The Breakfast Meeting: The Marketing Uses of a Hurricane, and Apple\'s Aesthetic Battles

As some companies linked their marketing to Hurricane Sandy, the public quickly rendered verdicts on which ads or promotions were appropriate, and which crossed a line, Stuart Elliott reports. The perceived line-crossers included the retailer Jonathan Adler, he writes, which used Twitter and e-mails to invite people to “storm our site” and created a code “Sandy” for free shipping; the company has since apologized. More successful in enlisting the storm and its damage was Duracell, whose Duracell Rapid Responder truck offered free batteries and access to charging lockers for mobile devices and computers in the New York area.

• While reporting on the hurricane, TV weather forecasters invariably rolled up their sleeves and even loosened their ties, Eric Wilson notes, the surest sign that this storm was going to leave destruction in its wake. He writes: “The Weather Channel has been experimenting with a standard look of just a dress shirt and tie for its mal e meteorologists, presumably to make its coverage seem more intense. And in a fascinating display of starch and perspiration control, wrinkles never appeared on their shirts over the long hours of coverage, not even in high definition.”
• NBC Universal announced that its networks would air a telethon concert for the victims of Hurricane Sandy Friday night that would include New Jersey natives Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, as well as Christina Aguilera, Sting and Billy Joel, ArtsBeat blog reported.

Sony Corporation on Thursday said that it had slowed its losses in the second fiscal quarter, based on a sales recovery and restructuring, and expected to meet its full-year forecast of a return to profit, Reuters reported. The results followed a woeful year; at the end of its fiscal year in March 31, the company reported a loss of $5.7 billion, in the face of stiff competition from Korean competitors and Apple.

The recent management shake-up at Appl e appears to resolve a serious aesthetic dispute within the company, Nick Wingfield and Nick Bilton reported. At other companies, issues of font choice or background patterns would be considered esoteric at best, but at Apple these choices were central to how Steven P. Jobs built the company. The exit of Scott Forstall, the leader of Apple's mobile software development, is considered a loss for skeuomorphism, they write, the use of clear, real-world images and metaphors - a spiral notebook, or, say, a bookshelf as a guide to users. Instead, Jonathan Ive, who has long been responsible for Apple's minimalist hardware designs, will also design the look of the software.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.