Obama and the Secrets T-shirts Tell
Posted in Civic Issues, Future Science, Intellectual Property, Memetic Engineering, Web 2.0 by wayne.porter on June 19th, 2008 It used to be that “street memes” were hard to track, but that has changed with the Internet. What is hot in the areas of spray paint, zines, tee-shirts and fringe culture greatly interest me (almost as much as shock memes in and of themselves)…so what about print-on-demand (POD) or Just in Time (JIT) inventory from grass roots designers? What can we infer or learn if anything?
Do t-shirt sales trends reflect the rise and fall of candidate popularity?
Do current events crank up sales? What does it say about their base?
The Cafepress graph offers a snapshot of weekly candidate product sales so you can do your own analysis…
Cafepress “Election Meter” charts sales across their millions of user created content products.
CafePress declares Barack Obama has won the Democratic T-Shirt Primary with 49% of cumulative sales, while Hillary finished at 18%. Look at the Meter since November, and you’ll see the T-Shirt Primary was truly an indicator of voter preference!
According to CafePress Obama took it away with a commanding lead. Let’s us take a look closer at the number of designs and total number of products. This should give us a better feel…from my snapshot (June 19, 2008) Obama has a commanding lead in overall products and a good edge in terms of designs.
Barack Obama: 32,800 designs on 1,140,000 products
Hillary Clinton: 21,000 designs on 650,000 products
John McCain: 8,250 designs on 291,000 products
Ron Paul: 6,110 designs on 120,000 products
How about the inverse? Anti-candidate products…
Anti-Barack Obama: 6,480 designs on 215,000 products
Anti-Hillary Clinton: 4,130 designs on 111,000 products
Anti-John McCain: 3,080 designs on 85,400 products
I predict that in the future POD and JIT systems will be contested areas and political pundits will wake up to analyzing the “on demand” spread of ideas and candidates through these systems and various products.
I can almost hear some silly analyst on CNN now…
“Candidate X has a slight edge over Candidate Y in mouse pads, but a blazing lead in coffee mugs and golf balls in terms of conversion and number of products.”
“What does this mean?”
“Well it is hard to say, but the golf balls implies a more affluent voter base than Candidate Y”.
“How about the area of tattoos?”
“Anti-candidate tattoos or pro-candidate? Very important we take this into account.”
Anti Barack Obama Anti Hillary Clinton Anti John McCain Barack Obama Cafepress Elections Hillary Clinton JIT John McCain meme engineering memes memetic analysis POD street memes t shirt sales
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