort cannot.
Working for a market research firm, inevitably you see things from a market research perspective. I remember distinctly thinking that NBC must have done some extensive research before trying the Leno in prime time experiment. Jay actually mentioned the research that was conducted earlier in the week during his monologue:
“They said, ‘how about prime time?’ I said, ‘that will never work.’ No, no, we want to put you on at 10:00. We have done focus groups. People will love you at 10:00. Look at these studies showing Jay’s chin at 10:00. People will go crazy.”
Now I don’t want to pile on NBC and obviously I have no idea how extensive the research was, but this seems like a potentially good example of placing too much weight on a research study instead of utilizing research as a component of an overall decision making process. Let’s hope that NBC didn’t make a decision with hundred of millions of dollars worth of consequences based on a couple of rounds of focus groups. But feel free to mention this example the next time someone complains about a product launch not going as well as the research predicted. Below is a link to the article with more quotes from Jay Leno.
Kudos to The Awl for two fairly recent charts featuring publishing statistics from the past decade. The images are too tall to just recopy in a single post here, but click through to check them out. This trend data, sourced from the Magazine Publishers of America and Audit Bureau of Circulations, respectively, is very interesting, but I’m particularly fond of how they’ve crafted the charts – in a tall, blog-friendly format rather than on a standard wide frame:
I came across this interesting little essay the other day, and it’s been on my mind ever since. As much as we talk about paying for “content” when we buy books, music, and movies, we’ve really just paying for the medium. Books are priced based on the number of pages and whether they are hardcover or paperback. Not the quality of the writing. The most critically acclaimed film at the theater doesn’t cost more to see than the least.
In this new, digital world, we’re beginning to move beyond this. Record companies have been pushing for more tiers of pricing on iTunes. Some television shows are free on Hulu. Some only show on premium cable and DVD. Once you eliminate the physical product, distinctions between perceived quality are able to be made.
It’s no longer about supply, demand, and the price of paper. It’s about quality and creativity.
Anyway. This article is worth reading.
A couple of links from mid-May highlighting creative formats for print magazines. Both articles are by Andrew Losowsky for the WSJ. Subscription to periodicals is still fun – I expect that if the content sings, there’s probably a base of creative class readers out there. Maybe some spark of the creative new ideas here will catch fire:
