MURKETING

Hats off: A little too much street cred for New Era in Cleveland

The Plain Dealer reports that New Era has withdrawn certain baseball caps from the market in Cleveland. Why? Because these particular caps are decorated with “logos associated with local gangs.”

Activists said the baseball caps bore the names of neighborhoods as well as local gangs such as “Da Valley,” for Garden Valley housing project; “10-5,” short for the 105th Street gang called Waste-5; and “HVD,” referring to the street gang on Harvard Avenue.

A New Era spokesperson named Dana Marciniak basically has the company pleading ignorance and promising to be “more vigilant” in the future.

Marciniak said the company was unaware the neighborhood names were affiliated with gangs and removed the hats once they were alerted. She estimated 100 hats were made. A clerk at the Richmond mall Finish Line store said they were taken off shelves on Saturday.

“We make a lot of hats for different colleges, neighborhoods and groups,” Marciniak said, citing a popular Bronx hat as an example. “We get designs from different areas. We assumed some of the Cleveland groups were a reflection of the neighborhood.”

Leaving aside the amusing reference to “Cleveland groups” (“Gangs? We thought they were groups!”), the comparison to the Bronx doesn’t really cut it, since the Bronx isn’t a neighborhood, it’s a borough with a population well over a million. More to the point, nobody has to do any research to figure out that the Bronx is resonant geography.

I can’t find any images of the caps, and the story isn’t totally clear on this, but if New Era figured out that a particular housing project in Cleveland might be a good thing to tout on a hat, and that this housing project was locally known as “Da Valley” — well, it requires some effort to learn such things. And the whole point of a project like this is to make sure it’s done in a way that has some kind of deep local street cred, basically to communicate the idea that: Damn, New Era knows.

So it would be interesting to know a bit more about how the company gathered that information. Maybe it hired a Cleveland cool-guy, who neglected to mention the relevant geography/gang connections. Maybe a company rep just talked to hip-looking kids in the park or at the mall. Or maybe they just had an intern gather the information by cruising around MySpace or something.

Obviously not every expression of geographic pride signifies gang affiliation, but you don’t exactly have to be an expert on this topic to know that geography-gang connections are pretty routine. So while it’s possible that New Era’s research was incomplete, I suspect it’s also possible that, somewhere in the company’s street-cred supply chain, somebody simply decided the risk was worth it.

It might be easier to judge by the hats themselves, so if you see one, let me know. Perhaps they’ll be popping up on eBay soon?

P.S.: For a quick primer on New Era and its (fairly impressive, to date) street cred or authentic reputation or however you want to put it, see this earlier Consumed column.

Buzz Factor

In Consumed: Spykes: A new product gets lots of attention — mostly from vehement critics.

This past January, Anheuser-Busch rolled out a new product called Spykes. It comes in two-ounce bottles, in flavors like Spicy Lime and Hot Melons. The label says it’s a “premium malt beverage,” containing caffeine and ginseng; it’s meant to be drunk straight, or used as a mixer with beer, or as an ingredient in some new cocktail of your invention. It’s “whatever you want it to be,” the new brand’s Web site says. Spkyes, in other words, is a hodgepodge of every recent trend or fad that has caught the attention of alcohol consumers in the past five years. …

Continue reading by way of this NYT Magazine link, or this Boston Globe link.

Fast Food Realism

Here’s an amusing project: Photographs of ad images of fast food, paired with the same item “purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort.” Guess which category the above Whopper image falls into?

Via Coudal.

Kleening up

I guess this is negative word of mouth week here at Murketing. While I was away recently, somebody from Not An Alternative sent along this Youtube link, of some activists prankishly inserting themselves in a Kleenex marketing stunt.

The marketing stunt was the Kleenex “Let It Out Tour.” This involves the brand showing up in various cities, and inviting regular old folks like YOU to sit in front of a camera, tell a story that makes you want to cry, climaxing with you actually weeping into your Kleenex. Or something like that. The site says: “Here’s your chance to participate. You might even be featured on letitout.com or included in future let it out™ commercials from the KLEENEX® Brand!”

It’s not clear to me how much this is a ripoff of Jet Blue’s ripoff of David Isay’s work, but that’s another story. Either way, it’s a complete mystery to me why anyone would want to participate in something so transparently phony. But I guess plenty of people do.

Anyway, when the tour arrived in Times Square late last month, activists associated with the Greenpeace project Kleercut were among those to get in front of the camera. After telling a standard tear-jerker, they would then say another thing that makes them sad is the forests being wiped out to make Kleenex. Obviously these confessionals won’t make it into an actual Kleenex ad, but videos made by the pranksters have gone up on YouTube, and have gotten some circulation on the Net.

Could this spark a massive consumer backlash against Kleenex? I doubt it.

But that’s not exactly what the activists have in mind, or at least it’s not the whole picture. As one of the activists in the video explains: “A lot of their money that they spend on PR is put into campaigns like this. If we can show the shareholders that the money they’re using for this PR isn’t effective, and they’re wasting a lot of money, it’s gonna cause shareholders to hopefully back out and demand cleaner, more forest-friendly products.”

Persuading shareholders? Why bother with that! If it’s true that one determined detractor can do as much damage as 100 positive mentions do good, then shouldn’t they simply ignore the shareholders and fight directly in the marketplace?

I know that everyone says consumers are more tuned in to green issues these days, but I think it would still be pretty tough to win this fight in the marketplace. However, it’s plausible that these activists can amass data (how many hits, how many views, etc.) that could be packaged as evidence that there’s a potential backlash. Convincing shareholders to believe in that backlash might be a challenge, but it more likely than trying to convince the public at large.

Coming tomorrow: One last post about word of mouth, backlashing, and murketing.

Anti-Urban

Speaking of negative word of mouth:

One thing I’ve noticed that many independent artists/entrepreneurs have in common, even when their work and cultural contexts vary widely, is a dislike of Urban Outfitters, which they all assert is a stealser of ideas. Now BoingBoing points out a blog that’s basically about this very theme: “UrbanCounterfeiters.com.”

The most recent post there is from March 17, and recounts a protest at a Vancouver location of the chain.

This seems to be the only way to get through to them – the ground roots approach, hitting individual stores and real people instead of their corporate headquarters where we’ve been virtually stonewalled – so we’re going to be handing out these pamphlets in front of the majority of their locations across the United States and Canada over the next few months. If you live in a city that has an Urban Outfitters store in it and you have a couple of hours to spare for the cause, please send an e-mail to urbancounterfeiters@hotmail.com

Worth keeping an eye on … See the site itself for more.

“Hype-generating mechanism with fully integrated Mac compatibility”

So the Apple ad for the iPhone — see it here if you like — came on the tv set here at Murketing headquarters the other night, and although there are plenty of Apple products around Murketing headquarters, we all agreed: The company’s smug, self-congratulatory attitude is getting really, really tired.

Thus I was pleased to see this in The Onion: “Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product“. Some highlights:

“Get ready for the future of product introduction,” said Jobs…

Described in its patent filing as a “hype-generating mechanism with fully integrated Mac compatibility,” the iLaunch is powered by Intel dual-core processors optimized to calculate a product’s gravitas. Apple claims the iLaunch can garner the same amount of press attention as a major scientific discovery, high court ruling, celebrity meltdown, or natural disaster at 200 times the speed of a traditional media-fostered launch….

“Do you want to know what the surprise of this unveiling is?” said Jobs to the eagerly nodding crowd. “The iLaunch itself generated this entire presentation, as well as this very surprise.” …
“Before today, I couldn’t imagine paying $12,000 for a product-unveiling product,” CNET editor Jasmine France said after the presentation. “Now I can’t imagine living without it.”

The whole thing.

Plague of visual stimuli: Check it out

Probably you need a recommendation for another YouTube video about as much as you need exposure to more advertising. Nevertheless, here’s a quite nice seven-minute film, on YouTube, highlighted the other day by the site of The Anti-Advertising Agency.

Looks like the film was made by Studio Smack, a “collective of young artists searching for new esthetics and concepts.” The film is basically a tour of an urban environment, in stark black and white, highlighting the logo overload. It looks really nice. The description on YouTube says it gives “an impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that plague us every day. The amount is so big that its commercial effectiveness has become utterly dubious.”

People have been making the argument in that last sentence for about a hundred years, and I don’t know if I buy it even now. But still. Cool little film.

Synthetic consumers: Illegal?

The Times of London says that in the U.K.:

Hotels, restaurants and online shops that post glowing reviews about themselves under false identities could face criminal prosecution under new rules that come into force next year.

Businesses which write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be from customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”.

Nothing like this is going on the U.S. that I’m aware of, so all you American murketers can carry as normal.

“The Ad Generator” …

… is described this way:

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.

Here’s the site. About one out of every five of the resulting “ads” are interesting. That’s not bad, though. It’s part of a thesis project by Alexis Lloyd. Via MetaFilter.

Anti-Fan Club

In Consumed: The Rachel Ray Sucks Community: Getting together to share and form a community — of dislike.

Consumer culture, and indeed popular culture, revolve in large part around shared admiration, shared likes: fandom, in a word, is a thing that can bring us together. But what about shared dislikes? Can a community form around that? What is the opposite of a fan club? The answer is the Rachael Ray Sucks Community. Gathering by way of the blogging and social-networking site LiveJournal, this group has more than 1,000 members, who are quite active in posting their latest thoughts and observations about the various shortcomings, flaws and disagreeable traits of Rachael Ray, the television food personality. “This community,” the official explanation reads, “was created for people that hate the untalented twit known as Rachael Ray.” The most important rule for those who wish to join: “You must be anti-Rachael!” ….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.

Additional link: Rachel Ray Sucks Community.

Fictionalized “Food Nation”

I’ve been very curious about the adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction best-seller Fast Food Nation into a fictionalized version directed by Richard Linklater. In this LA Weekly interview, Linklater says this general idea was Schlosser’s. The film

depicts a burger chain called Mickey’s whose McWhopping cash cow “the Big One” turns out to be riddled with shit. But Mickey’s is less a ringer for McDonald’s than a synecdoche for the fast-food-franchise herd entire, and Fast Food Nation the movie sets its sights not on individual corporate malfeasance so much as a pervasively poisonous socioeconomic order. If a Mickey’s Big One, for all its shiny happy advertising, leaves a trail of exploited workers, abused animals and despoiled land — not to mention unhealthy consumers — there’s an industrial-grade logic behind it. At the heart of the movie is the image of the meat-packing plant’s disassembly line, a conveyor belt whose speed directly correlates with the plant’s profit. Faster means higher margins, more workplace injuries and more irremediable mistakes at the gut table….

The co-writers approach their subject through three storylines that intersect in Cody, Colorado, a fictional meat-packing anytown. Don (Greg Kinnear) is a Mickey’s company man, sent to investigate the source of a “fecal coliform” infection; Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an illegal Mexican immigrant trying to resist the vice of drugs, harassment and injury that constitutes work at the Uniglobe Meat Packing Plant; Amber (Ashley Johnson) is a teenage Mickey’s waitress, experiencing the first stirrings of political consciousness.

It’s an interesting approach. The risk, or at least it seems like a risk to me, is that fictionalizing it makes it all much easier to dismiss. On the other hand, the power of a hit movie still blows away most other platforms I can think of. We’ll see how this one plays out….

Broken iPods…

If you’ve had just about enough of products and projects that involve indivualizing or otherwise arting-up the iPod, maybe you’ll enjoy this: Stay Free! is “seeking artists and (broken) iPods for an upcoming project about planned obsolescence.” You are invited to turn your broken iPod into “something deliciously useless,” or to send it to Stay Free, which will hand it over to a participating artist. Details are here.

Sounds promising. For the record I should mention I own two iPods — the original version, and the third generation. Both still work.

The Unbelievable Hype

As noted on The Hundreds’ site: Someone has started Don’t Believe The Hypebeast, and it’s pretty amusing. Early reports on the (streetwear-scene-satirizing) site include aNYthing being sold at Wal Mart “alongside other premium Walmart labels such as Wrangler, Nascar and Starter,” and a Lupe Fiasco collaboration with Maharishi and Lenscrafters. Also this: “Chuck Taylor has been tapped by Converse to create his own footwear. Ever since the announcement of this almost unfathomable collaboration, the ‘streetwear’ message boards have been on fire.”

Update (Aug.23): Streetwearing Your Way To Success — “Good luck and make sure you send us some promo tees when you get that feature in the NY Times.”