Klarna Smoooth merchandise by Nord DDB
Sweden – Payment provider Klarna is dropping its first-ever range of physical products to celebrate its friction-free services.
Building on its Get Smoooth campaign, which highlights how Klarna’s pay later products make everyday life as frictionless as possible, the brand has worked with ‘famously smooth’ rapper and Klarna investor Snoop Dogg to promote the collection. It includes lavish versions of household goods such as silk bedsheets, cashmere toilet paper, gold peanut butter and a 22-feet high inflatable slide.
Through its colourful, highly visual campaigns, Klarna exemplifies Fluid Capital – the new visual language emerging around financial values, transactions and the appearance of digital money. For more, look out for our upcoming interview with Mervyn ten Dam of Achtung! discussing the future identity of finance.
Mexico – The publication promotes music from the Next Eleven countries, or N-11, to global digital and analogue listeners.
The first issue of Next Eleven Paper focuses on the underground music scene in Mexico, taking inspiration from the country’s rich culture and vibrant colours. Combining digital and physical experiences, the newspaper invites users to scan the pages with the N-11 app, which then plays music. If more than one image is scanned the music mixes together to create new sounds.
Giacomo Bastianelli, the project’s designer, believes that countries such as Mexico, Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan will revolutionise the music scene. ‘Their over-driven economic metabolisms will generate all manner of social tensions and cultural rifts, which could spawn some 21st-century musical form that might take the world by storm just like jazz and rock’n’roll did in their day,’ he tells It’s Nice That.
To prepare for a future in which media is no longer static, but constantly evolving, watch out for our forthcoming macrotrend Programmable Realities.
Next Eleven Paper by Giacomo Bastianelli
