posted on January 13th, 2008 in Content, Information Design, Music 

The World’s First Album Cover - Alex Steinweiss’ Greatest Hit

Strange as this might seem, this page may be the only place on the Web to see the exterior and interior artwork for the World’s First Album Cover. Get up in here.

posted on December 11th, 2007 in Content, Information Design, Merch, Merchandise, Monetizing, Podcast, Tiki Bar TV 

Tiki Bar TV launches the Lala Pinup Calendar

Tiki Bar TV’s Lala Fastwaster now has a pinup calendar. Artfully rendered by Vancouver visual effects artist and increasingly-popular pinup illustrator Kevin Genzel (thethirdsequence.com) this calendar achieves a lot more than meets the eye. For thousands of Internet Geeks, saying “Lala Pinup Calendar?!” will doubtless be more than enough to capture credit card numbers. But this hits a trifecta, well, ok, maybe a quadfecta.

• “Lala Pinup?!” - Understood
• Direct Function - By actually providing real utility, it increases the impulse purchase likelihood because “Hey, I need a calendar anyway…”
• Shibboleth - Tiki Bar TV now offers another product that lets fans identify themselves as “in the Tiki Bar TV Fan Club”
• Brand Deepening - The genuinely authentic rendering of these illustrations itself reinforces the cool retro vibe which spans other Tiki Bar TV elements.

All these elements together just deepen and expand the Tiki Bar TV brand. We’ve already mentioned their truly awesome original Charooba Mug here. Charooba is the Tiki Bar TV mascot made into an actual Tiki Mug. (A coffee table book that ITSELF becomes a coffee table!) This wicked, green glazed creature is a must own for any serious fan of the show and anyone who calls themselves a Tiki Collector. Buy them both and be done with it.

posted on June 29th, 2007 in Information Design, Rooster Teeth, Undies 

The Rooster Teeth Comics Calendar

The Rooster Teeth Store now offers a completely customizable wall calendar. Users choose their 12 favorite comic strips (one for January, one for February, etc.) and they also can add their own unique entries into each day on the calendar (e.g. “July 1, My Birthday”,”August 8, 1997-Lord British assassinated. Failed coup attempt was obviously an inside job with Chuckles waiting in the wings.”,”June 28, 2007 - Red vs Blue Blood Gulch Chronicles ends…”)

posted on May 29th, 2007 in Information Design, Undies 

The Dissolution of Forms

So one of the hardest things about serving clients like ours is convincing them to trust us.

1. If you spend you waking life as a living exemplar of a completely new kind of content creator,
2. if you’ve been exposed to years of experience inside an Internet phenomena,
3. if you’ve reached millions of human beings with your talents,
4. if you’ve spoken as a keynote speaker at a conference,
5. if you’ve been interviewed by major media,
6. if you’re starting to see what I mean…

Then you probably don’t think you have anything to learn from a bunch of folks who ship orders for you. What could we know?

The beauty of serving many Undependents™ is you come to know quite a bit. You see what everyone is trying, what works, what doesn’t. You become a kind of meta-tacit knowledge repository. And that’s what Amplifier hopes to be. And a huge part of what we believe is happening is the fundamental dissolution of traditional mass media forms.

You wouldn’t know it from glancing around, the store shelves at Borders are flooded as ever with junk books, amray dvds and jewelcase cds. But for those who dare to create and distribute media directly to their audiences (namely Undies) the question is begged “Why just crank out another Amray-cased DVD release? Why not reinvent the DVD medium with a completely original release? Your audience might even be MORE likely to buy something truly novel and spend REAL dollars doing it, than buy just another merely functional release?”