The Tanning of America

by Steve Stoute

  The “I’m Lovin’ It” lifestyle campaign had broken so many rules and had been so successful that I’m sure there were many at McDonald’s who doubted if it could ever be topped. When they approached Translation in 2004 about how they could recreate the excitement of Justin Timberlake’s launch, we switched the approach and aligned the brand with Destiny’s Child—with Beyoncé Knowles, then the lead singer of the three-girl group that had already sold forty million records worldwide and were seen as iconic in the worlds of entertainment, fashion, and music.

  McDonald’s thus became the sponsor of Destiny’s Child’s upcoming worldwide tour, which was aptly entitled “Destiny Fulfilled and Lovin’ It.” The group was enlisted to serve as the global ambassadors of McDonald’s annual fund-raiser, World Children’s Day. When the album, Destiny Fulfilled, was released in November 2004, there had been rumors that it would be the trio’s final release and fans rushed to purchase it; eventually six million copies were sold worldwide. With rave reviews as well, by the time that the tour started in the spring of 2005, the concert tickets were among the most coveted in recent years.

  The “I’m Lovin’ It” lifestyle and mind-set, alive and well at this writing, secured McDonald’s position as a brand and industry leader—because executives were brave enough to lead with ethnic insights and embrace the rich psychographics of a tanner America. The inclusive thinking allowed urban youth culture to come back to the cool that had been there from the start, and McDonald’s to offer new menu choices, with more diverse flavors and healthier options (smoothies, salads, snack wraps), while keeping core consumers feeling better about healthy, more active lifestyles for themselves and their children.

  Some of these changes came about, rightfully so, in response to the negative reports from health organizations about rampant youth obesity plus widespread criticism of fast food in general and McDonald’s in particular, especially with the films Super Size Me (2004) and Food, Inc. (2008). Given those dynamics, we weren’t sure what kind of fiscal read there would be to show how effective the marketing had been for the “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign. Lo and behold, in 2008 McDonald’s stock hit $67 a share, a 198 percent improvement from the $22.45 that it was trading at five years earlier.

  Meanwhile, one of the ongoing changes being discussed that was near and dear to my heart came from the stories that I heard when we interviewed McDonald’s employees who lived in urban neighborhoods. I was convinced that if the brand really wanted to align itself meaningfully to the lives of millennials and remain aspirational, they had to do something about the outdated, conservative uniforms. Kids told me in interview after interview that the outfits were an embarrassment. They were so ashamed, in fact, they would change out of their uniform to walk home. No one wanted to be seen in their neighborhood in clothes like that—for fear of being teased, bullied, or worse. Addressing the dire issue, I asked executives, “Why not dress employees in the kind of apparel that would make them proud to come to work and that would appeal to the consumers we’re trying to attract?” When I presented recommendations of people to design the new uniforms, I showed sketches from the same creative designers behind the Sean John clothing line and Russell Simmons’s Phat Farm apparel label.

  As the McDonald’s executives were debating, the media predicted that Translation had really pushed the envelope too far this time. The July 4, 2005, issue of Advertising Age had a Ronald McDonald dressed in sweat pants, with a baseball cap turned sideways and a huge gold dollar sign hanging around his neck. The headline read: PHAT FEEDER DOWN WITH DIDDY.

  And in the nationally syndicated cartoon The Boondocks, cartoonist Aaron McGruder drew his two main characters, Huey and Riley, engaged in the following exchange:

  Huey: “Steve Stoute says McDonald’s is a lifestyle brand.”

  Riley: “Sounds like somebody might be smoking a little McCrack.”

  Hey, you know that you’re working in the business of culture when you start becoming noticed by culture. My behind-the-scenes cover was clearly blown.

  And pretty soon the uniforms were updated. These experiences validated what I knew about the scope and power—and pitfalls—of tanning that had proven itself to the world. Cool is . . . getting to say, Yeah, we have arrived.

  Fully activated, feeling invincible, the millennial generation with the shared mental complexion was also ready for a departure—to flex its muscle not just in the marketplace but in the voting booth.

  PART THREE

  THE FUTURE OF THE TAN WORLD

  (nav·i·gā·tion)

  [nav-ih-gey-shuhn]

  a) theory, practice and technology of charting a course for a ship, aircraft or spaceship b) a channel

  CHAPTER 9

  1520 SEDGWICK AVENUE–1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

  In May 2007 a group of South Bronx residents, concerned about the fact that rents were being raised in their poorly maintained hundred-unit building, made a startling discovery. Thanks to various search engines they’d been using to learn more about the company that owned the building—and its predatory practices—every time one of them plugged in their address, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, countless hits referred to the building as “the birthplace of hip-hop.” Until they decided to reach out for help from affordable-housing advocates and do the research, none of them would have had any idea that right there in their very own rec room, still in the building—although unusable because of needed repairs—DJ Kool Herc, a.k.a. Clive Campbell, had started the party that turned into a global phenomenon.

  Advocates and residents then teamed up to try to make the building a national landmark in the hopes of gaining attention from city officials as well as from prominent hip-hop figures. At issue in 2007 was the fear that the owners of the building—who had opted out of a city-wide program that helped subsidize rent-controlled apartments for low-income families—would let conditions get worse and then sell to the highest bidder, who, in turn, would fix up the building but kick out tenants who couldn’t afford the exorbitantly higher rents. Actually, the following year, the building was sold and, true to the pattern, living conditions worsened. There were complaints of rats and roaches everywhere, floorboards missing, and unpassable stairwells. In spite of all the attention, progress was slow. But then, finally, in September 2010, through the efforts of city, state, and federal housing authorities, it was announced that the building would be purchased and refurbished as the centerpiece of a new partnership between public and private concerns to provide decent, affordable housing to poor and middle-income families across the five boroughs of New York City.

  Early in the coverage of this story, I had been shocked that a cultural landmark, one that had played such an important role in many of our lives, could have been so easily overlooked and forgotten. At the same time, when word of the tenants’ plight surfaced in 2007, and The New York Times and other media were reporting about hip-hop as an institution with a vibrant, influential history, it was uplifting to see how many people felt connected and proud to belong to the diverse worldwide congregation. The idea that our culture even had its own monument, despite its disrepair, was a clarion call to everyone and anyone who had aligned with the movement at any time in their lives, past or present. Suddenly, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue—and the August night in 1973 when the first party rocked the building—became a touchstone for just how far the diverse global hip-hop community had come.

  I also learned something very interesting when I was reading the stories that came out in these recent years. While I knew that Cindy Campbell (Herc’s sister) had been involved in helping organize and market the first house party, I did not know the real reason that she—not her brother—came up with the idea. As Cindy told The New York Times in 2007, the venture was something she “dreamed up as a way for her to get some extra money for back-to-school clothes.” But not just to look cool and fit in. Cindy Campbell explained, “I didn’t want to go to Fordham Road to buy clothes because you’d go to school and see everybody with the same thing on.... I want
ed to go to Delancey Street and get something unusual.”

  That one comment speaks volumes about why the music that came out of those parties mattered so much, why it had practical relevance in the lives of the teens who were part of making it happen. Cindy Campbell didn’t want to stay put. She wanted the means to challenge the assigned demographics and get down to lower Manhattan.

  Today that might not sound so revolutionary. But almost forty years ago, it was definitely going against the grain. It’s a reminder that, as much as aspiration drives culture, it is oppression that breeds resourcefulness—which in turn breeds empowerment, economic, social, and political.

  Hip-hop, let us then acknowledge, came about to serve a higher purpose, to be a cultural bridge to the promised land of what America’s founders dreamed. I believe it did as much for civil rights as any other force since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And the bridge wasn’t just for people of color, for the impoverished and the oppressed. As DJ Kool Herc said about his first party and the mix of music that was played, “It wasn’t a black thing. It was a ‘we’ thing.” Truly, hip-hop was marked as a color-blind space.

  Tanning is also a “we” thing—the same “we” that could look back and say, “Yes We Did,” when it came to electing a president. For that reason, I like to think of all the groundbreaking done in the early years and of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as both the birthplace of hip-hop and where the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for our forty-fourth president of the United States took an auspicious turn.

  While much has been said and written about the historic campaign that helped put Barack Obama in the White House, a few lessons from a cultural perspective are worth revisiting—for both their marketing insights and, hopefully, their most cherished American values.

  The Rule of Three

  On the evening of November 7, 2000, at 9:04 P.M. Eastern Time, Reuters News Service published the headline BLACK VOTERS KEY TO GORE WIN IN FLORIDA. Al Gore had earned a stunning 94 percent of the African-American vote in Florida, as well as a majority of the Hispanic vote. For the nearly 60 million Americans who would be counted as having voted for Al Gore (48.38 percent of the popular vote versus 47.87 percent for George W. Bush), triumph was short-lived.

  Strange and sinister things suddenly began to happen—including the denial of requests for legal recounts amid evidence of as many as eighty-five thousand black and minority names being scrubbed from voter rolls for alleged felony convictions (95 percent of which turned out to be speeding tickets or fabrications). Thirty-six thousand newly registered Democratic voters who had signed up at the DMV never made it onto the rolls. And when a recount was attempted, the GOP hired busloads (as confirmed by ABC News) of young operatives to stop the process.

  In a later legal review of the facts by Spencer Overton of Florida State University, who addressed the issue of race in the election, these points were established:In the 2000 presidential election, African Americans made up only 16% of the voting population in Florida but cast 54% of the ballots rejected in automatic machine counts (“machine-rejected ballots”). Across the state, automatic machines rejected 14.4% of the ballots cast by African Americans, but only 1.6% of the ballots cast by others.

  Later studies conducted by the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as to how these patterns manifested in other states around the country suggested that extreme irregularities produced as many as two to six million uncounted votes.

  While many of these details were lost in the shuffle, most everyone got the memo as to what happened on December 12 when, by a five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court of the United States of America found in favor of George W. Bush’s argument that a complete recount would violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A vast majority of legal scholars protested the decision and its tortured logic, as well as political bias. But the Florida recount was immediately stopped—an act without precedent in American justice—and the presidency was effectively given to George W. Bush.

  Whatever this meant politically was yet to come. But culturally the ground shifted immediately. On that December day when the verdict was handed down, it caused an instantaneous mental tanning moment for a significant percentage of the sixty million Americans who had just been disenfranchised by having their votes not counted. For a lot of white nonminority voters, the feeling that I heard being expressed was Oh yeah, now I get it, now I know what discrimination is.

  Who was going to right this wrong? For urban youth culture and leading hip-hop voices, that question was a call to action. In the past, part of what had defined the movement was less about political activism and more about using lyrics to speak “truth to power.” There were exceptions. Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan organization founded in the early nineties, had been reaching out through artists from across the musical spectrum, who had helped add significant numbers of young voters for both parties. Russell Simmons, an early activist who believed in the importance of young people engaging in the political process, had organized Rap the Vote prior to the 2000 election.

  At colleges and universities in the early nineties there were on-campus hip-hop communities and student organizations that had, in fact, been instrumental in helping bring South African apartheid to an end by working to mobilize unions, municipal pension funds, and American corporations to pull out their investments in the regime—until political change was accomplished.

  Yet for all its influence culturally and in the marketplace, hip-hop’s countercultural stance—and its innate distrust of political institutions—made the idea of organizing around a system that appeared to be unjust anyway, more or less, a fool’s errand. Why not seek power in the boardroom and through economic means rather than the community-organizing route, as some might say? Others, like Russell Simmons, again, and Sean “Puffy” Combs, didn’t agree. What’s more, the dissatisfaction with George W. Bush was coming up in a lot of the rap songs that reflected what was going on in people’s lives. Rather than giving in and letting 2000 happen all over again, 2004 became a landmark election in terms of rallying the youth vote. Between Russell’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and concerts headlined by Kanye West and 50 Cent, a viral video about the importance of registering to vote with Eminem, along with Puffy’s “Vote or Die” efforts with Citizen Change, voters between the ages of twenty-one and thirty went to the polls close to twenty-one million strong. The increase was 4.6 million additional young voters—up 18.4 percent.

  In 2000 young voters had broken 48 percent for Gore and 46 percent for Bush. By 2004 the gap was 55 percent of millennial voters casting their ballots for John Kerry versus 45 percent for George W. Bush. In terms of tanning, this was proof that the cultural shift was having political reverberations. More than half of the new young voters, as a matter of fact, were African-American and Hispanic.

  To the dismay of Puffy and Russell, a lot of the mainstream media used John Kerry’s loss in the ’04 election as proof that youth in general weren’t showing up and that hip-hop was not the rallying force it was supposed to have been. Both were quoted in the press crying foul. Puffy was accused of being defensive and claiming there was a conspiracy in the media. It bothered him so much that there was no applause for the increase in young voter turnout that he was quoted as saying, “This generation gets knocked down so much for being irresponsible, that this generation doesn’t care, that this generation isn’t interested in things that are serious. Then, something like this happens—four million or so more votes! Young black and Latino kids are voting for the first time, and what are folks saying? I’m not being defensive. I know the truth.”

  According to media analysts, the reason that the youth turnout didn’t deliver the vote for John Kerry had to do with the higher-percentage turnouts in all the other demographics as well. Of course, these percentages were based on exit polls and estimates that made certain assumptions. Some of the same voting irregularities that were seen in 2000 were alleged to have happened in 2004—leaving lingering questions.

/>   Even with the disappointment of Kerry’s loss and the dispute over the impact of the youth vote, there was one question that had been answered. Over the past two elections, focused efforts in turning out the youth vote were producing meaningful results. And for those youth and younger adult voters who hadn’t forgotten the disenfranchisement of 2000, the results were gaining ground on behalf of Democrats.

  Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina sent the floodwaters over the levees in New Orleans, submerging most of the city, causing $85 billion in devastation, killing thousands, many of whom were never found, and stranding those who couldn’t get out of the city in time, most of them people of color, poor and without resources. The federal government’s shockingly delayed response was not only ineffectual, it was criminal.

  In spite of the reluctance of the media to initially embrace such an assertion, it would be painfully revealed as events unfolded that were hard to spin. Why? Because a) the public was witnessing them happen in real time with their own eyes and ears, and b) the on-the-ground reporting was based in facts that were incontrovertible. The administration’s later claim that they never could have imagined the ultimate devastation that took place, and George W. Bush’s statement, “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees,” were simply lies.

  As early as Friday, August 26, when Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency in Louisiana and when governors of all the gulf states convened a joint task force requesting assistance from the Pentagon, every worst case scenario was outlined. At five A.M. Saturday morning when Katrina was upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane and Governor Blanco announced, “I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments,” there was no ambiguity. This was even echoed in the statement from the White House that it was designating FEMA, specifically, as “authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”