 |
|
|
|||||
As cars become screen-dense digital environments, Volvo is reframing typography as critical safety infrastructure. Volvo Centum is a custom font designed to improve glance-based comprehension while driving.The Swedish automaker partnered with type studio Dalton Maag to engineer a font that minimizes cognitive load and maximizes clarity across digital interfaces. Every letterform was calibrated for split-second readability, with adjustments made for different lighting conditions, screen sizes and reading distances. The typeface supports over 800 languages, including complex scripts like Chinese and Arabic, ensuring consistent performance whether displayed on a dashboard in Stockholm or Shanghai. It debuts in the upcoming EX60 model before rolling out across Volvo's ecosystem.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Midway through singing at Taipei Dome late December, Jolin Tsai mounted a 30-meter mechanical serpent that carried her through the venue while she performed "Medusa" a spectacle that left 40,000 attendees stunned and went viral online.The pop star's "PLEASURE" world tour, which cost around USD 280 million to produce, opened with a three-story-tall ceremonial bull procession before Tsai appeared unexpectedly on an elevated platform wearing a dual-faced mask expressing both pleasure and pain. The massive snake, which she rode as she circled the entire dome, was just one element of what ETtoday reports was the most expensive concert production in the Taipei Dome's history. The show's five narrative chapters also featured nearly 30 large-scale art installations and 20 hybrid fantasy creatures.TREND BITEAs generative AI makes digital spectacle infinitely reproducible, physical experiences are moving into the realm of the impossible to fake. Tsai's serpent too massive, too mechanical, too viscerally present to be dismissed as a deepfake exemplifies how live entertainment is weaponizing scale and IRL overwhelm against the flattening effect of screens.The strategy extends beyond concert stages: Louis Vuitton's ship-shaped Seoul flagship and Gentle Monster's theatrical retail spaces demonstrate that when algorithms can conjure anything, brands compete by building what AI cannot: three-dimensional absurdity that demands physical presence to fully comprehend. The question facing industries from hospitality to automotive isn't whether to embrace maximalism, but whether they can engineer moments so deliberately excessive that "you had to be there" becomes the ultimate social currency.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
OpenAI just introduced ChatGPT Health, a dedicated space within its chatbot designed to help people make sense of fragmented health information.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
ASOS just updated its return policy, targeting customers whose shopping style makes free returns unsustainable.The UK-based online fashion retailer has revamped its previously implemented Fair Use Policy, now deducting GBP 3.95 per returned parcel from refunds for shoppers with a return rate of 70% or higher who've placed at least three orders in the past year. For the most prolific returners those with an 80% return rate across five or more orders ASOS charges an additional GBP 3.95 handling fee on top of standard delivery costs.The policy includes a 30-day processing window and continuously monitors customer behavior over rolling 12-month periods, allowing shoppers to track their return rate through their account dashboard. ASOS is framing the policy as protecting free returns for the majority while addressing a minority of customers whose shopping patterns strain the business model. Customers can avoid the fees by keeping items worth more than GBP 40 per order, and ASOS still offers full free returns for faulty or incorrect items.TREND BITEASOS's Fair Use Policy uses economic friction to reshape customer behavior without outright bans. Rather than penalizing all returns or eliminating the service entirely, the retailer creates a tiered system that preserves benefits for most while discouraging excessive returns through modest fees. The approach balances business sustainability with customer retention, banking on the reality that most shoppers will adjust their habits rather than absorb recurring costs.It's also a tacit acknowledgment that the environmental cost of returns the carbon emissions from transport, packaging waste and products that end up in landfill has become too significant to ignore. As e-commerce matures and margins compress, expect more brands to deploy similar behavioral economics: not punishing customers, but making unsustainable habits just inconvenient enough to discourage them, for both financial and environmental reasons.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
In a converted postal station in Buenos Aires' Retiro neighborhood, Posdata has reimagined the traditional café as a space where correspondence and coffee converge.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising