The Tanning of America

by Steve Stoute

  As Paul Fireman later recalled, Jay-Z’s instinct not to overexpose the line but to keep the quantity down and elevate demand was so smart. The S. Carter thus became the fastest-selling shoe in Reebok’s history. When we shot the commercial, Jay-Z appeared in it with 50 Cent, setting the stage for the audience and teasing it with the G-Unit, 50’s sneaker, which hadn’t even been released. And when the G-Unit did hit, forget it! It broke every sales record in the book. We were ready to follow yet again with rising star rapper/singer/producer/designer Pharrell Williams and his Ice Cream sneakers. Both the S. Carters and the G-Units outsold any of Reebok’s athlete-endorsed sneaker lines of that period.

  In August 2005 the announcement that Reebok had been acquired by Adidas-Salomon for over $3 billion was a storybook ending for the brand revival we had undertaken not too many years earlier. When Paul Fireman had returned to pick up the reins again at Reebok and we started working on it, stock shares had been trading at the sub-basement price of $6. At the time of the sale they were paid $59 per share. From as low as 6 percent of market share, Reebok had rebounded during Paul’s oversight to as high as 17 and even 18 percent. Most analysts predicted that the Reebok and Adidas merger would be mutually advantageous, pointing, in fact, to the opportunities opened up through outreach to younger consumers through music. Interestingly enough, Nike was following suit with their own embrace of the sounds and rhythms of urban culture gone global. With Nike holding steady at about 36 percent of U.S. market share and a combined Adidas-Reebok still around 20 percent, analysts noted that the rising brand to watch was—guess who?—Puma, coming on strong. So much for the Sneaker Wars.

  Whenever I am asked about what brands now fighting for survival in tough economic times really need to do, I point them toward all the choices that Paul Fireman made in building a company from the ground up and then re-empowering it even in the face of slim odds. If there is one particular rule that made the difference, it is the reality that doing business by the numbers, with focus only on the bottom line, is an economic death trap. During our work together, I distinctly recall that Jay Margolis, then president of Reebok, who had come aboard for that position after successes elsewhere, was resistant to many of the strategies that connected the company’s fortunes to culture. Paul chose not to bank on what others insisted the trends were going to be, but instead focused on making sure that the sneakers held up a mirror to the lives of the consumers who gave Reebok life from the start.

  I loved every second of it. My favorite moment would have to be the night of April 18, 2003, when one thousand or more people lined up behind a velvet rope stretching down several blocks from the entrance of the Foot Locker shoe store on 125th Street in Harlem. Police guarded the main doors, which had not yet opened, and upon becoming concerned that the crowd was growing more and more worked up by the minute, they decided to shut down the busy street to keep it clear of traffic. Inside the Foot Locker store, I was watching all this unfold as a local radio station broadcast live and reporters from local and national media outlets buzzed around waiting for Jay-Z to appear and for the unveiling of the S. Carter by RBK.

  For a minute, it all seemed surreal. Who would have ever thought that a sneaker could galvanize so much attention? Then out of the recesses of memory, I heard an echo of some lines of poetry from “My Adidas” by Run-DMC and all I could do was smile.

  CHAPTER 7

  FUTURE SHOCK REMIX

  Pop culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum. This is to say that only by responding to the events and movements happening in the times that the culture serves can there be truth and relevance—which are necessary in order for the culture to go on. Hip-hop, as both the driver of tanning and the beneficiary of it, had proven early on that it could take advantage of opportunities and be resilient in the face of challenge. And that was long before it was recognized for its profitability. Now, in the 2000s, with dramatic change happening almost on every level, each of those capacities became more evident and more needed than ever.

  Those had been my thoughts in the fall of 2001 when I still had a foot in the music business but the other already in marketing. One of the trends in the record industry that wasn’t hard to notice in those days was the fervor for Latino artists who were dominating pop as well as the Latin music charts. In 1999, Puerto Rican–born Ricky Martin, already well established with record releases in Spanish, debuted his English-language album and broke it out of the box with the single “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” which became a global number one, followed the next year with “She Bangs”—another international smash. Between Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, and Enrique Iglesias, the influence of Hispanic artists was such a significant phenomenon that it drew attention to what was the actual changing complexion of America.

  The 2000 census reported that in the largest one hundred cities in the United States, (non-Hispanic) whites—for the first time ever documented—had become the minority population. Within forty years, the Census Bureau went on to predict, more than half the population in the country would be comprised of the three most populous ethnic minority groups—Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Between 1990 and 2000, the Hispanic population in the U.S. grew by 58 percent. That was thirty-five million Latinos in this country—what market research companies estimated to be over $45 billion in buying power growing at twice the rate of general consumer groups. In 2000, seven million Americans categorized themselves as “multiracial,” a literal translation of tanning, and this was so notable that within two years, a few trade groups would begin to study the market forces in a polyethnic way. Multicultural buying power in 2002 would be estimated to be worth $580 billion. And one of the most telling statistics for future trends was the fact that the fasting-growing group, the Hispanic-American population, was younger—more than a third under the age of eighteen—as opposed to the majority of the U.S. population, which was aging.

  This isn’t to say that Latin music in the United Sates was news to the record business. In the 1970s, Billboard magazine started tracking sales of Spanish-language Latin artists domestically and abroad. In 1994, Billboard starting charting Latin pop to account for the growing potency of English-language music by Hispanic artists. By 2001, with “Livin’ la Vida Loca” charting a full-blown crossover to mainstream pop, the hinges of the doors had been knocked off. None of it was a fluke or a passing fancy. The music was hot. Young people who loved hip-hop, pop, R&B, country, you name it, embraced Latin pop en masse. They loved what and who it represented and they loved the beat for the feeling, flavor, and fun of it.

  As it so happened, Ricky Martin and Shakira were signed to Sony, my former employer, now my competitor. Then they signed Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, after they had been free agents and everyone had hoped to sign them. Sony did well. The other big free agent on the market was Enrique Iglesias. Born in Spain but raised mostly in the United States, he had pursued a career very much on his own—keeping it a secret for as long as he could from his father, Julio—to avoid both riding on the coattails of his dad and being tied to him musically. After working with an independent label that produced his Spanish-language albums—earning him a meaningful international following—Enrique was ready to make his break into English-language and pop radio.

  In 1999, right at this same time, we at Interscope were releasing the soundtrack for Will Smith’s next movie, Wild Wild West. The music was mostly by hip-hop artists, but we were able to include a single on it by Enrique. Entitled “Bailamos,” the song flew up to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, a full-fledged pop smash. This paved the way for us to sign Iglesias to a multi-album deal at Interscope and to go right into production for his first album for Interscope, Enrique, which landed another number one pop hit in “Be with You.”

  In 2001, the follow-up album, Escape, would be his most popular to date. It included the single “Hero,” a beautiful song that happened to come out right at the same time as a Marc Anthony album, Libre, and its single release called “Trage
dy.” There was definitely a competition for which Latin artist’s record of the moment would claim the greatest commercial success. Kind of dumb really, but that is the nature of an emerging art form that has to battle for legitimacy, I suppose. In any case, the contest was fierce. Marc Anthony, known as “the Voice” for being an unsurpassed male vocalist in the genre, was riding high. But then again, Enrique Iglesias, with his passion and multiple gifts as an artist, could connect to his audience with an electric current of emotion.

  Then in the midst of all of us wondering whether “Hero” or “Tragedy” was going to steal the most thunder, it was September 11 and the competition was instantly forgotten. None of it mattered in the days and weeks and months that followed. Of course, “Tragedy” seemed fitting, even though it was a song about a love affair that might not have been what people needed to hear. “Hero” was also fitting and Enrique did sing it during the telethon fund-raiser that was broadcast on September 21, America: A Tribute to Heroes. Still, in that time when America really did try to come together as one nation, one complexion, to find our way through the darkness, charting record sales was the last thing on everyone’s mind.

  Once I got back to work, I was immersed in an ad campaign for Chrysler’s new Jeep Liberty. They had named it that and had shot the commercial before 9/11 and, in what had come out of someone’s imagination, included rousing images of the Jeep climbing up the side of the Statue of Liberty. Not sure at all about how the public was going to take this, I was very wary of a spot that featured the Statue of Liberty at a time when smoke was still coming up from Ground Zero.

  And right as I was thinking about recommending that Chrysler scrap it, I had a stroke of inspiration. Two marketing challenges when taken separately were problems. But if you put them together—the Jeep Liberty commercial and the song “Hero”—the combination could be something redemptive for everyone in the very traumatic period we were going through. I went back to Interscope and worked with the head of new media, Courtney Holt, on setting the song to the commercial. When I took our rough version and presented it to everyone at GM, they loved it and went crazy, hoping that this could really solve their strategic problem.

  There was a hitch. Since the publishing rates for the use of songs in commercials are typically very steep, we knew that Jeep would balk at going for a record already in release by a global superstar. But then it occurred to me there was a way around that issue. We approached Marty Bandier, EMI Music Publishing chairman, and said, “Marty, we’re here to ask for six months.” After a pause during which he said nothing, we proposed that if he would waive the publishing for six months, then Chrysler would be spending its assets—ten million—in media. And how was this good for the publisher? The argument from us was, “If you believe that ten million of media works, you know that we’re gonna sell more albums and you’re gonna make all that money in addition to making back the money you waived in giving the six months of the publishing.”

  The logic is clear today. But it made zero sense when we suggested it. The answer was initially, “Say what? Invest the publishing rights?” Nonetheless, I knew that it would tap a nerve, benefit the client, and sell albums like crazy. Sure enough, we put the commercial and the song together and debuted it during Monday Night Football. And that’s how we began the launch of the campaign and how “Hero” cemented Enrique’s place in the heart of America. As the result of the platform of Monday Night Football, radio stations put the record into heavy rotation. In turn, as it was played, the Jeep was successfully launched into the new millennium.

  Many of these changes had been predicted in a ground-breaking book entitled Future Shock, written by Alvin Toffler in 1970. Toffler had predicted a state of future shock for generations that had already come of age and were not ready to deal with the rapid pace of changes in technology, globalization, and culture—changes that he believed future generations would be better equipped to handle. In an era that predated Microsoft and Apple, “TMI” was not yet in the vernacular—although Toffler saw the perils of “too much information” that would accompany those technologies and the challenges of coping with the resulting media onslaught. For those industries unable to remain “fluid,” as he put it, the future didn’t bode well. For those producers/ purveyors that could find a more direct way to link to their consumers, however, the shock of the future would be absorbed.

  In the last of my days in the music business, some inklings of this paradigm shift were becoming clear to me. In fact, I had floated many of the elements that became known as “360 deals”—whereby a record company, for example, would invest in artists and become their partners in all avenues of entertainment, brand endorsement, merchandising, live performance, and so on, and participate in the revenues. Having everything under one roof, in the service of that artist, just made sense for all involved. But in 2001 when I was pitching the idea, pretty much everyone laughed.

  Guess what? It took the demise, more or less, of the industry for everyone to realize that partnering in this way, working with advertising companies, was the future that had arrived. Record companies’ marketing launches now needed to be subsidized and brands wanted in on that cool.

  Again, there were old attitudes coming out of yesteryear, when the idea of artists and record companies aligning with marketing products was selling out to commercialism. Not to me, needless to say. The key, once more, was authenticity. How was it selling out if the product or project was authentic to an artist and to the audience aligned with the music already? If the uniform of country music stars was a pair of Levi’s jeans, it was only natural that those artists should enjoy the rewards of keeping that brand, and whatever products they were already repping for free, current. The prime example is Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock,” which became synonymous with American rugged individualism by providing the slogan for Chevy trucks and led to more than a decade as the brand’s advertising theme song.

  Though my argument for forging partnerships between artists, record labels, and brands fell mostly on deaf ears in the early ’00s, a decade later, it’s a practice that’s helping to resurrect the record business.

  Be that as it may, at around this same period, on their own the properties of tanning were providing the more resilient brands with new means of connecting to consumers successfully—leading to a kind of future shock remix. So part of my job description as I got into the marketing world was to better understand and be able to translate these new tools, as well as the nuanced code our multilingual target consumers were speaking.

  Meet the Millennials

  In mid-’03, when I went to register and trademark the firm name, Translation, for my new marketing and consulting agency, I was very happy and frankly shocked that it was available. Now that I was opening up my own shop, I had decided to gain experience on the other side of the marketing fence by investing in a relatively new brand, Carol’s Daughter, a line of hair and body products created by Brooklyn-bred entrepreneur Lisa Price.

  Besides the beautiful, earthy, incredibly fragrant appeal of the products—luxurious body butters and rich hair pomades—I related to the brand values and to the story of natural beauty secrets that had been handed down through three generations of women and made with love and ingredients from nature. There was also something very cool about how Lisa had built her business through hand-selling that kept her in touch with her multicultural consumers, mostly women, who connected emotionally to her products.

  In ’04, when the doors to my marketing company, Translation, first opened, I brought those insights to the table when the team and I began major strategy sessions for a growing array of accounts. We quickly realized that if we were asking brand managers and corporate executives to drop their old categories for boxing consumers into demographics, we had to find ways to talk about the psychographics that were meaningful to their efforts. Instead of approaching this task in a more traditional way—that is, through data about where consumers live, what they earn, how they spend, if they belong to religiou
s institutions, how or if they vote, what their educational levels are (all valid)—we wanted to explain our consumer target, also known as the millennials, in terms of their shared values and experiences. Broadly, millennials are seen as the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s.

  While it is hard to pinpoint age, we were able to begin with a list of key virtues: a) Our consumer target is a mind-set, b) our consumer is urban, c) our consumer is savvy, and d) our consumer is in control. Elaborating on each of these virtues, we then went on to explain them in the context of the changes happening in the real world at the time—posing questions to get into the heart of our approach.

  1. What distinguishes the mind-set of the target consumer? The mind-set of millennials is adaptive. Today as boundaries dissolve and information moves without restriction, demography tells us less about the “who” we want to engage. Within our general market consumer universe there exists this psychographic dimension that adapts and responds as a creative collective—igniting pop culture trends, as well as propagating them into mainstream culture. The polyethnic consumers of this mind-set are inclined to make brands their own and within their diverse social networks leverage brands as creative new material in composing self-image and style.