For a Glimpse Of The Future, Try Reading A 3.5-Inch Floppy Disk Tom Persky’s company, floppydisk.com, sells about 250,000 of the 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch square plastic storage cards each year. It has an inventory of about 1 million disks, many of which Persky acquired from competing companies as they went out of business. And he has no plans to restock them as they’re sold. “We stayed in the business through the good times of the floppy disk business, when it was a very common way to store media, through the trough of what we have now of people not using it very much at all,” Persky says. That's not to say floppy disks aren't still his mainstay. Any remaining modern demand for the once-ubiquitous floppy is driven by machines still made with old data inputs. The first floppy disks, introduced by IBM in 1971, were 8-inches big. The problem with digital storage--as the hundreds of people who ship Persky their floppy disks each year are finding out--is that it requires active upkeep. Persky’s data recovery methods are low-tech.
Cartoons on matchbooks I stopped into the MARVA matchbook club meeting yesterday to hand off some old matchbooks (as you know, I love ephemera) and the group was very welcoming. They usually have piles they trade amongst themselves as everyone has to specialize. I found a few of cartoon interest: 3 hillbilly gag cartoons, probably from the 1940s or early 1950s, on matchbook covers. "Won't Be Long Now" hillbilly cartoon gag on matchbook cover. A cricket that looks a lot like Disney's Jiminy on a "Li'l Cricket Food Stores" matchbook cover. Matchbook ad for Art Instruction, Inc, the school that Charles Schulz attended (via correspondence) and taught at before Peanuts. Interior of matchbook ad for Art Instruction, Inc, the school that Charles Schulz attended (via correspondence) and taught at before Peanuts. Cartoon matchbook spotlighting French cartoonist. ANNÉE DE L'ENFANCE [aka, Année internationale de l’enfant : 1979] Translation by Portugese comics scholar Leo de Sa:
Ambassadors of Goodwill: Vintage Matchbook Advertising and Design I picked up this salesman’s catalog for the Mercury Match Corporation of Zanesville, Ohio, about 25 years ago at the big antique show in Brimfield, Massachusetts. I remember the purchase vividly—I was over the moon, but tried to act all cool as I attempted to barter the price down from $35 to the far more reasonable $25 I had in mind. But I knew that I’d have paid $50 or more if I had to; anything to get my hands on Advertise with Mercury Union Label Book Matches. “Every time you pass out a Book of Matches,” the Book Matches Work page reads, “you are sending out an ambassador of goodwill directed to the very people you want to reach.” Related Articles: No Related Posts Found
How Patagonia Makes More Money By Trying To Make Less It’s holiday season and retailers are gearing up with every technique possible to maximize revenue for the next few weeks. Some retailers will earn more during the holiday shopping season than in the previous months combined, and already this year’s Black Friday online sales set a record by topping $1 billion for the first time, according to comScore. Sales for Cyber Monday were expected to exceed $1.5 billion, another record. But in the midst of this shopping mania, one prominent retailer took a different approach. Instead of blasting sales prices and urging consumers to load up their virtual shopping carts, Patagonia encourages consumers to buy less by promoting its Common Threads Initiative on its home page, advocating sustainability. This holiday campaign follows last year’s groundbreaking advertising strategy featuring an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday saying “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” That would be an easy pursuit if Patagonia didn’t care about running a great business.
The Most Egregiously Bad Product Placement You'll Ever See--And How To Do It Right As viewers DVR through commercials, put themselves on "do not call" lists, and set their browsers to limit tracking, product placement (placing a product into a TV series or movie) has become an increasingly popular way for brands to increase awareness, preference, and loyalty. How popular? American Idol alone had 577 placements in 39 episodes in 2011. Generally a brand has to pay a pretty penny to get on popular shows and in movies. Coke, for instance, has been featured on American Idol since the beginning of the show. An important point here to take away is the long-term partnership between Coke and Idol. 2) Don't just be in show; shoot for plot integration. One example of good integration is Target's product placement in the "Express Christmas" episode of Modern Family. 3) Don't overdo it.Here's a brand that did. 4) Don't get lost in the crowd. 5) Be so great you get placed for free. 7) Don't get dissed. 8) Track and measure. Want more marketing insight?
How Elf On The Shelf Went From Family Tradition To The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Innovators often have those “blue sky” moments, times where they close their eyes and conjure ideas on the grand scale. But for three business owners, the actual sky was the backdrop for their biggest dream: to see a 46-foot tall inflatable elf sailing through the air during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Not just any old elf, though. I Believe I Can Fly The trio own Creatively Classic Activities and Books, a Georgia-based company that developed the “Elf on the Shelf” Christmas book. “When we got together at that time to discuss our dream for the brand, seeing the Elf in the parade was the pinnacle,” recalls Christa Pitts, a former on-air host for QVC. “The barriers of where you could and couldn’t be didn’t exist,” Chanda Bell says. Risky Business It was tough going, says Carol Aebersold, “but we had an unspoken agreement that failure was not an option.” Flying off the Shelves That was fine with Pitts. Still, Pitts says, they were cautious about expanding too quickly.
Airline Timetable Images - Airline baggage labels - Airline luggage labels - Airline baggage tags - Airline stickers - Index Below is a list of airlines with images of airline baggage labels on this website. The airlines are grouped by continent: AfricaAsiaAustralia and the Pacific AreaEuropeNorth AmericaSouth America Please note that the years given with the labels are often estimated ("circa" or "?" have been omitted), though based on educated guesses. These pages also include the occasional baggage tag and ink blotter. Check for updates to the airline baggage label section.
Li’l Abner’s Al Capp: A Monstrous Creature, a Masterful Cartoonist No doubt about it: Al Capp engaged in depraved behavior. Most disgraceful was his attempted rape of a number of women, from college co-eds to Grace Kelly. And, as the interview below suggests, there may be more. Capp also created Li’l Abner, once one of America’s most acclaimed comic strips. It began in 1934, the Depression era, and was centered around the fictional, dirt-poor Appalachian town inhabited mostly by innocent yokels and conniving scoundrels. At its best, it ridiculed the powerful and pompous in politics and culture with shrewd insight, rollicking humor, and a distinctly lush, elegant drawing style. Abner rapidly gained unprecedented popularity and ran for 40-plus years. And now, both his dark and light sides are chronicled in Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, a valuable, thorough, and sensitive 300-page biography of this contradictory and deeply troubled individual, written by Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen. All images copyright © Capp Enterprises, Inc. Hah! Exactly.
A Fanzine Editor’s 60-Year Love Affair with 1950s Comics There’s this comic-book story about space aliens who try to save our planet from self-annihilation. But they arrive too late: We’d already destroyed ourselves in an atomic war. They land their rocket ship on a chunk of a devastated earth and discover a science-fiction comic book amid the rubble. It contains a story about aliens who look exactly like them, who try to save the earth but arrive too late, and who discover a comic book. Al Williamson: art Squa Tront is also the name of a fanzine that pays homage to 1950s-era EC Comics, a publisher that emerged in the 1940s. Wally Wood: art The following is the first of my two-part coverage of Benson, who’s been writing about comics since 1956. You’ll find part two, a look at John’s other work, including “The Sincerest Form of Parody,” a new collection of the best Mad-inspired satirical comics of the 1950s, here. Harvey Kurtzman: art BENSON: I’d say my interest has been intermittent at best. Lena the Hyena; Basil Wolverton: art