3.28.03
Support Our Froot Loops
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Meals Ready-to-Brand
Lately there have been quite a few tales of closed bids for Iraqi reconstruction contracts, back-room negotiations over post-war oil industry deals, and even indications of anticipatory maneuvers by Kuwaiti telecom entrepreneurs.

It only makes sense that the high tech, high price tag stuff commands media attention when it comes to the post-war world. But some folks are hoping for another result of war: brand loyalty.

When consumer package goods firms anticipate the outcome of a war, they're not only considering who wins or loses, but whether their candy-coated yummies make it through extreme temperature shifts intact, and perhaps more important, whether G.I. Joe enjoys a pleasant brand experience that will translate to loyalty once he's back home.

As is with most aspects of military life, garnering government contracts to supply grub to the troops can be a grueling experience. According to a March 14 Wall Street Journal article (Consumer-Goods Companies Compete to Supply Military, by Sarah Ellison), suppliers must prove that foodstuffs will last three years and survive a helicopter drop with no parachute. Even more strenuous, they must shun their brand names in order to gain placement on privates' plates. To ensure at least some semblance of an open-bidding process, the military puts out for bid orders for "pan-coated chocolate disks" and "cylindrical cheese-filled pretzels" knowing full well the contracts most likely will be awarded to Mars Inc. to provide M&M's and Combos.

Brand name goods are "a little piece of home," says Gerry Darsch, director of the U.S. Department of Defense's combat feeding program. Other comforting items supplied to Saddammy whammiers include "Pearl Harbor" videos from Walt Disney Co., Colgate-Palmolive Co.'s Colgate toothpaste, Eastern States Eyewear sunglasses, Cottonbuds Inc. Charmin To Go, Kellogg Co.'s Pop-Tarts and Tabasco sauce from McIlhenny Co.

Evidently, according to the Journal piece, baby wipes, deemed "too bulky," are sorely missed ("few items are more cherished among GIs stationed in the Kuwait desert"). Ya know, I don't care how handy they are, no tough army dude should be caught dead toting a product with the term "baby" or "wipe" in the name. Those should be reserved strictly for barbecue cleanup or caressing the supple bums of Tim Robbins and Janeane Garofalo.

Brands, especially food brands, can help maintain a bond between a soldier and the familiar world back home, away from the sand storms, away from the hazmat drills, away from the battalion's token fat guy who won't shut up about his imaginary girlfriend.

Then again, associating Tabasco sauce with burning oil fields might not be what the marketers had hoped for. Come to think of it, why do brand marketers want their products to be associated with a hellish experience like war at all? You'd think sitting through their commercials was torture enough.



Incogs on the Blog
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Carrion of Commercialism
Maynard G. Krebs. Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Clip-on nose rings. What do they have in common? They're all symbols of the utter evisceration perpetrated by commercialism on its pop-culturized prey.

Next in line for consumer contamination: the weblog. A March 10 Newsweek story describes Dr Pepper's marketing push behind its new Raging Cow "milk based product." The campaign's centerpiece is a blog site that "tells the fictional backstory of the drink." And by infiltrating the blog subculture, not only did the pop promoters commandeer a truly organic form of honest human expression (not to mention a forum for all things grammatically egregious), they commandeered some of the very folks who helped popularize it.

Dr. Pepper wooed six "key influence bloggers" in their late teens and early 20s to Dallas to imbibe a little brand indoctrination moo juice. According to the Newsweek brief, "Dr Pepper hop[ed] to develop a 'blogging network' to hype Raging Cow and 'be part of the in the know crowd.' " Even better, because the sponsored sycophants were compensated only with promo schlock such as shirts and hats, there's no legal requirement for them to disclose that they were in bed with Bessie. Oh, and needless to say, the Raging Cow site did a pretty good job of concealing its affiliation with Dr Pepper.

Then the heifer patties hit the fan.

A March 13 Globe and Mail piece revealed that savvy bloggers were on to the scam in no time, many posting complaints on the Raging Cow site. One especially outraged blog site publisher, Tim Ireland, self-described "Marketing Scumbag," railed against the tactics of his ad industry brethren who were behind the cow conspiracy, Richards Interactive. As seen on his Bloggerheads site, "The Raging Cow Boycott went live at 10:22pm (GMT) on Thursday, March 6th. By 10:00am on Sunday, March 9th it was the No. 3 result for 'raging cow' in Google. This soon propagated into Yahoo! - and even managed to climb a spot to hold steady at No. 2." Ireland proceeded to throw down the gauntlet by suggesting that the agency donate a "large and suitably painful cash donation to something everybody can use such as the Web Archive," a public nonprofit organization that's building a digital library of Internet sites and other digital media.

As noted in the Globe and Mail story, director of marketing at Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Andrew Springate, shrugged off the backlash by stating, "For us the blogging campaign is just an extension of what we consider to be the oldest form of advertising, which is word of mouth."

It's too bad this word of mouth is decayed. For marketers, the only real value of word-of-mouth promotion lies in its natural propagation powers, not in some pre-fab endorsement written under the close watch of big brother business man. At this point, I've just about exhausted my commentary regarding the viral marketing phenomenon and its relationship-tainting potential,* so I won't bother with redundancy.

What this notch in the belt of advertising history displays is this: as soon as any large corporate entity and its marketing department catches on to any subculture or vaguely underground trend, it invariably exploits it and inevitably squelches the life out of it.

I recall being really bummed out when Nirvana's Nevermind album shoved indie music into the mainstream. Sure, the eventual dilution of the music's intensity and spirit was part of it, but it was the looting of the DIY music scene's culture that got my goat. Don't get me wrong. There's still a thriving independent music underworld that the overfed corporate rock cretins have yet to chew up and spit out. It's just that now when I see a kid wearing what appears to be a great thrift shop t-shirt find, I have no idea whether she's actually hip, or just hit the mall department store to buy a knock-off of some shirt Avril Lavigne dons in her latest video.

All I can hope for is that advertiser's continue to go down the weblog-, chat room- and forum-path to the point where any positive reference to their brands is deemed specious. If the insipid naval-gazing Web diary format goes down with it, so be it.

What kinda losers read that personal commentary crap anyway?

*Read Sales Pitch Society for an in-depth analysis of viral marketing and its potential impact on human relations.



Hawk and Awe
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Sense of Humor Gone AWOL
It was mere days after 9.11.01. We were taking a cab home after returning to Jersey City from Manhattan (where we'd most likely spent the evening quaffing cocktails in a futile attempt to forget recent events). Our driver, a middle eastern immigrant, thrust a photocopied image towards us as we settled in our tattered seats. It was a crude photomontage displaying Osama Bin Laden keeling over in pain. Who could blame him? The Empire State Building was shoved up his ass.

It was hard even to chuckle. In fact, I was saddened as it became instantly apparent to me that our driver felt compelled to prove his allegiance to the people of his newly-adopted home by presenting us with this ridiculous image. He must have been truly fearing for his life, worried that some ignorant vigilante might choose him as the target in an Osama Bin backlash. The poor fellow probably went through the same exact ritual with each of his passengers for weeks thereafter.

Needless to say a new crop of war villain paraphernalia has emerged on the scene, and thanks to the marvels of modern technology, we don't even have to get off our duffs to buy it. In fact, sometimes we don't even have to seek it out; it torpedoes straight to us whether we like it or not.

Andrew Leonard doesn't like it. The senior editor of Salon.com was recently the recipient of a series of spam emails labeled "Shock and Awe." They advertised a T-shirt which prompted Leonard's reactionary 3/21 Salon.com diatribe. On the shirt was a retro-style illustration of a sweet, young, mostly naked cutie perched atop a MOAB bomb, the American flag waving behind her. The tagline: "Give Saddam Some Hooah. But make sure to bring your hooah back home."

Leonard laments "the whole idea of mass death in Iraq being used to hawk T-shirts," and wonders, "Did the geeks at DARPA who rigged up the Internet ever dream that their network would become a delivery mechanism for T-shirt advertisements selling blood and rubble? He adds, "Of course it might all just be a joke….Maybe there aren't any real T-shirts to be purchased by e-mailing gousa@concepts365.com." Had he bothered to visit the sender's website, the logo of which is prominently displayed in the t-shirt design featured in the email promo, not only would he have discovered that Vintage Image is in fact a legitimate online shopkeeper, but that the image he saw was the lame PG version, and that part of the shirt's sales proceeds will be donated to the Red Cross.

The Vintage Image site links to a page describing Hooah as "an expression of high morale, strength and confidence." Silly me -- and all this time I thought it was just a rude way to refer to Yo Mama.

First off, I'm amazed that the senior editor of a high-traffic publication (that's supposedly closer to death's door than Saddam) has the time, much less inclination to even open obvious spam messages. Plus, what could he possibly have against a retro pin-up chick straddling a phallic object? Coop couldn't have done it any better.

Overall, I don't understand what his beef is exactly. This type of propagandistic pap is a dime-a-dozen whenever any government puts some rogue in the foreign policy crosshairs. Let's face it: people like to rally around a common adversary. It makes them feel connected, and it's inherent in the nature of war and the typical human response to it. The Vintage Image shirt, along with the Saddam-inspired bumper stickers, Halloween masks and forwarded email jokes that accompany it, bolster support for the war here, and provide that particularly inane segment of the population which places war in the same category as the Ted Nugent World Penetration Tour with a means of self-important expression.

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the Office of Strategic Information (or whatever it's masking itself as these days since it "closed down") were behind some of the war monger accoutrements that usually accompany US military operations. What it comes down to is that wearing some stupid anti-Saddam shirt has about as small a chance of actually supporting the killing of innocents as wearing a "What Would Jesus Bomb?" shirt does at supporting peace. They both, however, add a little levity to an otherwise distressful situation.

All I know is, I can't wait for all the great midget jokes that'll be inspired by The War with North Korea II: The Legend of Li'l Kim's Plutonium.


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