Kickstart: Robots, technology, plastics and music

The band OK Go may be best known for its quirky videos featuring long takes and complex choreography with treadmills or Rube Goldberg machines or marching bands. It also may be the band mostly likely to integrate plastics into its videos.

OK Go's newest song, "Love," has a kaleidoscope theme and features 29 industrial robots from Kuka Robotics, mirrors, pool noodles and other props. On top of that, a behind-the-scenes video of the video relies on a camera embedded in a pair of polycarbonate and acrylic Ray-Ban glasses with integrated electronics that is sold by Facebook owner Meta. The regular video for the song also kicks off with one of the band members hitting a button on his Ray-Bans to start recording.

Meta and Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica first debuted the Wayfarer smart glasses in 2020. OK Go had already been experimenting with ways to use AI when Meta offered to partner up on ways to use the glasses, our sister paper Advertising Age writes.

It's far from the first collaboration between the band and a brand owner. In 2010, the insurance company State Farm got a truck bearing its logo into the video for "This Too Shall Pass" by sponsoring the clip. In 2012, the band collaborated with General Motors on the "Needing/Getting" video by incorporating sounds "played" by the car by tapping out percussion on the headliner, striking plastic pipes and drums and slamming doors.

In today's update on the effects of the White House's tariff policies: It seems that even the U.S. manufacturers of some iconic toys is finding a rough road when it comes to doing business right now.

Isaac Larian, the CEO of Little Tikes' parent company MGA Entertainment, told the Washington Post that some international sales have stalled for its Cozy Coupe ride-on toys and other products.

Little Tikes, with rotomolding and production in Hudson, Ohio, exports about 200,000 Cozy Coupes each year.

"Basically, every country in the world is saying, 'Hold on, let us find out what's going on.' They're pausing or they're canceling," Larian said. "All of Asia is shut down for now — if I ship a Cozy Coupe from Ohio to China and it gets slapped with a 125 percent duty, nobody is going to buy it anymore."

If Roy Sjoberg was "the godfather" of the Dodge Viper sports car, as Stellantis Chief Designer Ralph Gilles says, does that also make him one of the godfathers of composite car bodies?

Sjoberg, who died March 30 at age 86, led the development of the sports car that was in production from 1992 to 2017. The Viper provided a canvas for Dodge engineers to play with shapes available from sheet molded compound and the strength of carbon fiber.

Early in his career, while at General Motors, Sjoberg also spent time developing the fiberglass-bodied Corvette into the icon it is today. So even if he wasn't directly responsible for the birth of composites in the auto industry, he certainly was part of its coming of age.