I haven’t seen Wall-E, but yesterday someone* was telling me about it. I wasn’t taking notes but Wikipedia says much what she was saying about the movie’s plot. (Spoiler alert!) Here’s the context:
In the 22nd century, the megacorporation Buy n Large assumed every economic service on Earth, including the government. Overrun by un-recycled waste, the planet eventually became so polluted that it could no longer support life. In an attempt to keep humanity alive, Buy n Large sponsored a five-year exodus to outer space aboard massive executive starliners…
Etc. Etc. So Wall-E, who I guess is technically a Buy n Large product, eventually saves the day, or whatever.
Anyway, details aside, the point seems to be that a rampant corporation took over the world and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the ecology, and so on: Profit motive runs amok.
So it’s interesting to read that according to Ad Age, this article deconstructing the product-placement style used in the film. Read more
Well it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Consumed updates roundup, but three things came across the radar that I’ll note here at all at once.
1. Re the March 11, 2007 Consumed on the Starbury, sold exclusively through Steve & Berry’s: Steve Berry’s has filed for bankruptcy!
This surprised me: Turns out the mall-based super-discount chain has been in trouble for some months now, apparently owing to a debt management strategy that didn’t hold up in the current credit-challenged environment.
I’d been under the impression that shrewd real estate deals were a big part of the chain’s success. And on my couple of visits to a nearby Steve & Berry’s (admittedly, it’s been a while) consumer traffic was brisk. I guess I would have assumed that its reverse-sticker shock cheapness would have benefited the place in the current slow economy.
I guess not! Debt management is another one of those subjects that gets little coverage because it’s not particularly sexy (and because companies tend not to be forthcoming about it) — yet it can mean a lot more to the success or failure of a business than any amount of press coverage or any number of celebrity alignments.
I’m not sure if this turn of events makes me look bad … but it might. If it does, well, I have no excuses. Mea culpa.
2. Re the February 27, 2005 Consumed on the Victoria’s Secret Pink brand: Ad Age has a piece that says the “thriving” sub-brand is approaching $1 billion revenues. The piece also notes the newest Pink push will be “supported and promoted by a campus tour program and paid collegiate brand ambassadors.”
Pink is, for the first time, hiring two to three brand ambassadors at each of 15 campuses. Hundreds of résumés have been received, and the selected students will go through a training program in August to prepare them for the yearlong assignment.
In doing radio interviews for Buying In, every time the subject of word-of-mouth marketing comes up, either the host or a caller invariably says something like, “Oh, come on, how much of this is really happening?” A lot, okay? It’s routine. Especially (though not exclusively) for brands targeting youth. The “college rep” strategy that was maybe used by record labels a decade or two ago is now used by a wide range of consumer-products and apparel companies, basically signing up students to “get the word out” to their pals about brands. It’s an established tactic. It’s real. And it’ s just one facet of something that, I promise, I’m not making up.
3. Re the January 14, 2007 Consumed on Timbuk2, and the July 8, 2007 Consumed on Threadless: Timbuk2 has a line of bags with Threadless graphics on them. Via Josh Spear.
Lately I’ve been asked repeatedly how, or whether, various ideas in Buying In (particularly the you-fill-in-the-blanks aspect of murketing) might apply to politics. Laura Miller, in a Salon essay called “Barack By The Books,” suggests that perhaps the answer yes.
Obama the symbol possesses the enviable quality that Walker calls “projectability,” and Obama himself has marveled that he often seems to be “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He is, in short, a cutting-edge brand. But if he does win the general election, what then? A brand can’t be president of the United States….
This is just a jumping-off point for Miller’s piece, which delves deeply into Obama’s own writing, and covers a lot of highly interesting territory. To see where she goes from there, check out the whole piece. It’s worthwhile.
On a sort-of related note: I wrote about Barackists on Murketing.com here, and in Consumed here.
Sprint is offering to bribe YouTubers to include a particular phone in their online creations. First 1,000 people to do so get $20 and a chance to win $10,000. Not surprising.
Somewhat surprising: Sprint is bragging about it.
“Shamelessly plug the Samsung Instinct into your home movie … this summer, turn your loved ones into cash with blatant product placement,” a deep-voiced male narrator calls out to viewers. “It’s the greatest product placement home movie of all time.”
Via Commercial Alert.
Recently our local paper had an article about kids selling lemonade in the park, for a good cause (local literacy program). Typical small-town “feature” kind of thing.
I really only read it, rather belatedly as I was gathering up the recycling, because of the picture of one adorable youngster’s lemonade stand — which was sporting a prominent logo.
Turns out this four-year-old “was one of about 1,000 young entrepreneurs from around the nation selling the Crayons fruit-juice drink to collect money to support a charity of their choice.”
The article was a little vague on this, but after light clicking around I’m surmising that the kid was part of the Pink Lemonade Brigade, a “kid-empowering charity event” that involved giving a branded lemonade stands and a 100 cans of Crayons fruit drinks for up to 1,000 youngsters to set up in their communities (“anywhere there is a lot of foot traffic”), and raise money for whatever cause they want. Under the banner of Crayons fruit drinks.
What to say?
Obviously a good cause is a good cause.
On the other hand, murketing is murketing. And might I politely suggest that perhaps it would be better to be teaching our nation’s four-year-olds that they can do good deeds without being “empowered” by some brand?
Previous Murketing mention of Crayons drinks here.
[Note: After spending a good deal more time than anticipated stuck in airports and so on last week, I am running late both on AntiFriday, and on responding to recent comments to various posts. Will do that soonest.]
1. WSJ says “Federal regulators are beginning an effort to crack down on stealth advertising in television shows, a move aimed at letting consumers know when companies have paid to use their products as props.” (Via Commercial Alert.) And Ad Age says: “Hollywood’s screenwriters are the latest group to write poison-pen letters to the Federal Communications Commission about Madison Avenue’s use of product integration, which jumped 39% on broadcast TV in the first quarter of 2008, according to Nielsen Product Placement Service.” (Also via Commercial Alert.)
Something people ask me about a lot lately, vis a vis the broad topic of murketing and Buying In, is this very subject: Will there be a backlash/crackdown on the specific practice of commercial persuasion leaking out of the 30-second ads you can zap through if you happen to have a DVR, and into actual shows?
It’s clear that this practice really bugs a lot of people, but up to now my answer has been: I don’t see anything indicating it will slow down. Maybe that’s changing?
Here’s a related Washington Post story. Here’s the official (and generally unimpressed) response from Commercial Alert.
2. Meanwhile, one of the better-known murketing campaigns of the moment is the one pushing Colt 45. The malt liquor brand is owned by Pabst (whose PBR is of course the subject of a chapter in Buying In). The PBR story is largely about a brand picked up by consumers, with the corporate owner amping things after the fact. The Colt 45 thing seems more synthetic, but maybe there was an awakened interest in the malt liquor that I’m not aware of.
In any case, the Colt 45 campaign has been more of a “buzz building” effort, with aggressive stunts meant to have publicity value and talk value. One effort involved indie art on brown paper bags. More recently:
Philly’s “Mural Arts Program” has painted 2,700 murals. But while most of the murals are about life, energy and color, some murals in Fishtown are all about malt liquor, Colt 45. Pabst Beer paid local businesses for some of their wall space. But the city said the quasi-murals are illegal because a permit is needed. NBC 10 called Pabst and they are not commenting on the issue. The city is still trying to see if any local advertising agencies helped them out.
That’s from Phawker. Related posts in AdFreak, and Anti-Advertising Agency. Read more
As this long New York Times piece acknowledges, there’s nothing new about celebrity endorsements. But the piece is correct, I think, in setting out to explore why such endorsements seem more pervasive — higher-profile celebrities, and more thoroughly “integrated” deal formulations. (The article opens with a recounting of Rihanna’s people pitching a company that makes umbrellas, in advance of her now-famous single “Umbrella.”)
To me the key line comes from Steve Stoute. “Hip-hop completely opened the eyes of other music genres as to how to relate to corporations and not be seen as sellouts,” he says.
This isn’t really explored in the piece, so I don’t totally know what he means. But it’s definitely true that nobody is seen as a sellout for doing corporate sponsorship deals anymore, which is why mega-stars (not just in music, but across the board) who ten years ago would have feared tarnishing their reputations don’t sweat such things any more.
I’m guessing Stoute means that hip-hop opened people’s eyes about this in the sense that hip-hop stars simply did it, and there was no particular backlash. So everyone else followed suit.
Possibly the underlying factor is that more people see such deals as signs of hustle, and respect the paydays and corporate support that stars (musical or otherwise) are able to extract from brand-owners. Or maybe he sees other reasons; I’d be curious to know.
(On a consumer level, I think, the way these endorsements really work is that we assume/guess that P. Diddy, or whoever, is smart enough about managing his own brand not to ruin it by association with a truly awful product.)
Meanwhile, the most preposterous quote in the piece is from Rihanna: “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.”
Oh really? So the authentic connection, I guess, is that the song was called “Umbrella,” and the company writing you massive checks does in fact make umbrellas? (As opposed to, I don’t know, galoshes?)
Come on. There’s no “authentic” reason for a deal like that to exist, other than Team Rihanna “sincerely” smells money. Period.
Moreover, everybody knows it — or “feels” it, if you prefer. Nobody really thinks Rihanna has strong feelings about umbrella quality.
What’s authentic is the hustle.
Not that anybody has a problem with that.
A friend writes:
I saw something REALLY disturbing on TV and immediately thought of you*. Have you seen these TBS ads for the Bill Engval show? He literally walks onto the screen, pauses the show with a remote, tells you to watch his new series, and then restarts it. It’s insanely awful. Made me get up and write to TBS about how bad it is. Found a youtube clip of it. Obviously I’m not the only one bothered by this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUtfG9Bkec
Whether you watch the clip or not, a quick scan of the 200+ comments confirms that, yes, TBS viewers are mightily annoyed.
I’ve said before — and particularly a lot lately in interviews about Buying In — the real significance of TiVo and click culture (see the book for more on that) is not that it’s all given great power to the consumer (you know, “the consumer in control”) to zap past ads.
The real significance is that, faced with the possibility of people zapping past ads, etc., the commercial persuasion business has completely rewritten the rules about where and how advertising and marketing can appear. (Thus, “murketing.”) This thing is just a blunt example of one small way they’re doing that.
And it’s worth noting that, even now, less than a quarter of U.S. homes even have a DVR. But every home that gets TBS, DVR-ed or no, experiences this unpleasant stunt.
Maybe this particular style of ruining your viewing experience will fade if the backlash is severe enough, but it’ll just get replaced by more experiments in pitches that are tough to TiVo past. As with the just-noted Vespa street art campaign, I think we can expect more of this sort of thing in the future.
[Thanks, Justin.]
[* Yes, as a matter of fact, friends often think of me when they see “disturbing” things on television.]
A couple of weeks back I noted this Vespa murketing effort in Montreal and other Canadian cities: What looked like street art was actually Vespa branding. In subsequent conversation with the Globe & Mail‘s Jennifer Wells, I learned that this work was executed by an actual street artist, known as Fauxreel, whose work has included a number of billboard alternations. (I wasn’t familiar with him; here’s his site.)
The Anti Advertising Agency points to this evidence that at least some people find the artist’s collaboration with Vespa unappealing: “Sold Out For Real,” someone has scrawled on one of his (non-corporate) pieces.
So how big a deal is this? I’m not sure. Fauxreel is hardly the first graffiti/street artist to do paid work on the street for brands. (Memorable precedent: Tats Cru for Hummer.) Sure this alienates some fans and draws some sellout charges. But I’ve had plenty of conversations with people who figure this sort of thing is just fine: That it sort of amounts to corporations supporting artists, and bankrolling kinda-sorta subversive stuff.
Moreover, I suspect Vespa’s goals here had less to do with impressing street art fans than with simply finding a way (legal or not) to run a campaign that basically can’t be avoided, because it’s not happening in the traditional confines of a magazine ad you can flip past or a TV spot you can mute. It’s not about interrupting a media experience, it’s about interrupting your life. If that costs Fauxreel some credibility, well, I’m sure Vespa will live with that just fine.
Ultimately, backlashing like the above would have to get a lot more widespread before street art murketing goes away.
Time for another Fortnightly Weekend Thingdown. For whatever reason, I didn’t see that many Things that captured my attention the last two weeks. So it’s a short list.
Also, while I usually present the Things without comment, this time I need to provide a little context for the first one. It comes from the blog on the Fiji Green website, which is part of the bottled water company’s recent efforts to position itself as eco-friendly. More on that subject in this week’s Consumed, which I’ll post soon. But meanwhile, here’s the explanation of this item, from the aforementioned blog:
On April 26th, St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco held the ”Discarded to Divine“ gala, an eco-friendly fashion show and charity fundraiser. Kim, our Northern California events coordinator, recruited designers Elaine O’Malley and Lisa Anne Fullerton to create a dress made from 100% recycled and reused materials, including FIJI Water packaging, for a model to wear throughout the evening.
More here, though the pictures and description are not as illuminating as they could be. I can’t really tell how the dress is put together and how the “packaging” is incorporated. I guess those are Fiji labels, right?
Anyway, Discarded To Divine involves designers making new garments out of old, discarded ones that are too messed up to be worn on their own anymore. The results are auctioned, raising money for the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco, an organization that helps the homeless and the needy.
So far as I can tell, this Fiji Green dress wasn’t part of the auction. Perusing these pictures of the event, it looks like maybe Fiji was a sponsor, or at least was giving out water, and this model just walked around at the gala and mingled. So was this essentially just a mobile ad for Fiji and its good intentions, inserting itself at an eco-friendly charity event? A merger of unconsumption and murketing? What do you think?
Okay, two more Things:
Handwrench, via Craftzine.
Hotman Trivet, via PopGadget.
Following this recent post about brand-made street art in Montreal, got a note from Zeke about another example of murketing in that lovely city. Montreal City Weblog says:
Many folks have no doubt noticed the postering campaign up and down the Main, urging that it be renamed for Lucien Rivard, a colourful Quebec bandit of the 1950s and 60s. Turns out it’s a viral marketing stunt to promote an upcoming film…
More here at Spacing Montréal.
Another fine example of murketing, not unlike one noted here: This is a form of commercial persuasion you cannot “TiVo out,” because it’s not on your TV set. It’s in your life.
[PS: Memo to Zeke: Was gonna link here but … Let me know if you have another request, I will honor it.]
Posted Under:
Murketing
This post was written by Rob Walker on May 15, 2008
Comments Off on In other news of Montreal murketing…
Via Commercial Alert, here’s a Chicago Tribune story about college “brand reps,” such as 20-year-old Northwestern student Alex Covington, who reps for Macy’s. Specifically she:
plans Macy’s events on campus, from a sorority slumber party to a casting call for a Web documentary. She hands out fliers, sends out mass e-mails and text messages, and angles for articles in the student newspaper.
And whenever she gets a compliment on her tailored white blouse or her California-casual sundress, she makes sure to credit the company that provided them free of charge.
“I got it from [Macy’s’] American Rag” collection, she says.
“You should check it out.”
In exchange she gets $450 “stipend,” and $400 gift card. She apparently says “she reveals her ties to Macy’s about 85 percent to 90 percent of the time,” when pitching fellow students. The piece says her employer is RepNation, a division of Mr. Youth that claims to have 5,000 college reps working for various corporate brand clients.
This style of murketing — breaking the fourth wall between commercial persuasion and day-to-day life — is discussed in some detail in Buying In.
Speaking of street art: Who do you figure might be responsible for this work in Montreal and other Canadian cities?
An ad agency of course. Working for Vespa. Via AdFreak.
I’ve sure ready plenty of criticisms of Dove’s “campaign for real beauty” marketing tactics, but the thing just keeps metastasizing. Via Arts Journal, this article describes how marketers got playwright Judith Thompson involved in creating a theatrical production tied to the brand:
Dove Canada’s marketing partner, ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Canada, first proposed creating a theatre piece about beauty and aging as part of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which launched in 2004.
Dove Canada’s marketing manager, Alison Leung, said Ogilvy targeted the theatre as a way to give a voice to women over 45, a group their research suggests has chronically poor body image and feels underrepresented in media and culture.
Early in the search for a playwright, Leung said Dove and Thompson forged an immediate bond during the first phone call.
Thompson concedes that for Dove, “it really is about is brand loyalty.” But: “I don’t care if ultimately they hope to sell soap with it, the soap’s fine.”
A kind reader has brought to my attention the “themes” that you can acquire to pimp out, or whatever, your iGoogle home page. I’m not an iGoogle person myself, so I don’t know how new this is, but I was interested to see the sort of pitch to the potential page-pimper as “What happens when great art mixes with the Google homepage?”
I’m going to guess that one thing that happens is that Google gets paid. Because I see that much of the “great art” is by brands, such as Dolce & Gabbana, Ecko, and Bathing Ape. And even most of the artist art is from sort of brand-type artists, such as Jeff Koons. Also Michael Graves is in there, I’m not sure how to count him. And Coldplay, oddly enough.
The other possibility is that these “artists” get paid, or have been paid, by Google. My assumption is that these art pieces are more than anything else analogous to ads for the various entities represented, so the money would flow from them to Google. But maybe I’m wrong. One of the curious things about the cross-branded murketing world, especially online, is sometimes it’s hard to tell who pays whom, and under what theory.
Anyway, if you’re an iGoogler, please enjoy, uh, “personalizing” your experience.
[Thanks Rebecca!]
UPDATE 5/2: For another point of view on all of this, from representative of the super-savvy youth culture Joshspear.com: It’s a “a rad new customizing feature” that lets you “personalize your search toolbar”! What’s the point in making fun of this stuff if the coolhunters come LATER and STILL spout the SAME OLD CLICHES? Here’s something you might consider “personalizing”: your thoughts.
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