Marketing the Minimal

By at 4:00 pm Thursday, May 21

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

boingruboard.jpg

How do you market a toy that does almost nothing? Build a gnarly web ad!

We're talking about the Yo Baby, which is a skateboard with no wheels!

The presence of the turtle in the Yo Baby ad reminds me of Douglas Coupland's novel, JPod, which is about, among other things, the use of turtles in marketing, and which also has an intricate web page.

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Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist--with thirty-two published books. In the 1980s he received two Philip K. Dick awards, for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, which are available as part of the Wares tetralogy. Rucker has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he worked as a computer science professor at San Jose State in Silicon Valley for twenty years. He took up painting in 1999, and he's had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco. Rucker's latest publication is his autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Nested Scrolls received the Emperor Norton Award for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."

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