06.06.19
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

Episode 105: Malta, Marketing, Make-Believe


Jessica and Michael discuss Lauren Oyler’s New York Times magazine column, This Is What It Sounds Like When Brands Cry, about the lengths companies go in attempts to express empathy, such as Burger King’s recent “Real Meals” campaign.

When this happens, Jessica says,
humanism becomes reframed around conflating the ideals of trying to take selling something, which in a sense is a propagandistic mission, with feeling something, which is meant to entice people to spend more money for a thing because they identify with a more human attribute that it conveys.

Also mentioned this week:


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Posted in: Arts + Culture, The Observatory




Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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