What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

from Sunday’s NYT. full piece here.

I read this with interest, dying to read the comments section…but there wasn’t one. I’m guessing they were afraid to have it. Saw a few FB friends discussing and they all felt like the article didn’t reflect their experience in NYC.

We all do things in order to be (sexually) attractive to others. Some with abandon, some with reservations.

I also listened to the Lena Dunham interview on Fresh Air today – anybody else catch it? I thought the segment where Terry asked her about young adults’ sexual behaviors and appetites being influenced by watching porn was handled in a thought-provoking way. I’m sure the subject matter is mildly horrifying to many but I thought the discussion accurately reflected what I’ve heard in interviews.

According to a recent analysis by Draft FCB, over 80% of today’s most popular US albums are produced by minority or multicultural musical groups.

The agency looked at Billboard’s Top 10 artist’s race and ethnicity from 1950-2009.

YouTube is aiming to create 25 hours of programming per day with the help of some of the top names in traditional TV. The Google-owned site is spreading its wealth among producers, directors, and other filmmakers, using a $100 million pot of seed money it committed last fall. The fund represents YouTube’s largest spending on original content so far.

The idea is to create 96 additional YouTube channels, which are essentially artists’ home pages, where viewers can see existing video clips and click “subscribe” to be notified when new content goes up.

Well-funded videos by a select roster of stars are likely to be more watchable than the average YouTube fare of cute cats and webcam monologues. YouTube is betting that a solid stream of good content will attract more revenue from advertisers, bring viewers back frequently and bolster its parent company’s fledgling Web-connected-TV platform, Google TV.

The cash has enticed some of TV’s big hit makers, including “Fast Five” director Justin Lin, who directs episodes of “Community,” ”CSI” creator Anthony Zuiker and Nancy Tellem, the former president of CBS entertainment.

LeBron James hopped on his bike Sunday afternoon to avoid the traffic caused by the Miami Marathon in order to get to work.  He also caused a twitpic frenzy.

Experts estimate fewer than 1 percent of American adults commute to work on a bicycle. Montana has the highest percentage of work commuters with 1.6 percent, followed by western states Oregon and Idaho, according to trafficsafety.org. In the Sunshine State, only 0.4 percent of work trips are on a bike. Florida also has the highest annual reported bike fatality rate in America at 115.7 per year.

The study results reported in Ad Age fall in with what I’ve been imagining in my head: the clicking of the ‘like’ button is rarely meaningful in the way we marketers wish it was.  I think researchers need to quantify this type of consumer activity (as well as place it in proper context) and I am sure there will be many more methods used to try and ferret out this increasingly important statistic.

For a few years now, brands have been touting frothy Facebook “like” numbers as evidence of their social-media acumen. But how many of those fans are actually bothering to take part in conversation with brands?

Not too many, as it turns out.

Slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with the brands, according to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank that counts Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and other major advertisers as its supporters.

To get to these findings, the researchers used one of Facebook’s own metrics, People Talking About This, the awkwardly-named running count of likes, posts, comments, tags, shares and other ways a user of the social network can interact with branded pages. It was unveiled last fall as a way of giving advertisers a sharper look at at the level of activity on their pages.

Researchers for the institute looked at this metric as a proportion of overall fan growth of the top 200 brands on Facebook over a six-week period back in October and they found the percentage of People Talking About This to overall fans to be 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, which only requires a click and in the minds of the researchers are akin to TV ratings, and isolate for more engaged forms of interaction, you’re left within an even smaller number: 0.45%. That means less than half a percent of people who identify themselves as liking a brand actually bother to create any content around it.

You might assume these are damning numbers. But this isn’t necessarily the case.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” said Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a “Facebook advocate.” “People need to understand what it can do for a brand and what it can’t do. Facebook doesn’t really differ from mass media. It’s great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

I saw this study linking grief with heart problems mentioned on both on Yahoo and the New York Times.  It reminded me of a great TED talk by Helen Fisher you should check out.

A long-term study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association has confirmed what 16th century poets have known all along: heartbreak can be deadly.

Past studies have linked heart problems with the grieving period after a loved one dies. Japanese cardiologists first identified the phenomenon in 1990. This new report, however, suggests that a grieving person is 21 times more susceptible to a heart attack right after the death of a beloved.

Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston tracked 2,000 heart attack patients over a period of five years. While they found that patients with a history of heart problems were more prone to attacks, even those with perfectly strong hearts were at risk for potentially deadly attacks in the immediate days after a close friend, partner or family member passed.

The risk is particularly great for women. A separate study, released in November, found that females are on average 7.5 times more likely than men to have a heart attack in the early stages of grieving. The number rises to 9.5 for women under 55. According to Dr. Abhiram Prasad, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist: “It’s the only cardiac condition where there’s such a female preponderance.” What they can’t understand is why women are more prone to the condition.

“Americans are spending more time on social media than volunteering, praying, talking on the phone, emailing, or even exercising.”
- the head of Forrester Research at LeWeb conference in Paris this past week

I’m not really sure how I feel about kids going to school entirely online, young ones in particular. The numbers discussed below surprised me – I did not realize this was happening at such a rate.

“When I was in high school” will soon refer to different memories and memes than what it currently does.

In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some—or all—of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.

In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.

Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools. More than two million pupils take at least one class online, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group.

Regular listeners – I dare you to NOT snort!

An article in the WSJ about the ongoing Frankfurt Motor Show discusses the seemingly conflicting consumers demands that luxury automakers are attempting to fulfill: desire for the best performance possible yet also a growing demand for greener, more enviro products.
It’s mentioned once in passing in the article but I think for us strategists the really interesting thing to ponder is whether or not the kids of today will age into the current automotive mindsets, or will they redefine them all together? I recently shared with you data on how fewer teens are even getting their licenses and the continued march towards megacities means cars become more of a burden to most – not the ultimate “freedom-defining” purchase they once were.

It’s a delicate balancing act, but one the luxury car makers are forced to perform as they figure out what the customer of the future will want. Volkswagen AG luxury brand Audi, for example, invited academics and industry experts to a conference Monday to discuss the challenges of a near future when 70% of the world’s people will live in congested mega-cities. They also predict attitudes about car ownership will be upended by a generation that cares more about slick smartphone apps than 0-to-60-miles-per-hour times.

The dichotomy is on view on BMW’s show stand, which features an electric BMW i3 concept car made of aluminum and carbon fiber with the motor over the rear axle and a top speed of 93 mph. Nearby is parked a new edition of the auto maker’s mighty M5 super sedan, with a 560-horsepower petroleum-fueled V-8. BMW stresses that the new M5 is both more powerful than its predecessor and 30% more fuel efficient.

Audi is giving prominence to small electric concept cars. It’s also emphasizing the idea that in the future, what will matter to its customers is more than a car, but “mobility,” a concept being bandied about at the Frankfurt show that emphasizes giving consumers information about how to get around in crowded cities, locate parking spaces and use smartphone apps to arrange car-sharing.