Read Sales Pitch Society

6.7.02
Fifth Graders Get Dog Breath
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Head Voice? Try Lip, Butt and Snout Voice
The music room at St. John the Baptist Grade School was caught in a 1965 era time warp. By 1980, the same expansive green carpet, faded over time, crunched beneath Docksiders and Velcro sneakers. There still never seemed to be enough chairs for all of us and the xylophone was still off limits. The same old books released the same old aged glue odor as they creaked open to the same old pages. Mildly melodic munchkins still struggled to murmur along to My Country 'Tis of Thee, This Land Is Your Land and Red River Valley without risking ridicule by the cool kids.

I always dug music class, especially when our teachers attempted to engage us by applying pop culture to the lessons. Unfortunately, most grade-schoolers aren't entirely riveted by watching the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar or deciphering the lyrics to Louie Louie.

Today's kids get to have real fun in music class. They get to do the tube steak boogie. And on top of that, some of them get paid for it, like the 76 fifth-graders from NY's Albert Einstein Public School.

According to MediaPost's May 23 Out To Launch newsletter, "Their unique, high-energy rendition of the Oscar Mayer Bologna Song won them $10,000 toward their school's music program and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to appear in a new Oscar Mayer television commercial." It's all part of Kraft's Oscar Mayer School House Jam promotion which manages to build brand recognition among kiddie cold cut crooners under the guise of cultural education.

The child-targeted promo is part of an ongoing campaign to drill the Oscar Mayer name into the heads of malleable youngsters. As featured on the Kraft website, the School House Jam contest was launched in January and is open to kids in kindergarten through fifth grade. One school in each state plus Washington D.C. was chosen recently to win ten grand for contest entries. Plus, some schools that won the Early Bird Prize get a visit from the one and only Oscar Mayer Wienermobile according to an announcement on the National Association for Music Education's website (the organization is a "supporter" of the contest).

Tom Moe, senior associate brand manager at Oscar Mayer notes in a press release, "For the past five years, kids from across the country have been lining up to sing the praises of hot dogs and bologna for a chance to be the next Oscar Mayer kid…. SCHOOL HOUSE JAM™, our newest OSCAR MAYER® Talent Search program [gives] an entire classroom of kids the chance to be the next voice of OSCAR MAYER®."

Talk about magnanimity: not only has Kraft afforded kids the rare opportunity to sing their commercial jingles on school time, the wee willy wannabes get to pick from three choice cuts, the "Wiener Jingle," "the Bologna Song" or the "Spanish Jingle." Anonymous Lowbrow Lowdown sources report that in order to be sung properly, the Spanish Jingle requires the presence of three trumpet players, a large-bosomed bleach blonde in a sequined mini dress, a couple of chickens and a guy dressed like a bumble bee.

Man, what a scam this is! Kraft is not only infiltrating precious classroom time and impressionable minds with its branding efforts, the company gets tons of press out of it and a bunch of free actors for its TV spot to boot. Plus, somehow they look like heroes for doing it. The schools get cash for their strapped music programs, kids get a real-live visit from a hot dog on wheels and the teachers get a few lesson plan ideas out of the deal. Essentially, school administrations and teachers are endorsing Oscar Mayer brand messages as legitimate learning tools. These are songs about naming cold cuts and wanting to be a hot dog, for chrissakes. The next thing you know, kids'll be using M&Ms in art class to learn about the color wheel.

Ya know, these folks are pretty Krafty. I'm almost starting to wish I were an Oscar Mayer marketer.

(For a real laugh, check out Kraft's Jingle Jukebox, featuring Oscar Mayer jingles styled in an assortment of insipid arrangements, including "Soul Dog," "Jamaican Mambo" and "Wiener Concerto in O Mayer." Bar none, The Lowbrow Lowdown Lackeys' fave has to be "Getting (Hot) Diggity With It," which makes Tom Hanks's and Dan Akroyd's Dragnet Rap sound like a 2 Live Crew cover by Old Dirty Bastard.)

Snack Attack
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Revolting Repast
Like they always say, the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. And when you want men (and women, for that matter) to fall for a fallen leader's empty rhetoric, there's only one nutritionally-devoid foodstuff that'll do: potato chips!

Egyptian supporters of the Palestinian cause are well aware of this, and they're ensuring that Yasser Arafat remains in the hearts of the people by cranking out bag after bag of the feisty food favorite, Arafat chips. According to a 5/28 FoxNews.com story, makers of the militaristic munchies, International Industries, "donates five cents - 25 pisaters - to the 'Palestinian cause' for every 50 packages sold." The crispy snacks, named Abu Ammar after the Chairman's nom de guerre, feature on the package a cartoon illustration of Arafat saluting and holding the Palestinian flag.

The terrorist treats are cheese flavored, quite like the air in Arafat's Ramallah headquarters after the Israelis had him confined there for over a month. And like any good propaganda piece, each bag of chips carries an easily digestible message; in this case, "The more you buy, the more you build."

People are buying it, too -- literally. Shop owners in Cairo can't seem to keep the chips on store shelves. They're even out-selling the more violent vittles brand, The Hero, the packaging for which displays a schoolboy holding a stone and some books as he's threatened by an Israeli tank. Fans of both brands argue that each is quite satisfying when washed down with the promise of milk and honey.

As twelve-year-old Iman Mohammed Darwish comments in the article, "There's no one who doesn't love Abu Ammar." She adds, "I like the taste, and I want to help the Palestinians." She forgot to mention that the cheese-flavored powder acts as a terrific gripping agent for rock throwing.

Now what these chips really need is a prize inside. I could see a secret decoder ring or a fake tattoo of an American flag in flames going over well. Or better yet, International Industries can offer a "magic suicide note pad" with three proofs of purchase (s&h not included).

Let's All Bow to the Lobby
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93% Perspiration, 6% Electricity, 4% Evaporation, and 2% Butterscotch Ripple
When a friend of mine -- call him Caveman -- wrote an in-depth, travelogue type review of this year's annual SXSW music festival in Austin, he adeptly described one band as wearing their influences "like pleated pants." From a literary perspective, equating a stiff pair of slacks with the inflexible regurgitation of musical styles (keep in mind the audience for his piece is a casual rock 'n' roll crowd) is dead on. But it also sheds some light on the fine line between heavily-influenced creation and knee-jerk mimicry.

If well-executed and personalized, is an artistic endeavor lesser in quality simply because its roots lie outside of its creator's mind? Is William Blake's imagery any less emotive and stunning when one considers the fact that it was often inspired by stories, texts and images created centuries beforehand? Is k.d. lang's vocal style any less engaging when one considers it's a near perfect amalgamation of Roy Orbison's and Patsy Cline's?

Is an episode of Dawson's Creek any less indulgently satisfying when one considers that the plot line has been influenced by some lobbying group? That's the question many TV writers are asking themselves these days, as highlighted in a 5/20 PR Week article (When Bush lobbies Bartlett). Evidently, "Issue Placement" is a regular occurrence on television, much like its more tangible cousin, product placement. The difference between the two is vast, however; as the PR Week piece puts it, "Issue placement is a much more invasive procedure, requiring normally independent-minded writers to wrap their words around someone else's ideas."

Individual organizations, entertainment marketing firms and even the U.S. government have successfully wooed writers to their pet issues. Shows like Ricki Lake, Smallville, One Life to Live and 100 Centre Street have all been subject to PR prodding. Still, according to the story, the practice is not one that most writers embrace. The process often involves a series of educational meetings; the sell is very soft. After all, were a writer to overtly cram some ill-fitted storyline into a script simply to expose a topic, not only would the quality of the show suffer, it would dull the importance of the issue itself.

On the other hand, the fact that TV writers are constantly in search of story ideas is a big plus for issue lobbying groups. Some organizations accommodate this need to the extreme. Take the National Youth Anti-Drug Media campaign run by the White House Drug Czar's office. The group aims to have drug related situations portrayed as realistically as possible, and runs Drugstory.org, a website that provides "true stories of substance abuse and contact information for experts."

Television, fictional or not, has been known to sway public opinion, and certainly introduce issues to the masses. Of course, that does not necessitate that TV writers should alter scripts based on how the public might be affected, but it doesn't hurt to be cognizant of the influential power TV has over society. This is especially significant when one considers a possible next step: legislation. Once the American people grab hold of an issue, there is often a governmental response. Remember when Dan Quayle reacted to the out-of-wedlock pregnancy of TV's Murphy Brown by calling for a public discussion of moral values? OK, that one doesn't count, but as the White House's National Youth Anti-Drug Media campaign exemplifies, the government itself is often the instigator, which means "placed" issues can sometimes come full circle. How's that for sneaky?

So, does issue placement reduce the quality of a script, or any artistic or editorial endeavor for that matter? In reality, issue placement is not much more than structured, repetitive influence, which is rampant in all forms of media, from news programming and newspapers to blockbuster flicks. Simply because something has been influenced by outside forces (which is inevitable, really), doesn't necessarily lessen its integrity, unless of course, the dirty dollar is involved.

Last year, the FCC ruled that when ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and the WB networks pocketed over $20 million of government funds in exchange for featuring anti-drug messages in scripts, they should have notified the viewing public of their influential sponsor, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (See the Lowbrow Lowdown coverage.)

Come to think of it, maybe the government should pay the networks to feature another issue on their shows: social and cultural engineering.