No Logo
Page 7
Until the early seventies, logos on clothes were generally hidden from view, discreetly placed on the inside of the collar. Small designer emblems did appear on the outside of shirts in the first half of the century, but such sporty attire was pretty much restricted to the golf courses and tennis courts of the rich. In the late seventies, when the fashion world rebelled against Aquarian flamboyance, the country-club wear of the fifties became mass style for newly conservative parents and their preppy kids. Ralph Lauren’s Polo horseman and Izod Lacoste’s alligator escaped from the golf course and scurried into the streets, dragging the logo decisively onto the outside of the shirt. These logos served the same social function as keeping the clothing’s price tag on: everyone knew precisely what premium the wearer was willing to pay for style. By the mid-eighties, Lacoste and Ralph Lauren were joined by Calvin Klein, Esprit and, in Canada, Roots; gradually, the logo was transformed from an ostentatious affectation to an active fashion accessory. Most significantly, the logo itself was growing in size, ballooning from a three-quarter-inch emblem into a chest-sized marquee. This process of logo inflation is still progressing, and none is more bloated than Tommy Hilfiger, who has managed to pioneer a clothing style that transforms its faithful adherents into walking, talking, life-sized Tommy dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds.
This scaling-up of the logo’s role has been so dramatic that it has become a change in substance. Over the past decade and a half, logos have grown so dominant that they have essentially transformed the clothing on which they appear into empty carriers for the brands they represent. The metaphorical alligator, in other words, has risen up and swallowed the literal shirt.
This trajectory mirrors the larger transformation our culture has undergone since Marlboro Friday, sparked by a stampede of manufacturers looking to replace their cumbersome product-production apparatus with transcendent brand names and to infuse their brands with deep, meaningful messages. By the mid-nineties, companies like Nike, Polo and Tommy Hilfiger were ready to take branding to the next level: no longer simply branding their own products, but branding the outside culture as well —by sponsoring cultural events, they could go out into the world and claim bits of it as brand-name outposts. For these companies, branding was not just a matter of adding value to a product. It was about thirstily soaking up cultural ideas and iconography that their brands could reflect by projecting these ideas and images back on the culture as “extensions” of their brands. Culture, in other words, would add value to their brands. For example, Onute Miller, senior brand manager for Tequila Sauza, explains that her company sponsored a risqué photography exhibit by George Holz because “art was a natural synergy with our product.”1
Branding’s current state of cultural expansionism is about much more than traditional corporate sponsorships: the classic arrangement in which a company donates money to an event in exchange for seeing its logo on a banner or in a program. Rather, this is the Tommy Hilfiger approach of full-frontal branding, applied now to cityscapes, music, art, films, community events, magazines, sports and schools. This ambitious project makes the logo the central focus of everything it touches —not an add-on or a happy association, but the main attraction.
Advertising and sponsorship have always been about using imagery to equate products with positive cultural or social experiences. What makes nineties-style branding different is that it increasingly seeks to take these associations out of the representational realm and make them a lived reality. So the goal is not merely to have child actors drinking Coke in a TV commercial, but for students to brainstorm concepts for Coke’s next ad campaign in English class. It transcends logo-festooned Roots clothing designed to conjure memories of summer camp and reaches out to build an actual Roots country lodge that becomes a 3-D manifestation of the Roots brand concept. Disney transcends its sports network ESPN, a channel for guys who like to sit around in sports bars screaming at the TV, and launches a line of ESPN Sports Bars, complete with giant-screen TVs. The branding process reaches beyond heavily marketed Swatch watches and launches “Internet time,” a new venture for the Swatch Group, which divides the day into one thousand “Swatch beats.” The Swiss company is now attempting to convince the on-line world to abandon the traditional clock and switch to its time-zone-free, branded time.
The effect, if not always the original intent, of advanced branding is to nudge the hosting culture into the background and make the brand the star. It is not to sponsor culture but to be the culture. And why shouldn’t it be? If brands are not products but ideas, attitudes, values and experiences, why can’t they be culture too? As we will see later in the chapter, this project has been so successful that the lines between corporate sponsors and sponsored culture have entirely disappeared. But this conflation has not been a oneway process, with passive artists allowing themselves to be shoved into the background by aggressive multinational corporations. Rather, many artists, media personalities, film directors and sports stars have been racing to meet the corporations halfway in the branding game. Michael Jordan, Puff Daddy, Martha Stewart, Austin Powers, Brandy and Star Wars now mirror the corporate structure of corporations like Nike and the Gap, and they are just as captivated by the prospect of developing and leveraging their own branding potential as the product-based manufacturers. So what was once a process of selling culture to a sponsor for a price has been supplanted by the logic of “co-branding” —a fluid partnership between celebrity people and celebrity brands.
The project of transforming culture into little more than a collection of brand-extensions-in-waiting would not have been possible without the deregulation and privatization policies of the past three decades. In Canada under Brian Mulroney, in the U.S. under Ronald Reagan and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher (and in many other parts of the world as well), corporate taxes were dramatically lowered, a move that eroded the tax base and gradually starved out the public sector. (See Table 2.1.) As government spending dwindled, schools, museums and broadcasters were desperate to make up their budget shortfalls and thus ripe for partnerships with private corporations. It also didn’t hurt that the political climate during this time ensured that there was almost no vocabulary to speak passionately about the value of a non-commercialized public sphere. This was the time of the Big Government bogeyman and deficit hysteria, when any political move that was not overtly designed to increase the freedom of corporations was vilified as an endorsement of national bankruptcy. It was against this backdrop that, in rapid order, sponsorship went from being a rare occurrence (in the 1970s) to an exploding growth industry (by the mid-eighties), picking up momentum in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics (see Table 2.2).
At first, these arrangements seemed win-win: the cultural or educational institution in question received much-needed funds and the sponsoring corporation was compensated with some modest form of public acknowledgment and a tax break. And, in fact, many of these new public-private arrangements were just that simple, successfully retaining a balance between the cultural event or institution’s independence and the sponsor’s desire for credit, often helping to foster a revival of arts accessible to the general public. Successes like these are frequently overlooked by critics of commercialization, among whom there is an unfortunate tendency to tar all sponsorship with the same brush, as if any contact with a corporate logo infects the natural integrity of an otherwise pristine public event or cause. Writing in The Commercialization of American Culture, advertising critic Matthew McAllister labels corporate sponsorship “control behind a philanthropic façade.”2 He writes:
While elevating the corporate, sponsorship simultaneously devalues what it sponsors…. The sporting event, the play, the concert and the public television program become subordinate to promotion because, in the sponsor’s mind and in the symbolism of the event, they exist to promote. It is not Art for Art’s Sake as much as Art for Ad’s Sake. In the public’s eye, art is yanked from its own separate and theoretically autonomous domain and squarely placed in the
commercial…. Every time the commercial intrudes on the cultural, the integrity of the public sphere is weakened because of the obvious encroachment of corporate promotion.3
This picture of our culture’s lost innocence is mostly romantic fiction. Though there have always been artists who have fought fiercely to protect the integrity of their work, neither the arts, sports nor the media have ever, even theoretically, been the protected sovereign states that McAllister imagines. Cultural products are the all-time favorite playthings of the powerful, tossed from wealthy statesmen such as Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who set up the poet Horace in a writing estate in 33 B.C., and from rulers like Francis I and the Medici family, whose love of the arts bolstered the status of Renaissance painters in the sixteenth century. Though the degree of meddling varies, our culture was built on compromises between notions of public good and the personal, political and financial ambitions of the rich and powerful.
Table 2.1
Corporate Tax as a Percentage of Total Federal Revenue in the U.S., 1952, 1975 and 1998
Table 2.2
Increase in U.S. Corporate Sponsorship Spending since 1985
Of course there are some forms of corporate sponsorship that are inherently insidious —the tobacco industry’s corralling of the arts springs to mind. But not all sponsorship deals should be so easily dismissed. Not only are such broad strokes unfair to worthy projects but, perhaps more important, they can prevent us from seeing changes in the field. If all corporate sponsorship arrangements are regarded as equally compromised, it becomes easy not to notice when the role of the corporate sponsor begins to expand and change —which is precisely what has been happening over the past decade as global corporate sponsorship has ballooned from a $7-billion-a-year industry in 1991 to a $19.2 billion one in 1999.
When sponsorship took off as a stand-in for public funds in the mid-eighties, many corporations that had been experimenting with the practice ceased to see sponsorship as a hybrid of philanthropy and image promotion and began to treat it more purely as a marketing tool, and a highly effective one at that. As its promotional value grew —and as dependency on sponsorship revenue increased in the cultural industries — the delicate dynamic between sponsors and the sponsored began to shift, with many corporations becoming more ambitious in their demands for grander acknowledgments and control, even buying events outright. Molson and Miller beer, as we will see further on in this chapter, are no longer satisfied with having their logos on banners at rock concerts. Instead, they have pioneered a new kind of sponsored concert in which the blue-chip stars who perform are entirely upstaged by their hosting brand. And while corporate sponsorship has long been a mainstay in museums and galleries, when Philip Morris—owned Altoids mints decided in January 1999 that it wanted to get into the game, it cut out the middleman. Rather than sponsoring an existing show, the company spent $250,000 to buy works by twenty emerging artists and launch its own Curiously Strong Collection, a traveling art exhibition that plays on the Altoids marketing slogan, “Curiously strong mints.” Chris Peddy, Altoids brand manager, said, “We decided to take it to the next level.”4
These companies are part of a larger phenomenon explained by Lesa Ukman, executive editor of the International Events Group Sponsorship Report, the industry’s bible: “From MasterCard and Dannon to Phoenix Home Life and LaSalle Bank, companies are buying properties and creating their own events. This is not because they want to get into the business. It’s because proposals sponsors receive don’t fit their requirements or because they’ve had negative experiences buying into someone else’s gig.”5 There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers transcend their connection to their earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their businesses, they attempt to alter marketing’s social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration.
The most insidious effect of this shift is that after a few years of Molson concerts, Pepsi-sponsored papal visits, Izod zoos and Nike after-school basketball programs, everything from small community events to large religious gatherings are believed to “need a sponsor” to get off the ground; August 1999, for instance, saw the first-ever private wedding with corporate sponsorship. This is what Leslie Savan, author of The Sponsored Life, describes as symptom number one of the sponsored mindset: we become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity.
The Branding of the Cityscape
The expansive trajectory of branding revealed itself to Londoners in a 1997 holiday season morality play. It began when the Regent Street Association found itself without enough money to replace the dimming Christmas lights that normally adorned the street during the season. Yves Saint Laurent stepped in and generously offered to split the cost of new decorations in exchange for seeing its logo up in lights. But when the time came to hang the Christmas lights, it seemed that the YSL logos were much larger than the agreed-upon size. Every few steps, shoppers were reminded by illuminated signs 5.5 meters high just who had brought them Christmas. The logos were eventually replaced with smaller ones, but the lesson remained: the role of the sponsor, like that of advertising in general, has a tendency to expand.
While yesterday’s corporate sponsors may have been satisfied merely propping up community events, the meaning-seeking brand builders will never accept this role for long. Branding is, at its core, a deeply competitive undertaking in which brands are up against not only their immediate rivals (Nike vs. Reebok, Coke vs. Pepsi, McDonald’s vs. Burger King, for example) but all other brands in the mediascape, including the events and people they are sponsoring. This is perhaps branding’s cruelest irony: most manufacturers and retailers begin by seeking out authentic scenes, important causes and cherished public events so that these things will infuse their brands with meaning. Such gestures are frequently motivated by genuine admiration and generosity. Too often, however, the expansive nature of the branding process ends up causing the event to be usurped, creating the quintessential lose-lose situation. Not only do fans begin to feel a sense of alienation from (if not outright resentment toward) once-cherished cultural events, but the sponsors lose what they need most: a feeling of authenticity with which to associate their brands.
That’s certainly what happened to Michael Chesney, the hip-hop adman who painted Canadian billboards into the branding era. He loved Toronto’s Queen Street West —the funky clothing stores, the artists on all the patios, and, most of all, the graffiti art that figured large on the walls in that part of town. For Chesney, it was a short step from the public’s growing interest in the cultural value of graffiti to the commercial takeover of that pocket of marginal space —a space used and reused by the disenfranchised for political and cultural expression in every city in the world.
From the start, Chesney considered himself a distant relative of the graffiti kids —though less a cousin than a rich uncle. The way he saw it, as a commercial artist and billboard salesman he was also a creature of the streets, because even if he was painting for corporate clients, he, like the graffiti artists, left his mark on walls. It was in this context that Chesney pioneered the advertising practice of the “building takeover.” In the late eighties, Chesney’s company Murad began painting directly onto building walls, letting the size of each structure dictate the dimensions of the ad. The idea harked back to 1920s Coca-Cola murals on corner grocery stores and to early-industrial urban factories and department stores that painted their names and logos in giant block lettering on their buildings’ façades. The walls Chesney rented to Coke, Warner Brothers and Calvin Klein were a little bit bigger, however, reaching their pinnacle at a colossal 20,000-square-foot billboard overlooking one of Toronto’s busiest intersections. Gradually, the ads wrapped around the corners of the buildings so that they covered not just one wall, but all of them: the ad as edifice.
In the
summer of 1996, when Levi Strauss chose Toronto to test-market its new SilverTab jeans line, Chesney put on his most daring show yet: he called it “The Queen Street Takeover.” Between 1996 and 1997, Levi’s increased its spending on billboard advertisements by a startling 301 percent —and Toronto saw much of that windfall.6 For one year, as the centerpiece of the most expensive outdoor ad campaign in Canadian history, Chesney painted his beloved strip silver. He bought up the façades of almost every building on the busiest stretch of Queen and turned them into Levi’s billboards, upping the ante of the ad extravaganza even further with 3-D extensions, mirrors and neon. It was Murad’s greatest triumph, but the takeover presented some problems for Michael Chesney. When I spent a day with him at the tail end of the SilverTab bonanza, he could barely walk down Queen Street without running into somebody who was furious about the invasion. After ducking a few bullets, he told me a story of bumping into an acquaintance: “she said, ‘You took over Queen Street.’ She was really almost crying and I just, my heart sank, and she was really bummed out. But, hey, what can you do? It’s the future, it’s not Queen anymore.”
Nearly every major city has seen some variation of the 3-D ad takeover, if not on entire buildings, then on buses, streetcars or taxis. It is sometimes difficult, however, to express dissatisfaction with this brand expansion —after all, most of these venues and vehicles have been carrying some form of advertising for decades. But somewhere along the line, the order flipped. Now buses, streetcars and taxis, with the help of digital imaging and large pieces of adhesive vinyl, have become ads on wheels, shepherding passengers around in giant chocolate bars and gum wrappers, just as Hilfiger and Polo turned clothing into wearable brand billboards.