Choosing to live a simple, minimal, life is one thing, but what happens when you have young children, who are constantly being targeted by advertising and marketing campaigns, enticing and tempting them to want ever more toys and possessions?

When you choose to raise your children in a frugal, non-consumerism sort of way, you are going against a powerful advertising media. Images of the latest movie and its accompanying toys, video games, and action figures are all over the walls, cups, trays, and containers of fast-food restaurants. Television commercials tempt your children with compelling advertising, making your children think they just have to have the latest cereal, candy, video game, or toy.

Seven British smartphone app entrepreneurs discuss creating and selling apps for the iPhone. If you can strike upon the right idea you could do well as an app developer…

Thanks to the relative ease of fashioning an app (using a dedicated “developer’s kit”, which makes programming reasonably pain-free), around 15,000 are submitted to Apple every week for approval and sale through its App Store. The majority are created not by traditional software giants, but by individuals, working from home.

Today filmmakers post video snippets of selected movie scenes online to help drum up interest in upcoming film releases.

With no such option available to the promoters of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, they instead created a telephone hotline allowing people to call in and hear audio teasers recorded by the film’s stars, including Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, and James Earl Jones.

As reported in the Spring 1980 issue of Bantha Tracks – the original Star Wars Fan Club newsletter – a telephone hotline was set up to allow callers to dial in and hear teasers for The Empire Strikes Back several months before the film’s release.

The idea might still make for a retro-styled form of promotion today though.

Endorsements work as a means of advertising more because we have enjoyed an aspect of an endorsing celebrity’s work, rather than taking too much in the way of assurance from their “support” of a product or service.

According to Stallen and her colleagues, these results suggest “the perception of a celebrity face results in the retrieval of explicit memories” – say, of a fun night out with friends, during which you enjoyed the actor’s latest movie. “The positive affect that is experienced during the retrieval of these memories may subsequently be transferred to the product associated with the celebrity,” they write.

Mark Donselar’s collection of vintage motorcycle adverts.

Cool, custom made barcodes that resemble the products you sell or market.

A study of New York Times article reading patterns has found readers tend to share items that are generally positive, emotional, intellectually challenging, or of a scientific nature, with their friends, a finding that somewhat refutes the notion people are mainly interested in stories of scandal or gossip.

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

Brand New make their best and worst identity and logo selections for 2009. It comes as a surprise to me though to learn that the new AOL logo wins their highest accolade.

Hold the rotten tomatoes. I agree, AOL is neither technically nor aesthetically the best logo or identity of the year. But no identity will have a bigger impact in the evolution of a brand as AOL’s. Most companies brand to match their audience, AOL is branding to create a new audience. The name may conjure the 1990s but the identity is twenty-first century all the way. Wolff Olins may be the punchline for many designers but, even if you don’t know it or care to admit it, they are having the last laugh.

And on the subject of old and new logos, here’s a look at different IBM letterheads over the years.

The layout and design of restaurant and cafe menus, including the use of typography, can greatly influence diners when it comes to selecting what to order, according to US author William Poundstone.

Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, high-profit item – in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make,” Poundstone explains. “A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.”

A nice collection of minimally designed advertising posters.

Definitely a case of – dare I use the cliche – less is more.