Hasta La Ideas

Look, up in the sky, it’s thousands of pink soap bubbles shaped like that little Kirby guy from Nintendo games! Such was the reaction of onlookers at Kirby Middle School in Birmingham, Alabama last fall, when Nintendo celebrated the launch of a new video game featuring the fighting pink puffball by filling the sky with giant Kirby logos. They were “Flogos,” floating concoctions of soap-based foam and helium developed by SnowMasters. The company has branded the sky with Flogos for clients such as Mercedes-Benz, Sheraton, McDonald’s, and Method organic cleaning products (yup, Flogos are environmentally friendly).

Among SnowMasters’ latest Flogos was a distinctively spiked capital “A” wearing a halo—a foamy version of the Anaheim Angels logo ordered up for the team’s opening day. The two- and three-foot-wide bubble clouds were a crowd pleaser, at least for a while. “At the Angels game, wind gusts of 19 mph tore some of the Flogos into unintelligible cloud pieces, and the sun melted others,” notes Alana Semuels in today’s Los Angeles Times. Which raises the question: can Flogos be used at indoor events? Indeed, assures the company’s website, and “with very entertaining results. Generally, the higher the ceiling, the better the effect.”

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(Photo: Warren Clarke)

Branding wombats. Nope, it’s not the working title of Crocodile Dundee IV or a Men at Work comeback album, it’s the goal of “global diversified mining group” XStrata, which has agreed to fund an aggressive, multi-million dollar program to save the endangered marsupial in exchange for wombat branding rights. “Xstrata’s name will appear on everything wombat: from websites to educational DVDs to shirts worn by wildlife workers,” writes Todd Woody in Time. “Xstrata execs will also star in documentaries about the northern hairy-nose [wombat] and speak at media events.” Why wombats, reclusive, nocturnal creatures that have been compared to everything from porcine badgers to Alan Greenspan? Well, they’re rather adorable and massively endangered. “There’s obviously benefit in terms of the way people perceive Xstrata,” said Peter Freyberg, the CEO of Xstrata Coal. Obviously. Note to Crash Bandicoot: we smell a dingo of a co-branding opportunity.

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Speaking of no good punk friends as we were in the previous post (and on a regular basis now that we’ve both turned 80 years old), this writer ends his day on an entertaining, but head slappingly frustrating story coming from the music world. The mall-based outlet frequently visited by teenagers (who are even worse than “no good punks”), Forever 21, has gotten into some hot water for blatantly stealing the logo of the band Minor Threat and throwing it onto a truly horrible nostalgic-for-the-80s t-shirt. Once the shirt was spotted and made the rounds a bit online, members of the iconic band caught wind of it and shut the whole thieving operation down, forcing Forever 21 to remove the shirt from the racks. Certainly always bad to steal, which we believe is without question and we’re happy to see wound up being properly rectified, strange as it is to consider that a store that large would try something so obvious, but it does also raise other serious pieces of curiosity: 1) how many people who shop at Forever 21 know who/what Minor Threat is? 2) Were any of these customers even alive at the time the band was playing (we’re guessing not, since being 21 would have seen their arrival some five years after the group broke up). And 2b) Were any of them alive to even remember the 1980s? We’re confused. And feeling quite old.

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Steven Heller must be smiling this week as he, and seemingly millions like him, complained publicly about the rebranding of Tropicana‘s orange juice packaging, enough so that the company has decided to return to their original look, designed by the good people at Sterling Brands (and whose work is now back, albeit awkwardly, on the Tropicana site, with a link telling you to click to see the brand new packaging — we expect this will probably be fixed fairly quickly). This, following all the rigamarole over Pespi‘s new logo, sure must make Arnell, the firm behind both redesigns, not be feeling so hot (and likely worried about when Pepsi decides to do their next agency review). But, for sure, it’s also a testament to the power of branding, when you get a reaction this strong to make a company as large as Pepsi turn a very quick 180. Though, in what feels like another blunder, that isn’t really what the company is saying:

It was not the volume of the outcries that led to the corporate change of heart, [Tropicana president Neil Campbell] said, because “it was a fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product.”

Rather, the criticism is being heeded because it came, Mr. Campbell said in a telephone interview on Friday, from some of “our most loyal consumers.”

“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, he added. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”

A lousy quote, for sure, and it begs a lot of questions: Who is this tiny segment of the orange juice buying public and why do they hold such clout? Are they buying thirty vats of the stuff every week, shipped to them by barge and large trucks? Do they all have the last name “Orange” and spent all their time in tanning booths, hoping to look more like the fruit for which they’re named? Somebody really ought to make a documentary about these mysterious people, whoever they are.

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In other re-branding news, Air France has rolled out a new logo. Designed by the firms Brand Image and Desgrippes & Laga, the letters are no longer in italics and the space between the two words has been cut, joining them together. The firm also stripped down the number of stripes to just a solitary red one within the logo itself, though they’ve retained the familiar batch of them for their aircraft’s tails.

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