The Risk of Celebrity Endorsements
Celebrity endorsements help brands to increase loyalty and awareness. But this kind of endorsement can be a risky business. They are dependent on the celebrity’s own brand – and that can be fickle. Indeed, they are hostage to the celebrities image, and that can be very costly when things run amok. Read more here, from Stuff.
The Weird World of Expensive Wine
William Koch — yes, one of those Kochs — is giving a tour of his wine cellar when he asks the obvious question: “Did you see the wine bathroom?” he asked. “Wanna see it?”
It’s an opulent cellar, replete with Roman mosaics, a Guastavino-style ceiling and a Dionysian bust. The bathroom is, one can’t help but assume, where Koch and his guests unzip the flies of tailored Brioni suit pants and catch final glimpses of $1,000 bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux, since metabolized and micturated.
But some of Koch’s bottles will now meet different ends. Koch gave a tour of the wine bathroom for a promotional video ahead of the sale of more than 20,000 bottles from his cellar, at Sotheby’s, in New York. The sale, which took place over three days last month, fetched $21.9 million, going down as one of the richest wine auctions in history. Read more here from FiveThirtyEight.
How Diageo Helped Create the Single-Malt Shortage
It wasn’t with malice aforethought, but International Business Times lays out who did what — and why. Read more here.
Technology Is Sweeping Past Politics
An electric utility has moved into the world of innovation. It is Southern Co., under the dynamic chairmanship of Tom Fanning.
Southern is on the cutting edge of utility technologies, including carbon capture and storage, and advanced coal combustion. It is also building two state-of-the-art nuclear plants in Georgia.
Fanning believes the remit of the electric utility runs beyond the flow of electrons. Hence, one of Southern’s newest and most revolutionary undertakings: the vertical, urban farm.
According to Fanning, the idea is to go to blighted city areas where there is a shortage of fresh produce — the kind produced by truck farms — and convert old industrial and office buildings into urban farms. “We’re taking vacant, commercial buildings and creating farms that are vertical. There, produce can be grown more efficiently with our light and water systems. One of the best things is that you don’t need to use pesticides,” he told me.
Other things that are coming down the pike include the capture of carbon after combustion in power plants, steel mills and cement plants. What was a crazy scheme is almost a reality: So, be careful before you join the lynch mob of fossil-fuel haters. Read Llewellyn King‘s article in White House Chronicle.