Recently I was told by someone who knows a lot more about blog popularity than I do that having high-impact key words in a post’s headline is good for traffic, because I guess headline words mean more to Google’s algorithms. If true, then surely this will be the most popular post in the history of Murketing.com.
Even so, everything about this post and its headline is totally justified: According to some blog, that isn’t Photoshop above, that’s Pamela Anderson reading the recent book Unmarketable (“examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground”), by Murketing Q&A subject Anne Elizabeth Moore.
Would it be fair to infer that Anderson got hip to this fine book by reading Murketing.com?
No? It wouldn’t?
Okay, then. Just asking.
Yes, another new Murketing.com feature!
It’s the first installment of AntiFriday, a weekly round of dissent, critiques, and backlashes in consumer culture. I hope from now on you’ll always end your work week with a check of what’s upsetting people, and go home early in disgust. List after jump.
Read more
NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN
Winning consumer votes by catering to political disdain.
In Consumed this week, a look at a business with a rather broad potential audience — but also a built-in expiration date.
Given all the excitement generated by heated contests for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, it’s easy to forget that the current resident of the White House will not be moving out for nearly a year.
Then again, maybe you know precisely when that particular change occurs, since the date — Jan. 20, 2009 — has found its way onto a variety of buttons, bumper stickers, T-shirts and even golf balls and hot sauce. In fact, the rendering of that date as 1.20.09 was trademarked by a small company that sold more than $1 million worth of “Bush’s Last Day” merchandise in 2007.
Read the column in today’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, or here.
The Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The all-new Consumed Facebook page is here.
I think is really absurd for a sneaker to represent a lifestyle, it is really absurd to me. Somehow, these shoe companies have managed to insert themselves into people’s identity through repetition, through sponsorship deals, where they really hammer it down that shoes are a status symbol. But at some point in time people are going to realize that that is the most absurd thing.
So says Ian MacKaye, in this long interview with a site called Black Lodges. He talks about the Nike/Minor Threat stuff, and also about running Dischord, and more broadly about the “lifestyle” idea (which he makes quite clear doesn’t interest him in the least).
I came upon it by way of The Hundreds’ blog, where Bobby Hundreds briefly recounts approaching MacKay for his blessing on a Fugazi-lyric-inspired T-shirt, which evidently MacKaye begged off on giving, and so I guess there will be no such shirt.
Related previous items: Q&A with Anne Elizabeth Moore about her book Unmarketable, in which MacKaye and the Nike/Minor Threat incident figures prominently; Minor Threat Hot Sauce; “Brand Underground” article in which The Hundreds figure prominently, as does the idea of “representing a lifestyle.”
Paul Lukas holds back nothing in this awesome and definitive case against corporate logos on sports uniforms. Highly recommended.
Posted Under:
Anti,
Murketing
This post was written by Rob Walker on December 20, 2007
Comments Off on Logo Creep: The case against it
One of my running themes is that there is nothing new about contemporary consumers being fed up with advertising. We hear all the time about supposed discovery that what sets today’s consumers apart is that they (we) “see through” marketing, and don’t trust it, etc.
So I made sure to bookmark the above image from blog Paleo-Future when it made the rounds while I was away last week. It’s from 1885, and titled “Advertising In The Near Future,” one of the earliest examples I’ve seen yet of popular distaste for ad overload and just how bad it could get. Particularly interesting in the satirical slathering of the Statue of Liberty with commercial slogans is the presence of “suredeath” cigarettes.
Clearly there were people who could “see through” marketing in the late 19th century, and who could count an audience that would get the joke. Just as clearly, seeing through marketing didn’t quite add up to resisting marketing. Kinda like today.
In a rare – indeed, unprecedented — move, Murketing.com brings you now a Q&A with an (https://www.drsunilthanvi.com/phentermine-37-5-adipex/) author. The author is Anne Elizabeth Moore, who can also be described as an artist, an activist, co-editor of (recently departed) Punk Planet, series editor of Best American Comics, and a surprisingly nice person. The book is Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, and I think it’s quite good. (I should disclose that I was interviewed for the book and am quoted in it a few times, but I’m pretty sure I’d like the book if I weren’t mentioned in it, and possibly even it had singled me out as corporate shill.)
The book is described as “both a scathing critique of of corporate marketing’s dalliances with the cultural underground and a highly entertaining depiction of the absurdity produced by” some of those very dalliances. The description is accurate.
Plenty more on that below in the Q&A, along with interesting observations about 1) how indie culture has changed, 2) whether the argument that corporations are “funding cool stuff” holds water, 3) whether the revolution might take the form of a handbag from a DIY/crafter, 4) the “soul crushing” experience of explaining the book to professional marketers, 5) the surprisingly bad payoffs of “selling out,” and 6) why it’s really important for some things to remain truly “unmarketable.” I know it’s long but please read it all anyway – especially if you are, yourself, in any way involved something that you think of as sub-, or counter-, or indie culture. Take your time. It’s important. amoxil Thanks.
Q. I bet your publisher asked you: “Why did you write this book?” Or maybe not. But if they did, what did you say? And what’s the real answer?
A. No, in fact my editor really never questioned why I would do this book at all, and I believe on at least two occasions I had to ask her why I was writing it. At which point I think the answer was pretty much “because now you’re legally obligated under the contract you already signed,” so there it was.
The short answer to why I wrote it is that I apparently have a space in my brain where I store my discomfort with popular modes of activism, and where I was turning over projects like Dispepsi for years, just chewing on, well, the fact that a bunch of Bay-Area troublemakers kind of made a soft drink commercial unpaid. That is crazy. Why would they do that? And then when I read No Logo, and as I watched marketing change clearly as a result of that book, something clicked. My book does collect about six years of research and thought into these issues that I couldn’t even really get activists to discuss too deeply. Which I do, totally, understand: they are too damn busy to also be constantly re-theorizing their methods. Anyway I guess that space in my brain got filled up and it had to go on paper so I could start thinking about, like, my cat again.
Conceptually, the book kinda came together when, in 2005, Nike SB — long reviled by the skateboarders I’d grown up with — appropriated the image and ethos of the stridently anticorporate band Minor Threat, a part of the Dischord Records crew in DC. Some kind of circle seemed to close at that point. I started to suspect that maybe they were co-opting the underground’s strategy for debating intellectual property rights issues, called copyfighting sort of informally. At which point I just felt like, this has got to stop.
So then I stopped it. It’s over, now that the book has been written. Ha ha ha ha ha.
What’s different about “indie” culture (or whatever you want to call it, you know what I mean) now compared to 10-15 years ago? Read more
Yes, as a matter of fact, the Wall Street Journal’s front-page story today on Nike “tapping influencers” is several years late. But it’s still worth reading. (And at least they got it. While I’ve mentioned things like Futura and Mr. Cartoon, to name two examples in the piece, doing Nike stuff in the past, my own attempts to get an interview with Mark Parker a couple of years ago were totally stonewalled. Oh well.) In particular I liked this bit:
Not everyone is so anxious to see Nike roll into new turf. Recently, designer Steve “Birdo” Guisinger, owner of a small but influential Santa Cruz, Calif., retailer called Consolidated Skateboards, painted three wheel-less skateboard “decks” with images that lampooned Nike’s attempts to craft a more street-smart image. The board depicting Mr. Parker shows him in a T-shirt with flame tattoos running up one arm and a chauffeured white limousine waiting behind him.
Mr. Guisinger says the parody was meant to “raise awareness,” about the “behind the scenes jockeying that was going on with [Nike’s] attempt to enter the skateboard industry.”
Nike’s response was characteristically in-your-face. Global design head Sandy Bodecker — shown on one of the boards with a sales projection chart and a brown nose — purchased them on eBay and recently displayed them proudly in a prototype for a Nike retail concept store. “I personally was very pleased to be in such august company” he says.
Heh.
There’s also some material about Os Gêmeos. I was sort of pitched about Os Gêmeos at one point, but my interest was entirely in the role that Nike played in basically establishing them in the U.S. scene, and I was told that nobody involved was really interested in talking to me about that angle. But you get a decent sense of it here — Parker introduced them to the Deitch gallery, etc. So, again, the broad theme of the piece isn’t going to surprise anyone who’s been paying attention, but they got some facts.
We all know the old game of snob vs. reverse snob. When a guy at Vuitton says Coach “has nothing to do with luxury” and might as well be “selling iron ore,” well, that’s kind of snobby. The reverse snob from Coach of course decries the Vuitton guy as an elitist who needs to realize that “luxury has been democratized.”
These examples are from Fortune‘s recent recap of the eternal mass/class squabble in its latest issue. All pretty familiar, but noteworthy for Isaac Mizrahi popping up to defend himself from “critics of his work with Target.” His name for these people: “brand racists.”
Brand racists! That seem like a pretty harsh upgrade on snobbery, no? And actually, I’m pretty sure I read in one of the other recent mass/class articles somewhere else that Mizrahi’s Target success actually helped him to get Bergdorf’s (or something like that) to pick up his high-end line again. But maybe they just did it because they needed one line that had a mass-y connection to avoid looking like luxury bigots: designer tokenism, in other words.
Anyway, lux context aside, it’s actually kind of interesting to consider brand bigotry. Even those of us who claim not to pay attention to logos tend have very strong feelings about the ones we would never, ever wear. Three Adidas stripes may be fine, but put a swoosh on the same object and forget it; a polo shirt with an obscure brand’s icon is okay, but not with the Polo logo. Etc. Of course we all have our reasons for our biases, our lines of thought to assure ourselves that we’re acting on the basis of rational factors and rational factors only. Then again, bigots always think that way, too.
Really, though, I suspect brand bigotry is an underrated factor in the consumer/brand dynamic: How much are we motivated not by the brands we love, but by the brands we shun? If brand and identity are (or can be) tied together, isn’t the shun factor pretty crucial? If you have a very clear picture notion of the brands you simply won’t consider associating with, it makes shopping that much easier.
No wonder department stores are segregated by brand.
Wendy Dembo writes:
Last year when the Gap came out with their (red) campaign, the first word that popped into my head, was insu(red)/uninsu(red). They did a few kind of ironic shirts like bo(red) and ti(red), but I wondered why they didn’t make an uninsu(red) shirt.
With insurance looking like it’s going to be the touch point for the 2008 Presidential election, I thought that making these shirts could hopefully get some uninsured kids to think about their need for health insurance, perhaps even the need for universal health care.
She got Jeff Staple to execute the shirts, which are on sale at the Reed Space in New York.
It’s interesting to see something in the brand underground realm using the visual remix strategy to address a political issue. It will also be interesting to see what sort of reaction it ends up getting.
“Honesty — it’s a good angle.”
This line, by one of the ad agency guys in the early scene in the most recent episode of “Mad Men” when Don and his colleagues are talking about the famous VW “Lemon” ad — which came out around 1960, when the series is set — was easily the episode’s highlight moment. (If you’ve never seen the “Lemon” magazine ad, here it is.) In its time, the VW campaign that this ad was part of was different because it did not engage in overt hyperbole. In fact, it subtly mocked the overt hyperbole of, you know, every other ad in the world. Various other print pieces poked fun at the empty planned-obsolescence style “advances” touted by most car ads, for example.
That’s the honesty part. The angle part is that the campaign gave a new image to a car that, as Mary Wells summarized in her memoir, had previous been seen as “small,” “ugly,” and “a Nazi car, too soon after the war.” This is alluded to in Mad Men; one character mentions that last time he’d seen a VW, he was throwing a grenade into it. (This remark is made at a suburban house party, where the general idea that honesty is just another angle hovers over the somewhat predictable proceeds: We learn, for the umpteenth time, that shiny suburban facades conceal assorted grubby secrets, etc. But as always, I’m less interested in the plot than in the passing mentions of advertising history. So back to that.)
Thomas Frank, in The Conquest of Cool, observes: “That by the end of the decade the [VW] was more hip than Nazi must be regarded as one of the great triumphs of American marketing.” Particularly so given that its “hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass sociaety against which hip declared itself most vehemently ad odds.” Frank argues that the agency that made the campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach, “invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism — perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age — to consumerism itself.”
Sound familiar? Sure it does. It’s a point of view that’s now so thoroughly built into contemporary marketing, we pretty much expect it. The most scabrous critiques of the culture of marketing, are produced by marketing professionals, on behalf of whoever their paying client happens to be. Transparency, the consumer-in-control, co-creation, etc.: All today’s most progressive-sounding marketing tactics are all about honesty. It’s still a great angle.
The mission of The Anti-Advertising Agency is rather strongly suggested by its name. But to be a bit more specific, it is funded by a grant from the Creative Work Fund, and “co-opts the tools and structures used by the advertising and public relations industries. Our work calls into question the purpose and effects of advertising in public space.”
Past AAA projects have included a collaboration with Graffiti Research Lab called Light Criticism (an idea that might politely be described as the inspiration for the Boston Adult Swim marketing campaign that kicked up such a fuss a few months back) and, with Amanda Eicher, PeopleProducts123, the shopdropping workshops mentioned earlier on this site.
The AAA’s CEO is artist Steve Lambert (visitsteve.com), who was most recently in the news for a project he’s developing at Eyebeam called AddArt, “an extension for the Firefox browser which removes advertising and replaces it with art.” Mr. Lambert graciously agreed to answer a few Murketing Qs. Those, and his As, follow.
Q: Of the various projects the Anti-Advertising Agency has been involved in, which ones do you think have been most successful?
A: I don’t really know for sure. To know we would have to do what is done in any marketing campaign, which is an impartial evaluation — surveys, testing, etc. And we don’t have the budget for that. I can track some things empirically, like web hits, and I can hang out near where projects are installed and gauge reactions.
But then, what is success? Our goal is rather tough to measure — to cause the public to re-examine advertising and the role it plays in public space. But I think we reach that goal with anyone who spends more than a moment looking at our work. It’s some measure of success if they look at it at all. And if they do, how much do they take away? This is what I dwell on when I think of “success.” Read more
Posted Under:
Anti,
Q&A,
Semiotic Disobedience
This post was written by Rob Walker on May 22, 2007
Comments Off on Q&A: Anti-Advertising Agency CEO Steve Lambert
The Hater assesses celebrity current-events T-shirts:
Even though topical celebrity joke t-shirts are the lowest, most annoying form of fashion communication, they can also be a useful tool—especially when it comes to figuring out who in a crowd of strangers has a horrible sense of humor. Engaging in conversation in these situations is unnecessary. If someone is wearing a “Free Paris” T-shirt, that person is not funny, and should be avoided at all costs.
The rest of “What Your Jokey Paris Hilton T-Shirt Says About You,” including examples of topical Hilton Ts, is here.
(Thanks Cousin Lymon.)
Posted Under:
Anti
This post was written by Rob Walker on May 11, 2007
Comments (1)
Is all publicity good publicty? I’m no expert, but when your company is the focus of a 214-page report by Human Rights Watch, that can’t be good for the brand.
Here then, my final bit on the subject(s) of backlashes, word-of-mouth, and the allegedly forthcoming “world in which consumer engagement occurs without consumer interruption.”
A couple of months ago, I got an email from someone named Jessica, which said: “Hey. First, I think you have a great site. I work for Travelistic.com and we have a new video online about shopdropping.” She passed on the link, which she encouraged me to post, forward, or whatever. “It seems that shopdropping is a project that’s becoming an international trend,” she added, “and definitely deserves attention!”
Travelistic turned out to be “a site that lets you explore the world through video. We host all kinds of travel videos, including user uploads, professional content, and tourist board videos.”
The video on Travelistic that Jessica pointed me to was made at a recent workshop led by Steve Lambert of the Anti-Advertising Agency, which described shopdropping as “a tactic used by artists and activists to clandestinely place objects in retail stores. ‘Dropped’ objects are usually versions of consumer products altered or recreated to detourn the retail experience. Shopdropping is a fun and easy form of culture jamming, gently subverting dominant cultural forms to create new meanings.”
On the Travelistic site, the video was headlined “Culture Jamming 101.”
I looked back at Jessica’s email, and noted that her address ended not in Travelistic.com, but in Industryninefive.com. This turned out to be “a high-energy creative think tank and advertising agency.” High energy! I like that! What else can you tell me?? I checked the site.
We could tell you we’ve crafted online strategic branding campaigns for global Fortune 500 companies, and handled the positioning and PR for multi-national accounts. But all of that seems a bit too limiting. We manage every aspect of promoting your business from conception to execution. In a word, we are ideas.
Okay, that’s enough. Stop.
Whether or not shopdropping is becoming an international trend, it was certainly never intended to be repurposed for a word of mouth advertising campaign. But I have to say, this approach seems to have been at least somewhat effective. I know that the day I after I got the email from “Jessica,” the Consumerist had a post that, while snotty and dismissive of shopdropping as a tactic, did link to Travelistic. (They didn’t mention a press release or email from “Jessica” or anyone else, so maybe they found it some other way; I don’t know.) If you Google “shopdropping,” the Travelistic “Culture Jamming 101” link comes up just ahead of a link to the Anti-Advertising Agency’s site.
(Also, there used to be a comment from a certain “Jessica” on the AAA site, which said: “Hey I just saw a video about you guys on Travelistic.com. This is the first I’m hearing about shop dropping, but I think it’s great! I’m definitely going to start downloading and dropping. Check out the video,” followed by a link to Travelistic. The comment has since been deleted*.)
Here, then, is another glimpse of what we may have to look forward to in the post-TiVo era. The 30-second ad might be less effective, and more rarely seen. But that just means everything else under the sun becomes potential fodder for “buzz”-building. Even videos of culture-jamming workshops.
Excited?
[* Mr. Lambert did not know about “Jessica’s” efforts until I brought it up. I hope to be able to share some of his thoughts about this and other subjects in a forthcoming Q&A on this site.]
Posted Under:
Anti,
Ethics,
Murketing
This post was written by Rob Walker on April 13, 2007
Comments Off on Shopdropping, lifted
"
. With 
.
.
Kim Fellner's book 
.
A