And education comes in last..

Housing Education Health NORTH

I was reading an article this morning about housing’s share of the average household budget, which included the graph above. What struck me wasn’t the yawning gap between food and housing costs in 1945 [although it's safe to say that was something to do with the war;] what stood out is that today, we spend more on healthcare than anything else and education has remained consistently last in household spending over the decades.

That could explain a lot.

The mayor termed advertising ‘visual pollution’

“Four years ago, the streets of São Paulo, South America’s biggest city, were strewn with advertising. Messages on the surfaces of buildings, buses, shops, taxis and even private homes competed with billboards to create a chaotic and dizzying corporate assault on the senses.

So, Gilberto Kassab, the centre-right mayor of the city with the continent’s biggest consumer market, came up with a radical solution: a blanket ban on outdoor advertising. In late 2006, in spite of legal wrangles and business lobbying, he announced that, almost without exception, outdoor advertising would have to be removed within months.

“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air and the visual,” he said. “We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

Read the whole story to see how digital and social marketing got a boost.

The Friday awesomeness file week 12

A week’s worth of inspiration. Click on the images. Enjoy.

Previously inspiring awesomeness files [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

The Ponytail Chronicles: Volume 2

A bit of hard-earned wisdom: there is no downtime when going ponytail.

You’ve got to eat, drink, sleep follicle extension. It barely leaves time for the day job. Namely, internet abuse. Seriously, call out the parental controls. The siren song of the marginally diverting is killing me. As an adherent to the gulag school of the creative process [stare at blank page, think, struggle, sweat, repeat] the web is a sly parasite. Lets see, today I watched YouTube covers of the Bon Iver catalog, checked useless early round results from Flushing Meadows, and watched a slide show on shipping container architecture. In other words, I hate myself. And, worse still, hate imagining some net-evangelist media guy turning virtual cartwheels on my account. Fortunately, tomorrow is tomorrow. I will focus and write till my fingers seize and blood trickles from the ear lobes. In fact, the very thought of the new me makes me want to go Bret Michael’s bandana on my increasingly outlaw mane. Tell me, search engine, do you feel lucky?

Note to clients: Not to worry, all browsing lands billing-free in that timesheet safe haven called “skill development”. That, plus, I’m never, ever going to do it again forever.

[Jim Carey is a CD at NORTH]

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