Live from SXSW: Nick Adler, Strategic Brand Manager at Stampede, on why Far East Movement blew up

Nick Adler:

"Look, there are a couple factors. First, with Asian Americans you're looking at a demographic that's experiencing massive growth and that's been neglected as an audience for a long time. MTV, that was created for and caters to a certain audience. BET, that was created for and caters to a certain audience. No one ever said, 'Hey, there's this Asian American audience out there, and they speak English, and they were born and raised here, and they listen to music.' So then YouTube came along. And all of a sudden, artists could speak to people directly. Guys like Ryan Higa, he has millions of followers, and when he puts a video up, he gets 10 million hits. You look at that, and you say, 'There's an audience.' There's a clear path there. But Far East Movement, they were the first artists to really break through on the back of that [YouTube] audience — because they weren't like most artists who say, 'Hey, I gotta go do YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, because that's what you do if you're an artist.' That's where they're from. They were doing that from day one."

Speaking on a panel called "From the Blocks to the Blogs," described as follows:

Since the social media burst in 2004, Hip Hop Industry tastemakers and artists have embraced these platforms as an essential tool to connect with fans and to extend their brand. These early adaptors learned to engage fans, disseminate content and create brand awareness. What are the new trends and next steps for Hip Hop and social media?

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

What the New iPad means for Apple rivals: "No Air."

I've been having a somewhat spirited email conversation with colleagues who've been dismissive about the implications of the New iPad (that's what it's called — no numbers, no letters. Just iPad). 

My take: I think they're missing exactly what kind of a milestone the New iPad represents. 

When I look at the New iPad, I see Apple reaching a point where they're starting to turn off the oxygen taps on the other players in the (non-money-losing) tablet market — I'm absenting Amazon Fire and B&N Nook here, because both companies sell their product at breakeven or loss in the hopes of earning revenues on subsequent media sales. 

The argument for this oxygen deprivation is clear on the consumer-facing side: To paraphrase the always insightful Farhad Manjoo over at Slate, Apple is playing a "just out of reach" game with its rivals, where they're continually introducing product that's a half-generation ahead of the competition, while dropping the price on the parity product to a price the rest of the field can't hope to match. The New iPad does that in spades: iPad 2 was a faster, thinner iPad 1, but the New iPad's Retina Display makes it a unique product in the tablet category, and it's priced at exactly the same as the last generation. Which is now being discounted by roughly 25%. No air.

But it's even more clear on the supply side, where Apple has put billions of dollars down to lock up key components: microprocessors, cameras and especially the Retina Display screens themselves, making it impossible or impractical from a marginal standpoint for its rivals to even build a comparable product at scale. In fact, they might not be able to for intellectual property reasons as well: Display genius and Apple engineering director John Zhong owns the key patent on screens with Super High Aperture pixels — a critical innovation preventing crosstalk and distortion in screens with ultra-high pixel density, like the Retina Display. No air there either. 

What does this mean? Well, from this point, with tablets on course to surpass traditional PC sales in the next few years, we'll need to think of Apple's hold on the coming generation of computing as metaphorically equivalent to Microsoft's dominance of the trad PC...except much, much more potent.

Because Apple designs its own processors. It owns its own online app and media store. It owns its own B&M retail environment. And it owns the world's biggest online payments infrastructure, as defined by number of active credit cards on file. 

No air.

Unless it's Apple-scented air.

Posted via email from OriginalSpin

‘The Celebrity Apprentice,’ Season 5, Episode 3: TV Recap -- Goodbye George!

Celebrity Apprentice Season 5, Season Premiere Recap (on Wall Street Journal Online)

Celebrity Apprentice Season 5, Episode Two Recap (on Wall Street Journal Online)

[Due to illness, this week's didn't make it in time for the Wall Street Journal's window of freshness. But here it is in full anyway! The Internetz is awesome!]

Your humble recapper was struck down with a bout of the flu this weekend — no, not Linfluenza, although the horror that was the Knicks' ugly OT loss to the hated Men in Green on Sunday did make me sick to my stomach — and so apologies, your weekly dose of Celebprenticillin is a day late.

For the men's team, it's also $20,000 short, since, spoiler alert! Team Unanimous actually tanks a task this time out, giving the women of Team Forte a much-needed win after a pair of crushing defeats. The previous losses have pared Forte down to a svelte six, versus the Team Uni's excessively confident eight; however, it's clear that this has been a case of addition by subtraction, as the termination of low-energy Cheryl Tiegs and glowering gargoyle Victoria Gotti seems to have put a new spring in the ladies' step. Lisa Lampanelli seems particularly buoyant after heaving nemesis Gotti back into the fires of Tartarus from whence she came. "That was fun," she croons. "That was a good time."

Who's on the bubble for a Trump kick in the rump this week? Ironically, the two contestants who step in as project managers for this week's action. For Unanimous, it's George Takei, who's looked distracted and vaguely out of place so far this season, as if he'd accidentally wandered into a weird parallel dimension. OMG, in this universe, Spock has a moustache! And Lisa Lampanelli doesn't! That's a joke, Lisa! 

For Forte, it's Dayana Mendoza, who narrowly escaped being eliminated last time out after complaining about having nothing to do except be incredibly hot, with a sexy little Venezuelan accent, and oh, those lips, those teeth, that smile! Stop complaining, Day-Day!

When this week's mission is announced, it's clearly been hand-crafted to give the girls a chance to get some mojo back: The two teams each have to design, build and populate a pair of "living window displays" to show off Trumpspawn Ivanka's spring 2012 fashion line at the flagship New York branch of department store Lord & Taylor. The girls have an obvious edge, since most of the men's team does not wear women's clothing! But wait, the men's team isn't going into this duel unarmed: They have the gays. And Arsenio Hall, also. Who, as Hall has pointed out himself dozens of times in just the first two episodes, is super-duper-UN-gay, but — as Takei points out — is a "man of elegance and style, but also panache. He's amaaaazing." Don't read between the lines, people. Hall: Panache, yes. Gay? Not even a cinnamon-latte sprinkle!

But hey, Clay A. and Takei? Gay as a day in May! And so, the men have a fighting chance! Aiken declines the offer to project manage, but Takei, vociferously presenting his credentials ("I'm gay! I'm gay! I'd like to think I have good visual sense!") takes up the challenge. Which prompts the Moustache King to breathe a sigh of relief. "Me, I'm definitely in the dark," says American Chopper's Teutel. "I'm not a clothes kind of guy. Pair of boots, underwear and socks, I'm good to go." Arrrgh, the mental image, it burns!

Over on the double-X side of the dime, Dayana Mendoza snags the P.M. tiara from the clutches of Real Housewife Teresa Giudice, who's loudly proclaiming her fitness for the gig. "Fashion is my background," she says. "I went to school for fashion!" The other ladies pretend not to hear! Fortunately for Team Forte, there's no flippable furniture within reach.

The mission itself presents complications for both celebrisquads. First of all, even gayed-up Team Unanimous seems at a loss for ideas. "Our gay teammates weren't much help," grouses Arsenio Hall. "It seems they weren't the right kind of gay."

So leave it to the least gay guy on the show to step up to the fashion plate! "Let me be in the process of choosing clothes — I'm really good at dressing women," Hall says. Bring the panache, dawg! He's joined by Aiken and Takei himself, who look on with awe at the refined taste and kicky aesthetic of their so-straight-you-could-use-him-as-a-ruler colleague.

Adam Carolla, Paul Teutel, Lou Ferrigno and Michael Andretti — whose ninjitsu reality-show strategy seems to involve wearing dark colors and standing very, very still — are assigned the high-testosterone "build" portion of the mission: They'll construct the set on which the living window display will take place.

Dee Snider, meanwhile, is sent to the doctor’s office for a checkup on the finger he ganked in last week’s Dork Ages-themed episode. As he frets about being booted because of his gimpiness (rightly so: Arsenio Hall calls Snider the “one-armed guy from The Fugitive” and wonders multiple times whether the heavy metal madman can keep up with his arm in a sling, or if he should just be taken out and shot).

Anyway, the guys’ take on the assignment is pretty much the reflexive response of any (straight) guy to a situation involving wimmenstuff: Sexy twins! Can’t go wrong with Doublemint, amirite? (Maybe if we pretend we’re not looking, they’ll, like, start making out!) The guys decide that the two windows will show the versatility of the Ivanka Trump line, leveraging their cloned assets by creating identical tableaux, one by day and one by night.

The girls, led by an energized Aubrey O’Day, imagine an elaborate setup in which an army of models will represent every hour of the day (O’the Day?) to form a “clock of empowered womanhood.” O’Day’s bogarting of the mission leads a snappish Debbie Gibson to say the exercise, and maybe the whole series, is becoming “The Aubrey Show.” However, she also acknowledges that O’Day has been kicking serious butt – and proves herself the contestant to beat once again this episode, when multiple crises strike in sequence. The original idea (also engineered by O’Day) collapses due to the realization that a 13 by 10 retail window can’t possibly hold the fashion equivalent of the Tournament of Roses Parade. Their backup plan, suggested by O’Day, is to use Ivanka’s original sketches in one window and photographs of finished designs in the other. But after a day of painstaking shooting of product, with minutes to go before the grand unveiling, the photos (which O’Day was responsible for bringing down from the studio) are nowhere to be found! Totes not her fault – the box was mysteriously empty! So O’Day springs into action again, proposing a backup backup plan involving something something something smoke and mirrors. Hey, at this point they have five minutes left!

Fortunately, the lollapalooza of unforced errors on the part of the ladies is nothing compared to the leaden, lackadaisical work of the dudes. Our Man George wanders through scenes, letting his deputies – Carolla and Hall – pretty much do as they like. It’s clear from jump street that, as Trumpspawn Eric notes, this project will be a “referendum on George.” So when the curtains pull back on Team Unanimous’s windows, and the clothes on the twinsie models look like they were randomly selected from a hobo’s ragbag, it’s not Arsenio Hall’s fault, it’s George’s. And when the background color of one of the scenes is so dark that the setting looks like London during the Blitz, it’s not Adam Carolla’s fault, it’s George’s.

And when everybody ends up in the boardroom and the ladies are finally announced as the winners, George decides to take one for the team, with the dignity and grace of a samurai falling on his sword. “Ultimately, the leader has to take the responsibility,” he says, his voice even.

“You know who has the most respect for you, George?” says Donald Trump. “Donald Trump. But George, you’re fired. And you’re a terrific man.”

George is gone! “I only regret I couldn't do more for the Japanese American National Museum,” he says as he heads to the Loser’s Limo. Hey, but the show’s two mentions of the Japanese American National Museum are approximately two mentions more than JANM has ever had on primetime TV! So even if he’s lost the game, he’s won a moral victory?

And with that, Takei is loaded into a photon torpedo bay and shot into the icy vacuum of reality show also-ran-hood. Do “Dancing With the Stars” next, George!

That’s it for this week. Tune in next Monday for another madcap recap of Celebrity Apprentice – now with 100% less Sulu!

***

Takei wasn’t available for comment – he was appearing in a nonprofit fundraiser called Broadway Backwards last night – but his husband, Brad Takei, was quick to note that his firing didn’t represent the end of the story: “George and Donald are scheduled to get together to discuss marriage equality!” says Brad. (“Think of it this way: More Victoria’s Secret models for the straight guys, Don….”)

Takei also appeared on yesterday’s Today show and on Ellen DeGeneres, who hired George to hawk show merchandise to the studio audience. Takei raised a hot $335 for an animal rescue charity. But that’s hardly where Takei’s fundraising chops have shown up most: He put a project he’s been developing for years, a musical about the Japanese American internment called “Allegiance,” on IndieGoGo looking for $50,000 in production funds, which will go toward the show’s world premiere at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, Ca. With 17 hours left, “Allegiance” has raised over $150,000! Eat your heart out, Celebrity Apprentice. Check it out (and donate what you can, if you can).

 

Posted via email from OriginalSpin