by Naomi Klein
If this creeping ad expansion seems a mere matter of semantics when applied to taxis and T-shirts, its implications are much more serious when looked at in the context of another marketing trend: the branding of entire neighborhoods and cities. In March 1999, Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan unveiled a plan to revitalize poor inner-city areas, many of them still scarred from the 1992 riots after the Rodney King verdict: corporations would adopt a run-down part of town and brand its redevelopment. For the time being, the sponsors of Genesis L.A., as the project is called —among them Bank-America and Wells Fargo & Co. — only have the option of seeing these sites named after them, much like a sponsored sports arena. But if the initiative follows the expansive branding trajectory seen elsewhere, the sponsoring companies could well wield more politically powerful roles in these communities soon.
The idea of a fully privatized, branded town or neighborhood is not nearly as far-fetched today as it was only a few years ago, as the inhabitants of Disney’s town Celebration, Florida, can attest —and as the citizens of Cashmere, Washington, have quickly learned. A sleepy town of 2,500 people, Cashmere has as its major industry the Liberty Orchard candy factory, which has been making Aplets and Cotlets chewy sweets since it was founded in 1918. It was all very quaint until Liberty Orchard announced in September 1997 that it would leave for greener pastures unless the town agreed to transform itself into a 3-D tourist attraction for the Aplets and Cotlets all-American brand, complete with signs along the highway and a downtown turned into a corporate gift shop. The Wall Street Journal reported the company’s ransom demands:
They want all road signs and official correspondence by the city to say “Cashmere, Home of Aplets and Cotlets.” They have asked that one of the two main streets in town be changed to Cotlets Avenue, and the other one be renamed Aplets Avenue. The candymaker also wants the Mayor and Council to sell City Hall to them, build new parking lots and possibly go to the bond market to start a tourism campaign on behalf of the worldwide headquarters of a company that says its story is “America in a nutshell.”7
The Branding of Media
I appeal to every producer not to release “sponsored” moving pictures…. Believe me, if you jam advertising down their throats and pack their eyes and ears with it, you will build up a resentment that will in time damn your business.
—Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, 1931
Although there is a clear trajectory in all of these stories, there is little point, at this stage in our sponsored history, in pining for either a mythic brand-free past or some utopian commercial-free future. Branding becomes troubling —as it did in the cases just discussed — when the balance tips dramatically in favor of the sponsoring brand, stripping the hosting culture of its inherent value and treating it as little more than a promotional tool. It is possible, however, for a more balanced relationship to unfold — one in which both sponsor and sponsored hold on to their power and in which clear boundaries are drawn and protected. As a working journalist, I know that critical, independent —even anti-corporate —coverage does appear in corporate-owned media, sandwiched, no less, between the car and tobacco ads. Are these articles tainted by this impure context? No doubt. But if balance (as opposed to purity) is the goal, then maybe print media, where the first mass-market advertising campaigns began, can hold some important lessons for how to cope with the expansionist agenda of branding.
It is common knowledge that many advertisers rail at controversial content, pull their ads when they are criticized even slightly and perpetually angle for so-called value-addeds — plugs for their wares in shopping guides and fashion spreads. For example, S.C. Johnson & Co. stipulates that its ads in women’s magazines “should not be opposite extremely controversial features or material antithetical to the nature/copy of the advertised product” while De Beers diamonds demands that their ads be far from any “hard news or anti/love-romance themed editorial.”8 And up until 1997, when Chrysler placed an ad it demanded that it be “alerted in advance of any and all editorial content that encompasses sexual, political, social issues or any editorial that might be construed as provocative or offensive.”9 But the advertisers don’t always get their way: controversial stories make it to print and to air, even ones critical of major advertisers. At its most daring and uncompromised, the news media can provide workable models for the protection of the public interest even under heavy corporate pressure, though these battles are often won behind closed doors. On the other hand, at their worst, these same media show how deeply distorting the effects of branding can be on our public discourse —particularly since journalism, like every other part of our culture, is under constantly increasing pressure to merge with the brands.
Part of this stepped-up pressure is coming from the explosion of sponsored media projects: magazines, Web sites and television programs that invite corporate sponsors to become involved at the development stage of a venture. That’s the role Heineken played in the British music and youth culture show Hotel Babylon, which aired on ITV. In an embarrassing incident in January 1996, a memo from a Heineken executive was leaked to the press that berated the producers for insufficiently “Heineken-izing” the as-yet-unaired program. Specifically, Justus Kos objected to male audience members drinking wine as opposed to “masculine drinks like beer, whisky,” noted that “more evidence of beer is not just requested but needed” and complained that the show’s host “shouldn’t stand in the way of the beer columns when introducing guests.” Most inflammatory of all was the executive’s complaint that there was “too high a proportion of negroes in the audience.”10 After the controversy made its way into the press, Heineken CEO Karel Vuursteen issued a public apology.
Another sponsor scandal erupted during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, when CBS investigative journalist Roberta Baskin saw her CBS Sports department colleagues reporting on the games in jackets adorned with bold Nike logos. Nike was the official sponsor of the network’s Olympic coverage and it provided news and sports reporters with the swooshed gear because, according to Nike spokesman Lee Weinstein, it “helps us build awareness about our products.” Baskin was “dismayed and embarrassed” that CBS reporters seemed to be endorsing Nike products, not only because it represented a further dissolution of the line between editorial and advertising, but because two years earlier, Baskin had broken a news story about physical abuse of workers at a Nike shoe factory in Vietnam. She accused the station of refusing to allow her to pursue a follow-up and of yanking the original story from a scheduled rerun because of its sponsorship deal with Nike. CBS News president Andrew Heyward strenuously denied bowing to sponsor pressure, calling Baskin’s allegations “truly preposterous.” He did pull the Nike jackets off the news reporters midway through the games, though the sports department kept theirs on.
In some ways, these stories are simply pumped-up versions of the same old tug-of-war between editorial and advertising that journalists have faced for a century and a quarter. Increasingly, however, corporations aren’t just asking editors and producers to become their de facto ad agencies by dreaming up ways to plug their wares in articles and photo shoots, they are also asking magazines to become their actual ad agencies, by helping them to create the ads that run in their magazines. More and more magazines are turning their offices into market-research firms and their readers into focus groups in an effort to provide the most cherished “value-added” they can offer their clients: highly detailed demographic information about their readership, amassed through extensive surveys and questionnaires.
In many cases, the magazines then use the readership information to design closely targeted advertisements for their clients. Details magazine, for instance, designed a twenty-four-page comic/advertisement strip in October 1997, with products like Hugo Boss cologne and Lee jeans woven into a story line about the daily adventures of a professional in-line skater. On the page following each product’s extreme cameo, the company’s real ad appeared.
The irony of these br
anding experiments, of course, is that they only seem to make brands more resentful of the media that host them. Inevitably, the lifestyle brands begin to ask why they need to attach themselves to some one else’s media project in the first place. Why, even after proving they can integrate into the most stylish and trendiest of magazines, should they be kept at arm’s length or, worse, branded with the word “Advertise ment,” like the health warnings on packs of cigarettes? So, with lifestyle magazines looking more and more like catalogs for designers, designer catalogs have begun to look more and more like magazines: Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew, Harry Rosen and Diesel have all shifted to a storybook format, where characters frolic along sketchily drawn plotlines.
The merger between media and catalog reached a new high with the launch of the teen TV drama Dawson’s Creek in January of 1998. Not only did the characters all wear J. Crew clothes, not only did the windswept, nautical set make them look as if they had stepped off the pages of a J. Crew catalog, and not only did the characters spout dialogue like “He looks like he stepped out of a J. Crew catalog,” but the cast was also featured on the cover of the January J. Crew catalog. Inside the new “freestyle magalog,” the young actors are pictured in rowboats and on docks —looking as if they just stepped off the set of a Dawson’s Creek episode.
To see the birthplace of this kind of brand ambition, you have to go online, where there was never really any pretense of a wall existing between editorial and advertisement. On the Web, marketing language reached its nirvana: the ad-free ad. For the most part, the on-line versions of media outlets feature straightforward banner ads similar to their paper or broadcast versions, but many media outlets have also used the Net to blur the line between editorial and advertising much more aggressively than they could in the non-virtual world. For instance, on the Teen People site, readers can click and order cosmetics and clothing as they read about them. On the Entertainment Weekly site, visitors can click and order the books and CDs being reviewed. In Canada, The Globe and Mail has attracted the ire of independent booksellers for the on-line version of its book review section, ChaptersGLOBE.com. After reading Globe reviews, readers can click to order books directly from the Chapters chain —a reviewer/retailer partnership that formed “Canada’s largest online bookstore.” The New York Times’ on-line partnership with Barnes and Noble has caused similar controversies in the U.S.
These sites are relatively tame examples of the branding-content integration taking place on the Net, however. Sites are increasingly created by “content developers,” whose role is to produce editorial that will make an ad-cozy home for the developers’ brand-name clients. One such on-line venture is Parent Soup, invented by content developer “iVillage” for Fisher-Price, Starbucks, Procter and Gamble and Polaroid. It calls itself a “parents’ community” and attempts to imitate a user-driven newsgroup, but when parents go to Parent Soup to get peer advice, they receive such branded wisdom as: the way to improve your child’s self-esteem is by taking Polaroids of her. No need to bully or buy off editors — just publish do-it-yourself content, with ads pre-integrated.
Absolut Vodka’s 1997 Absolut Kelly Internet site provided an early preview of the direction in which branded media are headed. The distiller had long since solicited original, brand-centered creations from visual artists, fashion designers and novelists to use in its advertisements —but this was different. On Absolut Kelly, only the name of the site advertised the product; the rest was an illustrated excerpt from Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control. This, it seemed, was what the brand managers had aspired to all along: for their brands to become quietly integrated into the heart of the culture. Sure, manufacturers will launch noisy interruptions if they are locked on the wrong side of the commerce/culture divide, but what they really want is for their brand to earn the right to be accepted, not just as advertising art but simply as art. Off-line, Absolut is still a major advertiser in Wired, but on-line, it is Absolut that is the host, and a Wired editor the supporting act.
Rather than merely bankrolling someone else’s content, all over the Net, corporations are experimenting with the much-coveted role of being “content providers”: Gap’s site offers travel tips, Volkswagen provides free music samples, Pepsi urges visitors to download video games, and Starbucks offers an on-line version of its magazine, Joe. Every brand with a Web site has its own virtual, branded media outlet —a beachhead from which to expand into other non-virtual media. What has become clear is that corporations aren’t just selling their products on-line, they’re selling a new model for the media’s relationship with corporate sponsors and backers. The Internet, because of its anarchic nature, has created the space for this model to be realized swiftly, but the results are clearly made for off-line export. For instance, about a year after the launch of Absolut Kelly, the company reached full editorial integration in Saturday Night magazine when the final page of a nine-page excerpt from Mordecai Richler’s novel Barney’s Version was wrapped around the silhouette of an Absolut bottle. This was not an ad, it was part of the story, yet at the bottom of the page were the words “Absolut Mordecai.”11
Although magazines and individual television shows are beginning to see the branded light, it is a network, MTV, that is the model for fully branded media integration. MTV started out sponsored, as a joint venture between Warner Communications and American Express. From the beginning, MTV has not been just a marketing machine for the products it advertises around the clock (whether those products are skin cleansers or the albums it moves with its music videos); it has also been a twenty-four-hour advertisement for MTV itself: the first truly branded network. Though there have been dozens of imitators since, the original genius of MTV, as every marketer will tell you, is that viewers didn’t watch individual shows, they simply watched MTV. “As far as we were concerned, MTV was the star,” says Tom Freston, network founder.12 And so advertisers didn’t want to just advertise on MTV, they wanted to co-brand with the station in ways that are still unimaginable on most other networks: giveaways, contests, movies, concerts, awards ceremonies, clothing, countdowns, listings, credit cards and more.
The model of the medium-as-brand that MTV perfected has since been adopted by almost every other major media outlet, whether magazines, film studios, television networks or individual shows. The hip-hop magazine Vibe has extended into television, fashion shows and music seminars. Fox Sports has announced that it wants its new line of men’s clothing to be on par with Nike: “We are hoping to take the attitude and lifestyle of Fox Sports off the TV and onto men’s backs, creating a nation of walking billboards,” said David Hill, CEO of Fox Broadcasting.
The rush to branding has been most dramatic in the film industry. At the same time that brand-name product placement in films has become an indispensable marketing vehicle for companies like Nike, Macintosh and Star bucks, films themselves are increasingly being conceptualized as “branded media properties.” Newly merged entertainment conglomerates are always looking for threads to sew together their disparate holdings in cross-promotional webs and, for the most part, that thread is the celebrity generated by Hollywood blockbusters. Films create stars to cross-promote in books, magazines and TV, and they also provide prime vehicles for sports, television and music stars to “extend” their own brands.
I’ll explore the cultural legacy of this type of synergy-driven production in Chapter 9, but there is a more immediate impact as well, one that has much to do with the phenomenon of disappearing unmarketed cultural “space” with which this section is concerned. With brand managers envisioning themselves as sensitive culture makers, and culture makers adopting the hard-nosed business tactics of brand builders, a dramatic change in mindset has occurred. Whatever desire might exist to protect a television show from too much sponsor interference, an emerging musical genre from crass commercialism or a magazine from overt advertiser control has been trampled by the manic branding imperative: to disseminate one’s own brand “meaning” through w
hatever means necessary, often in partnership with other powerful brands. In this context, the Dawson’s Creek brand actively benefits from its exposure in the J. Crew catalog, the Kelly brand grows stronger from its association with the Absolut brand, the People magazine brand draws cachet from a close association with Tommy Hilfiger, and the Phantom Menace tie-ins with Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pepsi are invaluable Star Wars brand promotion. When brand awareness is the goal shared by all, repetition and visibility are the only true measures of success. The journey to this point of full integration between ad and art, brand and culture, has taken most of this century to achieve, but the point of no return, when it arrived, was unmistakable: April 1998, the launch of the Gap Khakis campaign.
The Branding of Music
In 1993, the Gap launched its “Who wore khakis?” ads, featuring old photographs of such counterculture figures as James Dean and Jack Kerouac in beige pants. The campaign was in the cookie-cutter co-optation formula: take a cool artist, associate that mystique with your brand, hope it wears off and makes you cool too. It sparked the usual debates about the mass marketing of rebellion, just as William Burroughs’s presence in a Nike ad did at around the same time.
Fast forward to 1998. The Gap launches its breakthrough Khakis Swing ads: a simple, exuberant miniature music video set to “Jump, Jive ‘n’ Wail” —and a great video at that. The question of whether these ads were “co-opting” the artistic integrity of the music was entirely meaningless. The Gap’s commercials didn’t capitalize on the retro swing revival — a solid argument can be made that they caused the swing revival. A few months later, when singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright appeared in a Christmas-themed Gap ad, his sales soared, so much so that his record company began promoting him as “the guy in the Gap ads.” Macy Gray, the new R&B “It Girl,” also got her big break in a Baby Gap ad. And rather than the Gap Khaki ads looking like rip-offs of MTV videos, it seemed that overnight, every video on MTV —from Brandy to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys —looked like a Gap ad; the company has pioneered its own aesthetic, which spilled out into music, other advertisements, even films like The Matrix. After five years of intense lifestyle branding, the Gap, it has become clear, is as much in the culture-creation business as the artists in its ads.