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RE: ADVERTISING

On Fri, 9 Aug 2002, Sherry Johnson wrote:
> The question for me is not whether it is wholly bad or good; nothing is.
> What strikes me is that companies like BMG (a major music distributor)
> and some shoe/athletic apparel advertisers actually hire young blacks to
> talk up products in inner cities--in an almost eerie, spy-like way.

Well, spies *gather* information.  It takes propagandists to *disseminate*
information.  :)

> In addition to that, Nike sponsors basketball courts in inner cities, as
> well as basketball tournaments, with swooshes everywhere.  They write
> most of these "charity" courts and events off on their taxes, thereby
> getting VERY cheap advertising.

*shrug*  Well, *somebody's* gotta sponsor these events.

> There is also something disturbing about product tie-ins that march all 
> over music.  In many ways, rap has become a slave to branding.  I wonder 
> what mainstream rap would have become, if it were not simply a cash
> magnet?  Many "old school" rappers and rap fans bemoan the fact that rap
> as a movement used to be about identity and community, and now it's
> mostly about making a buck.

Can't say I've ever cared about rap one way or the other, but it seems to
me *most* mainstream music is mostly about making a buck.  How does that
line from U2's 'God Part II' go?  "I don't believe in riches, but you
should see where I live..."  Popular culture has always been about money
to some degree, and in some ways, this *can* be a liberating thing --
popular, commercial art can be a reflection of the masses who pay for it,
and in some ways, this is preferable to a system whereby art is imposed on
the masses by some highbrow elite.  The problem we face is that most
popular art *is* controlled by an elite; it is created by a small group of
companies who are very skilled at manipulating public opinion, through
marketing and hype and so on.  Thus, everyone may hate, say, the 1998
version of _Godzilla_, but it still made hundreds of millions of dollars,
just because we had all been primed to see it on opening day, etc.

"Branding" and product placements are not unique to films and music, nor
to modern pop culture, of course -- they have been going on since at least
the James Bond novels that came out in the 1950s, where characters were
defined by their choice of guns, cars and brandy.  A Mickey Mouse cartoon
produced for the 1939 World Fair (and available on the _Mickey Mouse in
Living Color_ DVD) was explicitly sponsored by Nabisco, and there's a
great gag in one of the old Marx Brothers films, where a woman trying to
get Groucho's attention falls out of a rowboat and asks him to throw her a
"lifesaver" ... so he pulls out a roll of candies and tosses her one!

In addition, ISTR reading somewhere that gladiators in ancient Rome also
made money by endorsing various products or services.  The producers of
the film _Gladiator_ decided not to portray this side of the gladiator's
life because they were afraid people would find it anachronistic!

> That's not to mention what branding may have done both for and against
> the integrity of sport.  But I'm not a sports fan, so I will stop there.

Nor am I, so I won't pursue that line of discussion either.  :)

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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