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Top Gear presenter, Jeremy Clarkson- a wealth man made rich by celebrity vents his frustration at the banking system and the current crisis.

"As I sat there on that horrible Monday, watching the whole financial world on the brink of collapse, I thought back to all the midnight oil I’d burnt writing these columns, all the crappy hotels I’d stayed in while making various television shows. And how all of that revenue would be lost for a raft of reasons I simply didn’t understand.

Of course I made strenuous efforts to get my money out of AIG as soon as the scale of its problems became apparent. But it wasn’t possible. It had shut the fund in which I’d invested and it would remain closed for three months while it tried to sell the assets. “We need to do this in an orderly fashion,” said the man on the phone, calmly.

Inwardly I was screaming. I don’t give a shit about an orderly fashion, any more than a man in the trenches wants to look smart while running for his life. It’s my money. I gave it to you. You’ve squandered it on a Mexican’s house in San Diego and a stupid football team and that’s your problem. Not mine.

It turned out, however, that I was wrong. It was my problem, so I decided to try to understand banking. And what I’ve gleaned from a two-week crash course is that it is completely unfathomable. There isn’t a single person in the entire world who has the first idea how the system works."

Posted by Ed Cotton With the word going crazy, it's hard to know where things might be heading, but I think I might have found a clue at The Ace Hotel in Portland.

It wasn't that I stayed there, but I wandered into it after eating at its adjacent restaurant, Clyde Common (excellent, by the way).

The world of hotels is a good metaphor and a sort of divining rod for the world at large.

Years ago, there was the boutique designer hotel- all open spaces and various expensive objects and furniture littered around.

It was the time when the only hotels that mattered were designed by Starck.

The tide shifted to opulence, lavishness and excess, when a couple of years ago, Mr Schrager declared his creation, the boutique hotel officially dead and opened the velvety Gramercy Park.

The Ace Hotel is timeless. It possess a kind of "make do" attitude, it's neither opulent or minimalist. It uses simple, organic materials and has some really nice touches. They have rooms you can afford without an expense account-starting at $95, there's a coin-operated laundry (no one wants to pay for hotel laundry services), two landmark adjacent businesses; the restaurant mentioned above and the Stumptown coffee house and a bike rental service.



Ace seems to be ahead of the curve and represent where things might be heading.

Here's why..

1.Local Matters- people want to break free of chain consistency; where passion and care seem to play second fiddle to the supposed comfort and security of corporate sameness. Ace is a mini-chain - there's a hotel in Seattle and soon to be outposts in NYC and Palm Springs, but supporting local businesses gives it a local feel. It also doesn't feel like an unwelcome invader, it seems to understand the world that surrounds it.

2. Enough of the Cookie Cutter- people want to see the rough edges.

3. Community Matters- the coffee house and restaurant aren't owned by the hotel, but they feel part of the family.

4. Making Do- We don't need or want the flash. We want resourcefulness, getting more use out of old things, finding new uses out of old things. Doing things on a limited budget makes sense and leads to more interesting solutions.

5. Invitational- We need more participants, collaborators and we need more sharing and talking. The Ace Hotel has a gallery space that it rents out for this kind of stuff all the time. Clyde Common also boasts communal tables- more of that sharing in action.

6. Being Thoughtful- Thinking ahead and doing something different that makes a statement of your intent. Everything communicates as we know and we often make the mistake of thinking that this means everything needs to be the same, instead of using "everything" to tell different and layered stories. Ace's coin-operated laundry, is not only really convenient, it also says a lot about the experience and the attitude.




Posted by Ed Cotton For years video games and their makers have been dismissed by many as irrelevant, child's play.

The industry has carved out an impressive place in the entertainment space, but never seems to get the love or respect it feels it deserves.

With computing power advancing at a rapid rate and consoles being at the forefront of this, we are now starting to see games and the gaming industry being taken seriously.

One of the first examples was Folding@Home on the PS3, which allows console owners to band together to help medical science.

The latest manifestation is the amazing collaboration between Citroen and Polyphony Digital, the makers of the hit driving simulation game, Gran Turismo.

The Citroen GT unveiled at last week's Paris Auto Show was created in Polyphony's computers and then rendered into a live concept at Citroen.



The car therefore has been designed to perfection for both the real and virtual/digital worlds.




Posted by Ed Cotton It was 1998 and the internet was about to change everything.

Clients lined up outside advertising agencies demanding they take their business.

The ad business thought it had won the house in Vegas with big money flowing in and the chance to be as wacky and funny as they wanted.

The gerbils spot for Outpost.com was the poster child of this period and it's worth showing again in all its glory.




There's a fascinating interview with Outpost's CEO from Business Week, where he talks about a couple of worrying (Usenet?) postings and how proud he is that the spot received an A rating from Entertainment Weekly.

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing.


Posted by Ed Cotton 'That's good though, they are the I-generation; iPods, iPhones, everything starts with I. Well, we will have to go back to the basics now. Icelanders are risk-takers, but hard working, they will have to downsize. We will have to eat haddock and Icelandic lamb and forget these imports of goose livers and Japanese soy sauce. When everyone was extremely rich in Iceland - you know, last month, it was with money that they never have earned. Now those who were extremely rich are just normally rich, but they think they are poor. They were spoilt, spending billions.'

Siggi Hall- Chef- Iceland.

More on Iceland's rags to riches and back to rags ride here..

Posted by Ed Cotton It's now become very clear that most of the West has been living on cheap credit for way too long.

It has fueled consumption growth and helped people get what they wanted without having to worry much about the consequences.

While you can look at declining consumer confidence with regard to the economy and people's own financial situations, it doesn't look like something that's going to suddenly swing back to where it once was.

The new normality is going to with us for a considerable amount of time.

This means people are going to question every single purchase and ask themselves if it's a necessity or something they can live without. If it's a necessity, they are going to work out if they can find an alternative at a cheaper price. Expect budgets to constrict, savings to go up and private label/low cost alternatives to be the vogue.

Here are 10 things that I expect to rise.

1. Strict budget planning- banks, Quicken, Mint etc could all be winners here if they can help people control and mange their spending

2. New and alternative forms of retail to become more popular- good for Ebay, thrift stores and low cost grocery chains like Wal-Mart..

3. More hoarding and bulk buying- good for Costco- but people will be shopping there for essentials and staying clear of the premium items...

4. Barter services to become popular again...

5. People taking on whatever work they can beyond their full-time jobs- moonlighting and daylighting to happen all over the place.

6. More self sufficiency- more DIY home improvements and less contractors..fewer re-models and big projects, but for general maintenance consumers will do this themselves. Home Depot/Lowes could help the newbies here...

7. Rise of the grow your own movement- with $50,000 of annual food production available in the average American lot, people will start growing their own vegetables and foods. People will also start doing things like canning and making more of their own food- less prepared foods and eating out.

8. Grocery chains will invest more in private label development and start to take more share from brands. This change will be a catalyst for the revival and further development of PL.

9. Value focused brands need to get their story right because there are big opportunities if they can. Old Navy and Uniqlo in apparel are cases in point. This could be the time for Dell to surge- if they can find a way to re-frame value that's right for today...

10. Subscription culling- companies have grown fat on the profits of the multiple subscriptions to services that American consumers have. Expected cable channels to be culled and non-essential mobile services to do the same. Anyone selling subs needs to be very careful they don't find themselves on the chopping block. Offering new value based subs could be the solution here.


Posted by Ed Cotton Clay Shirky makes a great point in this short interview about the focus of agencies on producing everything to the highest quality. The single-minded focus on production excellence ends up being alienating to consumers because it doesn't invite dialog.

The finished piece of high production work is a statement that isn't looking for answers or questions, it's simply a command. Clay's point here is about how agencies and brands can become more human by looking a little less perfect. This is something 2.0 companies know only too well. The idea of being in a perm-beta state is inviting in itself.




Posted by Ed Cotton Here's a great visual from The Deal that explains the packaging and re-marketing of credit. Sort of explains how the badness was turned into goodness and everyone slept soundly at night until the day they realized the badness was real bad. It's also the system that propped up the consumer economy. An economy driven by cheap and easy credit isn't sustainable. For years, the US economy has been running on cheap credit. What happens when it goes away remains to be seen, but companies are need to get amazingly creative if they want to continue to sell in these tough times.



From Paul Kedrosky


Posted by Ed Cotton JR is creating an impact in the street space with such scale and imagination that it puts advertising to shame. His massive portraits are of inhabitants of Brazilian favelas, Parisian ghettos and Palestinian towns. He's a graffiti artist who picked up a camera and the results of his work are extraordinary. He has a show in London at the moment- the first two images are from there and the final image is from the favela project he did in Brazil. He's work blends the best in photography with graffiti and social causes.







Posted by Ed Cotton Iceland has become something of a poster child for a country that borrowed too much money and sucked in cheap capital.

The country's banks got more than a little carried away.

According to The Financial Times.

"The witch-hunt is sustained by a sense of injustice that these upstarts got so big in the first place – combined assets of the top three are about nine times Iceland’s gross domestic product."

The banks are now of course in terrible trouble forcing the Icelandic government to bail them out with money it doesn't have.


Posted by Ed Cotton