Source: M.T.A. Sells Naming Rights to Subway Station

The MTA has finally been able to sell the naming rights to one of their subway stations. Atlantic Ave/Pacific Street (which is the connecting station for various trains and the LIRR) will be named after Barclays bank. The logic behind this change is that the new Brooklyn Nets stadium (set to open in 2012) will be called Barclays Center.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, let’s look at the facts.

The MTA has been in severe debt for many years now, and stories about budget deficits and cut service have been much too commonplace. If this $4 million deal will keep Metrocard prices steady (at least for another year or two), then there’s really no reason not to do it.

People may complain that the rebranding process dishonors pieces of Brooklyn history, but it’s just the subway station. Atlantic Ave/Pacific St is sure to become a historic landmark… when hovercars and public transit powered by positive thoughts become the norm. But for now, the subway system is going to remain as busy as ever. It’s not like they’re auctioning off the naming rights to historic streets.

And consider this. The area in question on Flatbush Ave is being completely restructured to become a downtown metropolis. They’ve already torn down old houses so that high-rise condos can be built. They’re going to be building a basketball stadium! Besides the obvious issues surrounding the gentrification of the area, how is any of that any less disrespectful to history? The bottom line is money. Why else would New York even bring the Nets over from New Jersey? Maybe they couldn’t find any companies who wanted to buy the branding rights of the New York Knicks.

Speaking as both a native of Brooklyn and an Advertising scholar, I say you gotta roll with the times.

Source: Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation

There’s an age-old story about a contest where villagers had to guess the weight of a cow just by looking. The town butchers were of course the most accurate. But a curious thing happened- after pooling together all of the guesses, their average was even closer to the actual weight. In short, the combined wisdom of the crowd was greater than that of any single individual.

Now then, that brings us to crowdsourcing. To summarize the concept glibly, crowdsourcing is when a company allows many different individuals to contribute their ideas in a contest-style format and the company then chooses a winner (or amalgamates the best aspects of several ideas). This can work for designing logos, programming scripts, deciding a color scheme for a product- pretty much anything in today’s technological age of connectedness.

Competition lights fires under creatives, right? It makes you put in that extra 10% so you can edge out the competition to gain recognition or a quick buck. So crowdsourcing is a good thing, right?

Well, think about it from the perspective of the creative. The company will no doubt be paying less to the contest winner than if they had hired a professional to do the work, so in this respect, it devalues your work. But it’s not just about the money. If companies just crowdsource the design of everything, then in theory wouldn’t that mean that the opinions of all those individuals would create a super-opinion that would be better than any individual designer? Only in theory. In practice, designers and creatives work in their own distinctive styles, which when done well, help a brand create their own trademark style. If a company just takes bits and pieces of all the best entries, then they’ll lose the subtleties and nuances behind each decision- why these two colors work together, how the curves of each part complement each other, the overall theme of the work, etc.

And of course, let’s not forget that Twitter paid $6 for the design of their logo.

We creatives have to eat too.

The sandwich chain Subway may be solely responsible for the NBC Show ‘Chuck’ staying on the air, speculates this article.

Subway has basically become the official sponsor of the show. Entering into a deal with Subway may deter the cancellation of the spy comedy despite less-than-stellar ratings. And the payoff? Prominently displaying Subway sandwiches within the scene settings and also shameless mentions within the dialogue itself.

Is this the future of product placement?

Well, that’s an inherently flawed question. This sort of hyperreal advertising is already happening in the present. Everyone’s aware that Simon, Paula and Randy (and Kara) all only drink one brand of carbonated beverage. The Transformers movie franchise is the perfect platform for GM’s highly transparent product placement campaign. Viewers of the CW hit ‘Smallville’ can tell you exactly which model of Toyota the show’s characters love to drive and their favorite brand of chewing gum. Even Terminator Salvation, set in a nigh-apocalyptic future, featured a particular SUV blown up by robots. In the scene immediately following the dust settling, viewers had to try hard to ignore the grill of the vehicle on the ground, still proudly displaying the JEEP logo. There was another scene where survivors gathered at a gas station/former convenience store. The camera deliberately panned upward to show a much weathered 7-ELEVEN logo.

Is this the future of product placement?

Will money soon influence art to the degree that the audience will not be able to ignore it? In the age of TiVo and online viewing, commercials have certainly lost their impact. Is the only solution to make TV shows into ads themselves? When do we reach the tipping point? Back when product placement wasn’t as common, it was easy to tell which companies paid to have their goods deliberately placed onto a set. And then it began happening more and it became harder to tell which were the result of natural dialogue (i.e. saying ‘iPod’ instead of ‘mp3 player’) and which were being paid for (ironically, the makers of the Harold and Kumar series did not have a deal with White Castle). So what happens when it becomes too evident that product placement is happening? Will it just stop working altogether? Will viewers resent that brand? Or will they grow to love the product as if it were their own child?

Only time will tell.

Anybody wanna offer me a job?

It was bound to happen. I have joined the TwitterSphere:

http://twitter.com/kennySHARKchung