Brand News
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Sonny Astani walked into a Westwood movie theater in 1985 and saw the film that changed his life: “Blade Runner,” the science-fiction tale that imagined a dystopian Los Angeles where jet-powered cars zoom past skyscrapers covered with enormous, cinematic advertisements.
Decades later, the Iranian-born businessman is determined to bring some of those futuristic images to life. His plan? Attach an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium project he is building in downtown L.A.
Some people are starting to wonder whether the one-by-one approach to conservation is really the right solution. With many predicting the extinction of thousands of species, Bob Smith, a researcher in conservation at the University of Kent in Britain, argues that targeting individual species is too narrow. He praises the recent trend toward identifying and branding entire regions as “flagship areas”.
Conservation International, based in Arlington, Virginia, has its biodiversity hotspots: (“the most remarkable places on earth are also the most threatened” is their slogan). These include the tropical Andes, the Brazilian Atlantic forests and Africa’s Cape floristic region. The World Wide Fund for Nature, based in Gland, Switzerland, boasts that it is “working for conservation of the world’s most fabulous places”, which it called “global ecoregions”.
Even the American Dialect Society knows how risky home mortgages are these days. The group of wordsmiths chose “subprime” as 2007’s Word of the Year at its annual convention Friday.
Today, the couple’s quirky enterprise is owned by the Clorox Company, a consumer products giant best known for making bleach, which bought it for $913 million in November. Clorox plans to turn Burt’s Bees into a mainstream American brand sold in big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Along the way, Clorox executives say, they plan to learn from unusual business practices at Burt’s Bees — many centered on environmental sustainability. Clorox, the company promises, is going green.
Where are the Gremlins of yesteryear? Or the El Dorados, for that matter?
They are history. The industry is on an increasingly strict diet of alphabet soup with numerical garnish. Alphanumeric nameplates — which consist of nonsensical combinations of letters and numbers — were on 135 models in the 2007 model year, compared with 80 a decade ago, according to Kelley Blue Book.