9.7.01
Listen to What the Brand Says
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Subliminal Sound Seduction
"Hey, is that Freedom Rock? Well turn it up man." If you were livin' in the USA back in the late '80s, there's a good chance you knew some idiot who insisted on spouting that line in a vapid stoner drone day in and day out for comic relief. The phrase came from a poorly produced TV ad that was probably a lot more popular than the classic rock compilation it was hawking.

Popular music compilations still sell, but the musically-challenged need not struggle through that grueling choosing process anymore ("Honey, do you think I'm more of a soft rock kinda guy, a lite hits kinda guy or a heavy metal ballads kinda guy?"). Nope, all they need do is walk into their favorite shop and pick up the branded compilation on display at the cashier's counter.

From Brooks Brothers to Jiffy Lube, companies looking to immerse their customers in a branded experience beyond the store's four walls are turning to tunes. According to an 8/28 Wall Street Journal feature (If You Liked Our Oil Change, Wait 'Til You Hear Our Taste in Music, by Joanne Kaufman), the majority of these marketing mixes are custom-produced by in-store music provider, DMX/AEI. These tune wranglers have a licensing arrangement with 1,500 record labels and tailor song choices based on demographics, time of release and what the store will be selling at the time. Some of their CDs have sold up to 100,000 copies, but in the end, the goal is to drive more in-store visits and sales of traditional product.

Of course, a brand's overall marketing strategy dictates the major aspects of each project, whether or not DMX/AEI is involved. For instance, Jiffy Lube hoped to shed its reputation as a "male bastion," so the oil-changers installed listening walls in service centers that pumped out the kind of music that would have Oprah nodding in approval. CDs with names like 90s FM Radio and Romantic Moments collected touchy-feely songs by artists including Tears for Fears, Suzanne Vega, The Cranberries and Joe Jackson. It's just too bad today's modern woman insists on changing her own oil.

Also, in developing caffeinated comps entitled, Rendézvous à Paris and Our Favorite Frank Sinatra Songs, Starbucks picks ditties that "would go well with a cup of joe." Apparel seller Brooks Brothers has released six titles since 1999 and aims for its branded music to make the same statement its clothing line does: none at all. As noted in the article, the company "strives for background music by mainstream performers -- nothing, please, that calls undue attention to itself." Satchmo fans won't be pleased to hear that Louis Armstrong falls into that category; he's featured on the "Cocktail Jazz" CD.

Adds a Brooks Brothers' VP, Brenda Vemich, "We're classic and preppy and we have a heritage but we're also modern and relevant and current and we don't want to offend anyone. Those are the adjectives we want to be able to use to describe our music." I can picture the client meeting now: some tortured artist-type audiophile with an over-the-top title like "sound sculptor" storms out of the room after learning that his intentions to broaden the musical palettes of Brooks Brothers customers by featuring Sun Ra and John Zorn in the CD have been denied.

In my tirade against Volkswagen's Web radio, I expressed my belief that VW is simply "commandeering underground music culture" and "laying claim to something with its own pre-established aesthetics" for exploitation in its branding efforts. Minus the "underground" qualification, that argument applies in this case as well. The difference is that, here, people are actually paying for the branding experience.

Still, I worry less about the societal and cultural impacts of these branded compilations than I do about their potential for subliminal message insertion. Does anyone remember Wilson Bryan Key's 1973 media manipulation manifesto, Subliminal Seduction? In it, Keys takes great pains to prove that "ad men" secretly arouse human desires through subliminal imagery. In liquor ads, ancient symbols of deception and lust are strategically embedded in ice cubes. In others, the letters "SEX" are repeated over and over in mosaic form. Hey, this subliminal messaging stuff may seem like paranoia, but the next time you're in Starbucks and the guy ahead of you in line orders a double tazoberry blow job, don't say I didn't warn ya.

Defensive Maneuver
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Imperial War Reparation
Last November, I discussed an ad campaign created by British agency, Delaney Lund Knox Warren and Partners for the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust exhibit. As told by the Wall Street Journal in an 11/2 story, ads featured what I called "debatably trite" copy like, "Come and see what man can achieve when he really puts his mind to it," and "Once in a while, someone invents a product that changes people's lives." Along with other uncharacteristically P.C. comments, I wondered whether it is appropriate for a museum or its ad agency to profit from an exhibit focusing on an event so horrific and impacting on society as the Holocaust.

A week or two ago, I received an email from Delaney Lund Knox Warren's creative director, Malcolm Green, who had recently read The Lowbrow Lowdown commentary on the campaign. He assured me that the agency "handled this project on an entirely non-profit basis." He added, "In fact we funded the cinema commercial ourselves purely because we felt so passionate about this exhibition."

Well, I stand corrected. In fact, I found the cinema commercial to which Malcolm refers to be quite captivating -- chilling even (he sent me a copy). Hey, apparently when advertising agencies put their minds to it, even they are capable of creating work that's valuable to society! Who'd a thunk it? By the way, we greatly appreciate Malcolm's response; if you have a comment about anything you've read in these pages, lay it on us.

Suspicious Suds
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Coors Cons-beer-acy?
To some, it's an Orwellian nightmare come to life. To others, it's an innovation with the potential to win military battles and locate kidnapped children, lost pets or stolen possessions. And still to others, it's a high-tech car toy they keep meaning to figure out how to use. You guessed it: it's Global Positioning System technology, and if you enjoy drinking cheap, watered-down sludge, it may be in the next bottle of brew you knock back.

That's because Coors Light, a.k.a. The Silver Bullet, is employing the magic of GPS in its latest campaign. As featured in an 8/31 AdNews report, guzzlers of three specially-equipped bottles of Coors Light will be sniffed out by GPS and awarded a trip for two to LA. And as the tracking team does its thing, the hunt will be aired on television.

In their search for more details on the promo, The Lowbrow Lowdown Lackeys found themselves wishing further information was also track-able by GPS technology. Based on the known bits, this whole campaign seems ripe for disaster. First of all, how will people be notified that they've opened a winning bottle? Let's surmise that on the outside, the bottles do not appear out of the ordinary; otherwise greedy folks could tamper with cases before purchase to find the winning bottles. Maybe the lucky drinker will flip his cap to find a winning notification message. The thing is, most people aren't prone to inspecting the undersides of beer bottlecaps, and there's a good chance that a lot of folks drinking from potentially winning bottles will have no knowledge of the promotion. This sort of thing could work well for beverages sold singularly, like 20oz. bottles of fruit drinks or sodas, but beer is more often than not consumed communally.

Will everyone at the family picnic or game watching get-together be aware of the contest? If not, how can Coors Light guarantee that the GPS-enabled bottle won't end up in the trash or tossed into some deserted roadside field? If this were to occur, television coverage of the track down ceremonies could turn out to be more embarrassingly uneventful than the Geraldo Rivera/Capone's Vault fiasco.

Plus, can you imagine being the unsuspecting soul who unwittingly cracks open a winning bottle of this piss water, only to discover that his whereabouts are being monitored by some central station of TV viewers and Coors Light tracking goons? Contrary to what some ratings or polls may indicate, not everyone on the planet is aching to whittle away his fleeting 15 minutes of fame on the next reality show. To many people, this could easily be construed as a violation of privacy. I don't know about you, but if I were a Coors Light drinker, I wouldn't want anyone to find out.

Which leads me to what's most worrisome about this campaign. Is it possible that more than just those three Coors Light bottles can be tracked? Call me a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but if this tracking system only requires a special label or code to determine a winning bottle's location, what's to stop demographic stat hungry marketers from activating global positioning technology in lots of Coors Light bottles? With restrictions on beer and liquor advertising growing more and more stringent, knowing the home addresses of people who buy a product certainly could make a highly-targeted direct marketing campaign a lot more successful. Hey, I'm not trying to insinuate that the makers of Coors Light or its ad agency are involved in anything as sleazy (or illegal) as tracking people's movements and location without their express knowledge and consent. Only Web marketers would do that.

Cig-arrest
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Party-pooping Project
Rules were made to be broken, or at least bent beyond recognition. Consider the strict guidelines applied to tobacco marketing, for instance. Tobacco firms have so few forums left in which they are allowed to advertise, sometimes the only way they can market their product is by slipping under the regulatory radar.

Call it apparition advertising. As highlighted in an 8/27 Advertising Age article, British American Tobacco has been throwing increasingly popular parties for adult smokers in big South African cities like Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town. These events are all about exclusivity, and apparently it's their "member's only" appeal that's prompted attendance to quadruple since these shindigs began. The smoke-filled soirees feature performances by top musical acts, and as noted in the piece, "Guests are asked to provide proof that they are over 18. Thumbprints are scanned at the door, and only members are allowed entry." As in most commercial promotions, membership status isn't hard to come by: simply play an online game to discover where free tickets are available. The parties themselves are kept low key, "only because the tobacco industry is banned from advertising such events," according to British American spokesman, Simon Millson.

It seems as though the fuming functions may be in violation of the Tobacco Products Act which bans advertising and promotion of cigarettes and other tobacco products. And now, South Africa's National Council Against Smoking is on a mission to stop what's become known as "dark marketing." (Now that's an unfortunate term for marketing in South Africa….)

Comments the Council's executive director, Dr. Yussuf Saloojee, "[British American Tobacco] is trying to create a feeling among smokers that they are part of a privileged in-group…. I don't know if it is illegal, but it is very close to the edge. It is encouraging a spirit of defiance against the law."

British American probably would call it a spirit of brand-embracing camaraderie. Either way, you've gotta love the holier-than-thou attitude of this Saloojee guy, and the entire crusade for that matter. He's not sure if it's illegal, but he's dead set on finding something, anything, that hints of rule-busting. It's like he's straight out of Porky's 2 or something. I wonder if he wears a whistle.

The tobacco producer calls the festivals "consumer relations events" and insists that there is no product branding and no free products are distributed. Cigarette vending machines are located on the premises, however.

As mentioned in the article, "South Africa's anti-smoking legislation is among the most uncompromising in the world." The irony is that the traditional billboards and magazine ads that were relied upon for years did little to build a rapport with consumers, or establish a branded community. Now that the lawyers and moralists have wielded their anti-tabaccy axes, the only thing these firms have left is the most insidious, indelible forms of marketing imaginable. No longer do people simply see a Camel ad and think of smoking Camel cigarettes; they see their smoking buddies, reminisce about last week's party, and then they light up. Which do you think makes more of an impression? Well, as they say, maybe the anti-smoking brigade shouldn't have wished for what they wanted; it looks like they got it.

Big Screen Beautification
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Cosmetically Compromised Cinema
Beebe Gallini loved pink. She loved lipstick and powder puffs, too. But what she seemed to love most of all was getting under Mike Brady's skin. In this episode of The Brady Bunch, Pa Brady, an architect by trade, was commissioned to design a new factory for Ms. Gallini's cosmetics company. She wanted the structures to be shaped like makeup containers. It's just too bad the producers of The Brady Bunch hadn't considered getting a cosmetics firm to sponsor the show. These days, they would have made that move ipso facto.

The hawkers in Hollywood are doing just that. It ain't all pancake powder and Rick Baker monster makeup stuff anymore. We're talkin' serious cross-promotion between the film world and the face-paint producers. An 8/21 Fashion Wire Daily piece details this cosmetic film push.

In flick-flop, One Night at McCool's, for example, lippy Liv Tyler plays a Clinique consultant. The makeup firm developed a scarlet-hued lipstick named "Liv's Jewel" after Tyler's character, Jewel Valentine. Although the movie bombed, clinique.com has sold out on the lipstick, proceeds from which went to Tyler's pet charity, Prevent Child Abuse New York. Hmmm… perhaps a more apt charity choice would have been Prevent Steven Tyler from Destroying What's Left of His Rock 'n' Roll Dignity.

Clinique also teamed up recently with Legally Blonde, a summer box-office offering starring Reese Witherspoon as a "brand-obsessed" sorority chick-turned-law student with a penchant for pink. In the movie, the "Clinique devotee," named Elle, "brings a client -- and sorority sister -- a behind-bars goody bag, it includes an array of Clinique products (as well as Calvin Klein sheets and the latest issue of Cosmo)." That's not all. Clinique's "Happy" perfume is placed prominently on Elle's dresser. Plus, the company is selling a $35 limited edition purse adorned with pink feathers "inspired by Elle's flirty sense of style," according to the story.

The action isn't exclusive to Clinique. Demeter, "kooky perfumier to the stars," has created an eau de post-op mishap which is being sold in conjunction with underground cinematic slice of life, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Deals have also been struck between filmmakers and Three Custom Color Specialists as well as nail polish company, Hard Candy.

It seems like up until recently, movie-affiliated products were restricted to the toy, fast food and apparel arenas. Now companies as diverse as condom makers and telecoms are getting in on the act. And the products are actually featured components of the films, as opposed to inspired by them. From a business perspective, these cross-promotions make sense. Not only do they help to promote movies to a wider audience, they vindicate production companies who need not worry quite as much about filling quite as many theater seats. Why bother when there's sponsorship revenue rolling in before the celluloid even hits the can? Of course, the incentive for the sponsors is even more obvious.

One wonders, though, do the sponsors have any impact on the outcome of the films? The assumption is that the script is set in stone before the sponsors come on board, so they're merely slapping their nametag on something that would have been present in generic form otherwise. But that's naïve. Take Legally Blonde, for instance. Something tells me that the screenwriter who originally wrote this script did not intend for Elle to give her sorority sister "a behind-bars goody bag" loaded with Clinique products. Chances are, the writer called for "makeup" sans brand, or perhaps items of a more symbolic nature relating to the characters.

Surely moviegoers attending mass-market films like Legally Blonde or One Night at McCool's aren't anticipating an unadulterated, commercial-free experience. The herd likes fluff, especially when it's got a comforting, recognizable label on it. Still, when a sponsor wields the kind of influence that Clinique seems to have done in the case of Legally Blonde, integrity is sacrificed. I haven't seen the movie, but I'd be willing to bet there are no scenes during which Elle whines about how she wishes her nail polish didn't chip away so readily. I'd also be surprised to see her lipstick comically smudge her wine glass or companion's collar.

As a result of most sponsors' strict contracts (brand protection is paramount), not only do film characters lose dimension, they lose their humanity, becoming empty shells glazed with the translucent lacquer of product promotion. With any luck for theater audiences, that lacquer will chip, but don't count on it.