Fast forward to 1998. The Gap launches its breakthrough Khakis Swing ads: a simple, exuberant miniature music video set to "Jump, Jive 'n' Wail"-and a great video at that. The question of whether these ads were "coopting" the artistic integrity of the music was entirely meaningless. The Gap's commercials didn't capitalize on the retro swing revival-a solid argument can be made that they caused caused the swing revival. A few months later, when singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright appeared in a Christmas-themed Gap ad, his sales soared, so much so that his record company began promoting him as "the guy in the Gap ads." Macy Gray, the new R&B "It Girl," also got her big break in a Baby Gap ad. And rather than the Gap Khaki ads looking like rip-offs of MTV videos, it seemed that overnight, every video on MTV-from Brandy to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys-looked like a Gap ad; the company has pioneered its own aesthetic, which spilled out into music, other advertisements, even films like the swing revival. A few months later, when singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright appeared in a Christmas-themed Gap ad, his sales soared, so much so that his record company began promoting him as "the guy in the Gap ads." Macy Gray, the new R&B "It Girl," also got her big break in a Baby Gap ad. And rather than the Gap Khaki ads looking like rip-offs of MTV videos, it seemed that overnight, every video on MTV-from Brandy to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys-looked like a Gap ad; the company has pioneered its own aesthetic, which spilled out into music, other advertisements, even films like The Matrix The Matrix. After five years of intense lifestyle branding, the Gap, it has become clear, is as much in the culture-creation business as the artists in its ads.
For their part, many artists now treat companies like the Gap less as deep-pocketed pariahs trying to feed off their cachet than as just another medium they can exploit in order to promote their own brands, alongside radio, video and magazines. "We have to be everywhere. We can't afford to be too precious in our marketing," explains Ron Shapiro, executive vice president of Atlantic Records. Besides, a major ad campaign from Nike or the Gap penetrates more nooks and crannies of the culture than a video in heavy rotation on MTV or a cover article in Rolling Stone Rolling Stone. Which is why piggybacking on these campaign blitzes-Fat Boy Slim in Nike ads, Brandy in Cover Girl commercials, Lil' Kim rapping for Candies-has become, Business Week Business Week announced with much glee, "today's top 40 radio." announced with much glee, "today's top 40 radio."13 Of course the branding of music is not a story of innocence lost. Musicians have been singing ad jingles and signing sponsorship deals since radio's early days, as well as having their songs played on commercial radio stations and signing deals with multinational record companies. Throughout the eighties-music's decade of the straight-up shill-rock stars like Eric Clapton sang in beer ads, and the pop stars, appropriately enough, crooned for pop: George Michael, Robert Plant, Whitney Houston, Run-DMC, Madonna, Robert Palmer, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie and Ray Charles all did Pepsi or Coke ads, while sixties anthems like the Beatles' "Revolution" became background music for Nike commercials.
During this same period, the Rolling Stones made music history by ushering in the era of the sponsored rock tour-and fittingly, sixteen years later, it is still the Stones who are leading the charge into the latest innovation in corporate rock: the band as brand extension. In 1981, Jovan-a distinctly un-rock-and-roll perfume company-sponsored a Rolling Stones stadium tour, the first arrangement of its kind, though tame by today's standards. Though the company got its logos on a few ads and banners, there was a clear distinction between the band that had chosen to "sell out" and the corporation that had paid a huge sum to associate itself with the inherent rebelliousness of rock. This subordinate status might have been fine for a company out merely to move products, but when designer Tommy Hilfiger decided that the energy of rock and rap would become his "brand essence," he was looking for an integrated experience, one more in tune with his own transcendent identity quest. The results were evident in the Stones' Tommy-sponsored Bridges to Babylon tour in 1997. Not only did Hilfiger have a contract to clothe Mick Jagger, he also had the same arrangement with the Stones' opening act, Sheryl Crow-on stage, both modeled items from Tommy's newly launched "Rock 'n' Roll Collection."
It wasn't until January 1999, however-when Hilfiger launched the ad campaign for the Stones' No Security Tour-that full brand-culture integration was achieved. In the ads, young, glowing Tommy models were pictured in full-page frame "watching" a Rolling Stones concert taking place on the opposite page. The photographs of the band members were a quarter of the size of those of the models. In some of the ads, the Stones were nowhere to be found and the Tommy models alone were seen posing with their own guitars. In all cases, the ads featured a hybrid logo of the Stones' famous red tongue over Tommy's trademarked red-white-and-blue flag. The tagline was "Tommy Hilfiger Presents the Rolling Stones No Security Tour"-though there were no dates or locations for any tour stops, only the addresses of flagship Tommy stores.
In other words, this wasn't rock sponsorship, it was "live-action advertising," as media consultant Michael J. Wolf describes the ads.14 It's clear from the campaign's design that Hilfiger isn't interested in buying a piece of someone else's act, even if they are the Rolling Stones. The act is a background set, powerfully showcasing the true rock-and-roll essence of the Tommy brand; just one piece of Hilfiger's larger project of carving out a place in the music world, not as a sponsor but as a player-much as Nike has achieved in the sports world. It's clear from the campaign's design that Hilfiger isn't interested in buying a piece of someone else's act, even if they are the Rolling Stones. The act is a background set, powerfully showcasing the true rock-and-roll essence of the Tommy brand; just one piece of Hilfiger's larger project of carving out a place in the music world, not as a sponsor but as a player-much as Nike has achieved in the sports world.
The Hilfiger/Stones branding is only the highest-profile example of the new relationship between bands and sponsors that is sweeping the music industry. For instance, it was a short step for Volkswagen-after using cutting-edge electronic music in its ads for the new Beetle-to launch DriversFest '99, a VW branded music festival in Long Island, New York. DriversFest competes for ticket sales with the Mentos Freshmaker Tour, a two-year-old traveling music festival owned and branded by a breath-mint manufacturer-on the Mentos Web site, visitors are invited to vote for which bands they want to play the venue. As with the Absolut Kelly Web site and the Altoids' Curiously Strong art exhibition, these are not sponsored events: the brand is the event's infrastructure; the artists are its filler, a reversal in the power dynamic that makes any discussion of the need to protect unmarketed artistic space appear hopelessly naive.
This emerging dynamic is clearest in the branded festivals being developed by the large beer companies. Instead of merely playing in beer ads, as they likely would have in the eighties, acts like Hole, Soundgarden, David Bowie and the Chemical Brothers now play beer-company gigs. Molson Breweries, which owns 50 percent of Canada's only national concert promoter, Universal Concerts, already has its name promoted almost every time a rock or pop star gets up on stage in Canada-either through its Molson Canadian Rocks promotional arm or its myriad venues: Molson Stage, Molson Park, Molson Amphitheatre. For the first decade or so, this was a fine arrangement, but by the mid-nineties, Molson was tired of being upstaged. Rock stars had an annoying tendency to hog the spotlight and, worse, sometimes they even insulted their sponsors from the stage.
Clearly fed up, in 1996 Molson held its first Blind Date Concert. The concept, which has since been exported to the U.S. by sister company Miller Beer, is simple: hold a contest in which winners get to attend an exclusive concert staged by Molson and Miller in a small club-much smaller than the venues where one would otherwise see these megastars. And here's the clincher: keep the name of the band secret until it steps on stage. Anticipation mounts about the concert (helped along by national ad campaigns building up said anticipation), but the name on everyone's lips isn't David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Soundgarden, INXS or any of the other bands that have played the Dates, it's Molson and Miller. No one, after all, knows who is going to play, but they know who is putting on the show. With Blind Date, Molson and Miller invented a way to equate their brands with extremely popular musicians, while still maintaining their competitive edge over the stars. "In a funny way," says Universal Concerts' Steve Herman, "the beer is bigger than the band."15 The rock stars, turned into high-priced hired guns at Molson's bar mitzvah party, continued to find sad little ways to rebel. Almost every musician who played a Blind Date acted out: Courtney Love told a reporter, "God bless Molson.... I douche with it."16 The Sex Pistols' Johnny Lydon screamed "Thank you for the money" from the stage, and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell told the crowd, "Yeah, we're here because of some fucking beer company...Labatt's." But the tantrums were all incidental to the main event, in which Molson and Miller were the real rock stars and it didn't really matter how those petulant rent-a-bands behaved. The Sex Pistols' Johnny Lydon screamed "Thank you for the money" from the stage, and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell told the crowd, "Yeah, we're here because of some fucking beer company...Labatt's." But the tantrums were all incidental to the main event, in which Molson and Miller were the real rock stars and it didn't really matter how those petulant rent-a-bands behaved.
Jack Rooney, Miller's vice president of marketing, explains that his $200 million promotion budget goes toward devising creative new ways to distinguish the Miller brand from the plethora of other brands in the marketplace. "We're competing not just against Coors and Corona," he says, "but Coke, Nike and Microsoft."17 Only he isn't telling the whole story. In Only he isn't telling the whole story. In Advertising Age's Advertising Age's annual "Top Marketing 100" list of 1997's best brands there was a new arrival: the Spice Girls (fittingly enough, since Posh Spice did once tell a reporter, "We wanted to be a 'household name'. Like Ajax." annual "Top Marketing 100" list of 1997's best brands there was a new arrival: the Spice Girls (fittingly enough, since Posh Spice did once tell a reporter, "We wanted to be a 'household name'. Like Ajax."18) And the Spice Girls ranked number six in Forbes Forbes magazine's inaugural "Celebrity Power 100," in May 1999, a new ranking based not on fame or fortune but on stars' brand "franchise." The list was a watershed moment in corporate history, marking the fact that, as Michael J. Wolf says, "Brands and stars have become the same thing." magazine's inaugural "Celebrity Power 100," in May 1999, a new ranking based not on fame or fortune but on stars' brand "franchise." The list was a watershed moment in corporate history, marking the fact that, as Michael J. Wolf says, "Brands and stars have become the same thing."19 But when brands and stars are the same thing, they are also, at times, competitors in the high-stakes tussle for brand awareness, a fact more consumer companies have become ready to admit. Canadian clothing company Club Monaco, for instance, has never used celebrities in its campaigns. "We've thought about it," says vice president Christine Ralphs, "but whenever we go there, it always becomes more about the personality than the brand, and for us, we're just not willing to share that."20 There is good reason to be protective: though more and more clothing and candy companies seem intent on turning musicians into their opening acts, bands and their record labels are launching their own challenges to this demoted status. After seeing the enormous profits that the Gap and Tommy Hilfiger have made through their association with the music world, record labels are barreling into the branding business themselves. Not only are they placing highly sophisticated cross-branding apparatus behind working musicians, but bands are increasingly being conceived-and test-marketed-as brands first: the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, N' Sync, All Saints and so on. Prefab bands aren't new to the music industry, and neither are bands with their own merchandising lines, but the phenomenon has never dominated pop culture as it has at the end of the nineties, and musicians have never before competed so aggressively with consumer brands. Sean "Puffy" Combs has leveraged his celebrity as a rapper and record producer into a magazine, several restaurants, a clothing label and a line of frozen foods. And Raekwon, of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan, explains that "the music, movies, the clothing, it is all part of the pie we're making. In the year 2005 we might have Wu-Tang furniture for sale at Nordstrom."21 Whether it's the Gap or Wu-Tang Clan, the only remaining relevant question in the sponsorship debate seems to be, Where do you have the guts to draw the borders around your brand? Whether it's the Gap or Wu-Tang Clan, the only remaining relevant question in the sponsorship debate seems to be, Where do you have the guts to draw the borders around your brand?
Nike and the Branding of Sports Inevitably, any discussion about branded celebrity leads to the same place: Michael Jordan, the man who occupies the number-one spot on all of those ranking lists, who has incorporated himself into the JORDAN brand, whose agent coined the term "superbrand" to describe him. But no discussion of Michael Jordan's brand potential can begin without the brand that branded him: Nike.
Nike has successfully upstaged sports on a scale that makes the breweries' rock-star aspirations look like amateur night. Now of course pro sports, like big-label music, is in essence a profit-driven enterprise, which is why the Nike story has less to teach us about the loss of unmarketed space-space that, arguably, never even existed in this context-than it does about the mechanics of branding and its powers of eclipse. A company that swallows cultural space in giant gulps, Nike is the definitive story of the transcendent nineties superbrand, and more than any other single company, its actions demonstrate how branding seeks to erase all boundaries between the sponsor and the sponsored. This is a shoe company that is determined to unseat pro sports, the Olympics and even star athletes, to become the very definition of sports itself.
Nike CEO Phil Knight started selling running shoes in the sixties, but he didn't strike it rich until high-tech sneakers became the must-have accessory of America's jogging craze. But when jogging subsided in the mid-eighties and Reebok cornered the market on trendy aerobics shoes, Nike was left with a product destined for the great dustbin of yuppie fads. Rather than simply switching to a different kind of sneaker, Knight decided that running shoes should become peripheral in a reincarnated Nike. Leave sneakers to Reebok and Adidas-Nike would transform itself into what Knight calls "the world's best sports and fitness company."22 The corporate mythology has it that Nike is a sports and fitness company because it was built by a bunch of jocks who loved sports and were fanatically devoted to the worship of superior athletes. In reality, Nike's project was a little more complicated and can be separated into three guiding principles. First, turn a select group of athletes into Hollywood-style superstars who are associated not with their teams or even, at times, with their sport, but instead with certain pure ideas about athleticism as transcendence and perseverance-embodiments of the Graeco-Roman ideal of the perfect male form. Second, pit Nike's "Pure Sports" and its team of athletic superstars against the rule-obsessed established sporting world. Third, and most important, brand like mad.
Step 1: Create Sport Celebrities It was Michael Jordan's extraordinary basketball skill that catapulted Nike to branded heaven, but it was Nike's commercials that made Jordan a global superstar. It's true that gifted athletes like Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali were celebrities before Nike's time, but they never reached Jordan's otherworldly level of fame. That stratum was reserved for movie and pop stars, who had been transformed by the special effects, art direction and careful cinematography of films and music videos. Sport stars pre-Nike, no matter how talented or worshiped, were still stuck on the ground. Football, hockey and baseball may have been ubiquitous on television, but televised sports were just real-time play-by-plays, which were often tedious, sometimes exciting and high tech only in the slow-mo replay. As for athletes endorsing products, their advertisements and commercials couldn't quite be described as cutting-edge star creation-whether it was Wilt Chamberlain goofily grinning from a box of Wheaties or Rocket Richard being sentenced to "two minutes for looking so good" in Grecian Formula commercials.
I wake up every morning, jump in the shower, look down at the symbol, and that pumps me up for the day. It's to remind me every day what I have to do, which is, "Just Do It."-Twenty-four-year-old Internet entrepreneur Carmine Collettion on his decision to get a Nike swoosh tattooed on his navel, December 1997 Nike's 1985 TV spots for Michael Jordan brought sports into the entertainment world: the freeze frame, the close-up and the quick cuts that allowed Jordan to appear to be suspended in mid-jump, providing the stunning illusion that he could actually take flight. The idea of harnessing sport-shoe technology to create a superior being-of Michael Jordan flying through the air in suspended animation-was Nike mythmaking at work. These commercials were the first rock videos about sports and they created something entirely new. As Michael Jordan says, "What Phil [Knight] and Nike have done is turn me into a dream."23 Many of Nike's most famous TV commercials have used Nike superstars to convey the idea idea of sports, as opposed to simply representing the best of the athlete's own team sport. Spots often feature famous athletes playing a game other than the one they play professionally, such as tennis pro Andre Agassi showing off his version of "rock-and-roll golf." And then there was the breakthrough "Bo Knows" campaign, which lifted baseball and football player Bo Jackson out of his two professional sports and presented him instead as the perfect all-around cross-trainer. A series of quick-cut interviews with Nike stars-McEnroe, Jordan, Gretzky-ironically suggested that Jackson knew their sports better than they did. "Bo knows tennis," "Bo knows basketball" and so on. of sports, as opposed to simply representing the best of the athlete's own team sport. Spots often feature famous athletes playing a game other than the one they play professionally, such as tennis pro Andre Agassi showing off his version of "rock-and-roll golf." And then there was the breakthrough "Bo Knows" campaign, which lifted baseball and football player Bo Jackson out of his two professional sports and presented him instead as the perfect all-around cross-trainer. A series of quick-cut interviews with Nike stars-McEnroe, Jordan, Gretzky-ironically suggested that Jackson knew their sports better than they did. "Bo knows tennis," "Bo knows basketball" and so on.
At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Nike took this strategy out of the controlled environment of its TV commercials and applied it to a real sports competition. The experiment started in 1995 when Nike's marketing department dreamed up the idea of turning a couple of Kenyan runners into Africa's first Olympic ski team. As Mark Bossardet, Nike's director of global athletics, explained, "We were sitting around the office one day and we said, 'What if we took Kenyan runners and transferred their skills to cross-country skiing?'"24 Kenyan runners, who have dominated cross-country track-and-field competitions at the Olympics since 1968, have always represented the "idea of sports" at Nike headquarters. ("Where's the Kenyans running?" Phil Knight has been heard to demand after viewing a Nike ad deemed insufficiently inspiring and heroic. In Nike shorthand it means, "Where's the Spirit of Sports?"). Kenyan runners, who have dominated cross-country track-and-field competitions at the Olympics since 1968, have always represented the "idea of sports" at Nike headquarters. ("Where's the Kenyans running?" Phil Knight has been heard to demand after viewing a Nike ad deemed insufficiently inspiring and heroic. In Nike shorthand it means, "Where's the Spirit of Sports?").25 So according to Nike marketing logic, if two Kenyan runners-living specimens of sports incarnate-were plucked out of their own sport and out of their country and their native climate, and dumped on a frozen mountaintop, and if they were then able to transfer their agility, strength and endurance to cross-country skiing, their success would represent a moment of pure sporting transcendence. It would be a spiritual transformation of Man over nature, birthright, nation and petty sports bureaucrats-brought to the world by Nike, of course. "Nike always felt sports shouldn't have boundaries," the swooshed press release announced. Finally there would be proof. So according to Nike marketing logic, if two Kenyan runners-living specimens of sports incarnate-were plucked out of their own sport and out of their country and their native climate, and dumped on a frozen mountaintop, and if they were then able to transfer their agility, strength and endurance to cross-country skiing, their success would represent a moment of pure sporting transcendence. It would be a spiritual transformation of Man over nature, birthright, nation and petty sports bureaucrats-brought to the world by Nike, of course. "Nike always felt sports shouldn't have boundaries," the swooshed press release announced. Finally there would be proof.
And if nothing else, Nike would get its name in lots of quirky human-interest sidebar stories-just like the wacky Jamaican bobsled team that hogged the headlines at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. What sports reporter could resist the heart-warmer of Africa's first ski team?
Nike found its test-tube subjects in two mid-level runners, Philip Boit and Henry Bitok. Since Kenya has no snow, no ski federation and no training facilities, Nike financed the entire extravagant affair, dishing out $250,000 for training in Finland and custom-designed uniforms, and paying the runners a salary to live away from their families. When Nagano rolled around, Bitok didn't qualify and Boit finished last-a full twenty minutes after the goldmedal winner, Bjorn Daehlie of Norway. It turns out that cross-country running and cross-country skiing-despite the similarity of their names-require entirely different sets of skills and use different muscles.
But that was beside the point. Before the race began, Nike held a press conference at its Olympic headquarters, catered the event with Kenyan food and beer and showed reporters a video of the Kenyans encountering snow for the first time, skiing into bushes and falling on their butts. The journalists also heard accounts of how the climate change was so dramatic that the Kenyans' skin cracked and their fingernails and toenails fell off, but "now," as Boit said, "I love snow. Without snow, I could not do my sport." As the Tampa Tribune Tampa Tribune of February 12, 1998, put it, "They're just two kooky Kenyans trying to make it in the frozen tundra." of February 12, 1998, put it, "They're just two kooky Kenyans trying to make it in the frozen tundra."
It was quintessential Nike branding: by equating the company with athletes and athleticism at such a primal level, Nike ceased merely to clothe the game and started to play it. And once Nike was in the game with its athletes, it could have fanatical sports fans instead of customers.
Step 2: Destroy the Competition Like any competitive sports player, Nike has its work cut out for it: winning. But winning for Nike is about much more than sneaker wars. Of course Nike can't stand Adidas, Fila and Reebok, but more important, Phil Knight has sparred with sports agents, whose individual greed, he claims, puts them "inherently in conflict with the interests of athletes at every turn"26 the NBA, which he feels has unfairly piggybacked on Nike's star-creation machinery; the NBA, which he feels has unfairly piggybacked on Nike's star-creation machinery;27 and the International Olympic Committee, whose elitism and corruption Knight derided long before the organization's 1999 bribery scandals. and the International Olympic Committee, whose elitism and corruption Knight derided long before the organization's 1999 bribery scandals.28 In Nike's world, all of the official sports clubs, associations and committees are actually trampling the spirit of sports-a spirit Nike alone truly embodies and appreciates. In Nike's world, all of the official sports clubs, associations and committees are actually trampling the spirit of sports-a spirit Nike alone truly embodies and appreciates.
So at the same time as Nike's myth machine was fabricating the idea of Team Nike, Nike's corporate team was dreaming up ways to play a more central role in pro sports. First Nike tried to unseat the sports agents by starting an agency of its own, not only to represent athletes in contract negotiation but also to develop integrated marketing strategies for its clients that are sure to complement-not dilute-Nike's own branding strategy, often by pushing its own ad concepts on other companies.
Then there was a failed attempt to create-and own-a college football version of the Super Bowl (the Nike Bowl), and in 1992, Nike did buy the Ben Hogan golf tour and rename it the Nike Tour. "We do these things to be in the sport. We're in sports-that's what we do," Knight told reporters at the time.29 That is certainly what they did when Nike and rival Adidas made up their own sporting event to settle a grudge match over who could claim the title "fastest man alive" in their ads: Nike's Michael Johnson or Adidas's Donovan Bailey. Because the two compete in different categories (Bailey in the 100-meter, Johnson in the 200), the sneaker brands agreed to split the difference and had the men compete in a made-up 150-meter race. Adidas won. That is certainly what they did when Nike and rival Adidas made up their own sporting event to settle a grudge match over who could claim the title "fastest man alive" in their ads: Nike's Michael Johnson or Adidas's Donovan Bailey. Because the two compete in different categories (Bailey in the 100-meter, Johnson in the 200), the sneaker brands agreed to split the difference and had the men compete in a made-up 150-meter race. Adidas won.
When Phil Knight faces the inevitable criticism from sports purists that he is having an undue influence on the games he sponsors, his stock response is that "the athlete remains our reason for being."30 But as the company's encounter with star basketball player Shaquille O'Neal shows, Nike is only devoted to a certain kind of athlete. Company biographer Donald Katz describes the tense meeting between O'Neal's manager, Leonard Armato, and Nike's marketing team: But as the company's encounter with star basketball player Shaquille O'Neal shows, Nike is only devoted to a certain kind of athlete. Company biographer Donald Katz describes the tense meeting between O'Neal's manager, Leonard Armato, and Nike's marketing team: Shaq had observed the explosion of the sports-marketing scene ("He took sports-marketing courses," Armato says) and the rise of Michael Jordan, and he'd decided that rather than becoming a part of several varied corporate marketing strategies, an array of companies might be assembled as part of a brand presence that was he. Consumer products companies would become part of Team Shaq, rather than the other way around. "We're looking for consistency of image," Armato would say as he began collecting the team on Shaq's behalf. "Like Mickey Mouse."
The only problem was that at Nike headquarters, there is no Team Shaq, only Team Nike. Nike took a pass and handed over the player many thought would be the next Michael Jordan to Reebok-not "Nike material," they said. According to Katz, Knight's mission "from the beginning had been to build a pedestal for sports such as the world had never seen."31 But at Nike Town in Manhattan, the pedestal is not holding up Michael Jordan, or the sport of basketball, but a rotating Nike sneaker. Like a prima donna, it sits in the spotlight, the first celebrity shoe. But at Nike Town in Manhattan, the pedestal is not holding up Michael Jordan, or the sport of basketball, but a rotating Nike sneaker. Like a prima donna, it sits in the spotlight, the first celebrity shoe.
Step 3: Sell Pieces of the Brand As If It Was the Berlin Wall Nothing embodies the era of the brand like Nike Town, the company's chain of flagship retail outlets. Each one is a shrine, a place set apart for the faithful, a mausoleum. The Manhattan Nike Town on East Fifty-seventh Street is more than a fancy store fitted with the requisite brushed chrome and blond wood, it is a temple, where the swoosh is worshiped as both art and heroic symbol. The swoosh is equated with Sports at every turn: in reverent glass display cases depicting "The definition of an athlete" in the inspirational quotes about "Courage," "Honor," "Victory" and "Teamwork" inlaid in the floorboards; and in the building's dedication "to all athletes and their dreams."
I asked a salesperson if there was anything amid the thousands of T-shirts, bathing suits, sports bras or socks that did not have a Nike logo on the outside of the garment. He racked his brain. T-shirts, no. Shoes, no. Track suits? No.
"Why?" he finally asked, sounding a bit hurt. "Is somebody allergic to the swoosh?"
Nike, king of the superbrands, is like an inflated Pac-Man, so driven to consume it does so not out of malice but out of jaw-clenching reflex. It is ravenous by nature. It seems fitting that Nike's branding strategy involves an icon that looks like a check mark. Nike is checking off the spaces as it swallows them: superstores? Check. Hockey? Baseball? Soccer? Check. Check. Check. T-shirts? Check. Hats? Check. Underwear? Check. Schools? Bathrooms? Shaved into brush cuts? Check. Check. Check. Since Nike has been the leader in branding clothing, it's not surprising that it has also led the way to the brand's final frontier: the branding of flesh. Not only do dozens of Nike employees have a swoosh tattooed on their calves, but tattoo parlors all over North America report that the swoosh has become their most popular item. Human branding? Check.
The Branded Star There is another reason behind Nike's stunning success at disseminating its brand. The superstar athletes who form the building blocks of its image-those creatures invented by Nike and cloned by Adidas and Fila-have proved uniquely positioned to soar in the era of synergy: they are made to be cross-promoted. The Spice Girls can make movies, and film stars can walk the runways but neither can quite win an Olympic medal. It's more practical for Dennis Rodman to write two books, star in two movies and have his own television show than it is for Martin Amis or Seinfeld to play defense for the Bulls, just as it is easier for Shaquille O'Neal to put out a rap album than it is for Sporty Spice to make the NBA draft. Only animated characters-another synergy favorite-are more versatile than sports stars in the synergy game.
But for Nike, there is a downside to the power of its own celebrity endorsers. Though Phil Knight will never admit it, Nike is no longer just competing with Reebok, Adidas and the NBA; it has also begun to compete with another brand: its name is Michael Jordan.
In the three years before he retired, Jordan was easing away from his persona as Nike incarnate and turning himself into what his agent, David Falk, calls a "superbrand." He refused to go along when Nike entered the sportsagent business, telling the company that it would have to compensate him for millions of dollars in lost revenue. Instead of letting Nike manage his endorsement portfolio, he tried to build synergy deals between his various sponsors, including a bizarre attempt to persuade Nike to switch phone companies when he became a celebrity spokesperson for WorldCom.32 Other highlights of what Falk terms "Michael Jordan's Corporate Partnership Program" include a WorldCom commercial in which the actors are decked out in Oakley sunglasses and Wilson sports gear, both Jordan-endorsed products. And, of course, the movie Other highlights of what Falk terms "Michael Jordan's Corporate Partnership Program" include a WorldCom commercial in which the actors are decked out in Oakley sunglasses and Wilson sports gear, both Jordan-endorsed products. And, of course, the movie Space Jam Space Jam-in which the basketball player starred and which Falk executive-produced-was Jordan's coming-out party as his own brand. The movie incorporated plugs for each of Jordan's sponsors (choice dialogue includes "Michael, it's show time. Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and Gatorade and we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way!"), and McDonald's promoted the event with Space Jam Space Jam toys and Happy Meals. toys and Happy Meals.
Nike had been playing up Jordan's business ambitions in its "CEO Jordan" commercials, which show him changing into a suit and racing to his office at halftime. But behind the scenes, the company has always resented Jordan's extra-Nike activities. Donald Katz writes that as early as 1992, "Knight believed that Michael Jordan was no longer, in sports-marketing nomenclature, 'clean.'"33 Significantly, Nike boycotted the co-branding bonanza that surrounded Significantly, Nike boycotted the co-branding bonanza that surrounded Space Jam Space Jam. Unlike McDonald's, it didn't use the movie in tie-in commercials, despite the fact that Space Jam Space Jam is based on a series of Nike commercials featuring Jordan and Bugs Bunny. When Falk told is based on a series of Nike commercials featuring Jordan and Bugs Bunny. When Falk told Advertising Age Advertising Age that "Nike had some reservations about the implementation of the movie," that "Nike had some reservations about the implementation of the movie,"34 he was exercising considerable restraint. Jim Riswold, the longtime Nike adman who first conceived of pairing Jordan with Bugs Bunny in the shoe commercials, complained to he was exercising considerable restraint. Jim Riswold, the longtime Nike adman who first conceived of pairing Jordan with Bugs Bunny in the shoe commercials, complained to The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal that that Space Jam Space Jam "is a merchandising bonanza first and a movie second. The idea is to sell lots of product." "is a merchandising bonanza first and a movie second. The idea is to sell lots of product."35 It was a historic moment in the branding of culture, completely inverting the traditionally fraught relationship between art and commerce: a shoe company and an ad agency huffing and puffing that a Hollywood movie would sully the purity of their commercials. It was a historic moment in the branding of culture, completely inverting the traditionally fraught relationship between art and commerce: a shoe company and an ad agency huffing and puffing that a Hollywood movie would sully the purity of their commercials.
For the time being at least, a peace has descended between the warring superbrands. Nike has given Jordan more leeway to develop his own apparel brand, still within the Nike empire but with greater independence. In the same week that he retired from basketball, Jordan announced that he would be extending the JORDAN clothing line from basketball gear into lifestyle wear, competing directly with Polo, Hilfiger and Nautica. Settling into his role as CEO-as opposed to celebrity endorser-he signed up other pro athletes to endorse the JORDAN brand: Derek Jeter, a shortstop for the New York Yankees and boxer Roy Jones Jr. And, as of May 1999, the full JORDAN brand is showcased in its own "retail concept shops"-two in New York and one in Chicago, with plans for up to fifty outlets by the end of the year 2000. Jordan finally had his wish: to be his own free-standing brand, complete with celebrity endorsers.
The Age of the Brandasaurus On the surface, the power plays between millionaire athletes and billion-dollar companies would seem to have little to do with the loss of unmarketed space that is the subject of this section. Jordan and Nike, however, are only the most broad strokes, manifestations of the way in which the branding imperative changes the way we imagine both sponsor and sponsored to the extent that the idea of unbranded space-music that is distinct from khakis, festivals that are not extensions of beer brands, athletic achievement that is celebrated in and of itself-becomes almost unthinkable. Jordan and Nike are emblematic of a new paradigm that eliminates all barriers between branding and culture, leaving no room whatsoever for unmarketed space.
An understanding is beginning to emerge that fashion designers, running-shoe companies, media outlets, cartoon characters and celebrities of all kinds are all more or less in the same business: the business of marketing their brands. That's why in the early nineties, Creative Artists Agency, the most powerful celebrity agency in Hollywood, began to represent not just celebrity people, but celebrity brands: Coke, Apple and even an alliance with Nike. That's why Benetton, Microsoft and Starbucks have leapfrogged over the "magalog" trend and have gone full force into the magazine publishing business: Benetton with Colors Colors, Microsoft with the on-line zine Slate Slate and Starbucks with and Starbucks with Joe Joe, a joint venture with Time Inc. That's why teen sensation Britney Spears and sitcom character Ally McBeal each have their own line of designer clothing; why Tommy Hilfiger has helped launch a record label; and rapper Master P has his own sports agency business. It's also why Ralph Lauren has a line of designer household paints, Brooks Brothers has a line of wines, Nike is set to launch a swooshed cruise ship, and auto-parts giant Magna is opening up an amusement park. It is also why market consultant Faith Popcorn has launched her own brand of leather Cocooning armchairs, named after the trend she coined of the same name, and Fashion Licensing of America Inc. is marketing a line of Ernest Hemingway furniture, designed to capture the "brand personality" of the late writer.36 As manufacturers and entertainers swap roles and move together toward the creation of branded lifestyle bubbles, Nike executives predict that their "competition in the future [will] be Disney, not Reebok."37 And it seems only fitting that just as Nike enters the entertainment business, the entertainment giants have decided to try their hand at the sneaker industry. In October 1997, Warner Brothers launched a low-end basketball shoe, endorsed by Shaquille O'Neal. "It's an extension of what we do at retail," explained Dan Romanelli of Warner Consumer products. And it seems only fitting that just as Nike enters the entertainment business, the entertainment giants have decided to try their hand at the sneaker industry. In October 1997, Warner Brothers launched a low-end basketball shoe, endorsed by Shaquille O'Neal. "It's an extension of what we do at retail," explained Dan Romanelli of Warner Consumer products.
It seems that wherever individual brands began-in shoes, sports, retail, food, music or cartoons-the most successful among them have all landed in the same place: the stratosphere of the superbrand. That is where Mick Jagger struts in Tommy Hilfiger, Steven Spielberg and Coke have the same agent, Shaq wants to be "like Mickey Mouse," and everyone has his or her own branded restaurant-from Jordan to Disney to Demi Moore to Puffy Combs and the supermodels.
It was Michael Ovitz, of course, who came up with the blueprint for the highest temple of branding so far, one that would do for music, sports and fashion what Walt Disney long ago did for kids' cartoons: turn the slick world of television into a real-world branded environment. After leaving Creative Artists Agency in August 1995 and being driven out as president of Disney shortly after, Ovitz took his unprecedented $87 million golden handshake and launched a new venture: entertainment- and sports-themed megamalls, a synthesis of pro sports, Hollywood celebrity and shopping. His vision is of an unholy mixture of Nike Town, Planet Hollywood and the NBA's marketing wing-all leading straight to the cash register. The first venture, a 1.5-million-square-foot theme mall in Columbus, Ohio, is scheduled to open in the year 2000. If Ovitz gets his way, another mall, planned for the Los Angeles area, will include an NFL football stadium.
As these edifices of the future suggest, corporate sponsors and the culture they brand have fused together to create a third culture: a self-enclosed universe of brand-name people, brand-name products and brand-name media. Interestingly, a 1995 study conducted by University of Missouri professor Roy F. Fox shows that many kids grasp the unique ambiguities of this sphere intuitively. The study found that a majority of Missouri high-school students who watched Channel One's mix of news and ads in their classrooms thought that sports stars paid shoe companies to be in their commercials. "I don't know why athletes do that-pay all that money for all them ignorant commercials for themselves. Guess it makes everyone like 'em more and like their teams more."38 So opined Debbie, a ninth-grader and one of the two hundred students who participated in the study. For Fox, the comment demonstrates a disturbing lack of media literacy, proof positive that kids can't critically evaluate the advertising they see on television. But perhaps these findings show that kids understand something most of us still refuse to grasp. Maybe they know that sponsorship is a far more complicated process than the buyer/seller dichotomy that existed in previous decades and that to talk of who sold out or bought in has become impossibly anachronistic. In an era in which people are brands and brands are culture, what Nike and Michael Jordan do is more akin to co-branding than straight-up shilling, and while the Spice Girls may be doing Pepsi today, they could easily launch their own Spice Cola tomorrow.
It makes a good deal of sense that high-school kids would have a more realistic grasp of the absurdities of branded life. They, after all, are the ones who grew up sold.
Virgin's Richard Branson, the rock-and-roll CEO. Revolution Soda Co.'s consumable Che.
Chapter Three.
Alt. Everything The Youth Market and the Marketing of Cool It's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people.
-Designer Christian Lacroix in Vogue Vogue, April 1994 In our final year of high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I passed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of well-worn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just end up on another one-the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go traveling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let's Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the secondhand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death. Everywhere we imagined ourselves standing turned into a cliche beneath our feet-the stuff of Jeep ad copy and sketch comedy. To us it seemed as though the archetypes were all hackneyed by the time our turn came to graduate, including that of the black-clad deflated intellectual, which we were trying on at that very moment. Crowded by the ideas and styles of the past, we felt there was no open space anywhere.
Of course it's a classic symptom of teenage narcissism to believe that the end of history coincides exactly with your arrival on earth. Almost every angst-ridden, Camus-reading seventeen-year-old girl finds her own groove eventually. Still, there is a part of my high-school globo-claustrophobia that has never left me, and in some ways only seems to intensify as time creeps along. What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.
All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper. That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar...what more could you ask? Well, actually, you could ask to go soaring off the side of a mountain on a snowboard, feeling as if, for one moment, you are riding the clouds instead of the snow. You could scour Southeast Asia, like the world-weary twenty-somethings in Alex Garland's novel The Beach The Beach, looking for the one corner of the globe uncharted by the Lonely Planet to start your own private utopia. You could, for that matter, join a New Age cult and dream of alien abduction. From the occult to raves to riots to extreme sports, it seems that the eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing.
In the absence of space travel and confined by the laws of gravity, however, most of us take our open space where we can get it, sneaking it like cigarettes, outside hulking enclosures. The streets may be lined with billboards and franchise signs, but kids still make do, throwing up a couple of nets and passing the puck or soccer ball between the cars. There is release, too, at England's free music festivals, and in conversions of untended private property into collective space: abandoned factories turned into squats by street kids or ramped entrances to office towers transformed into skateboarding courses on Sunday afternoons.
But as privatization slithers into every crevice of public life, even these intervals of freedom and back alleys of unsponsored space are slipping away. The indie skateboarders and snowboarders all have Vans sneaker contracts, road hockey is fodder for beer commercials, inner-city redevelopment projects are sponsored by Wells Fargo, and the free festivals have all been banned, replaced with the annual Tribal Gathering, an electronic music festival that bills itself as a "strike back against the establishment and clubland's evil empire of mediocrity, commercialism, and the creeping corporate capitalism of our cosmic counter-culture"1 and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration. and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration.
I remember the moment when it hit me that my frustrated craving for space wasn't simply a result of the inevitable march of history, but of the fact that commercial co-optation was proceeding at a speed that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. I was watching the television coverage of the controversy surrounding Woodstock '94, the twenty-fifth-anniversary festival of the original Woodstock event. The baby-boomer pundits and aging rock stars postured about how the $2 cans of Woodstock Memorial Pepsi, festival key chains and on-site cash machines betrayed the anticommercial spirit of the original event and, incredibly, whined that the $3 commemorative condoms marked the end of "free love" (as if AIDS had been cooked up as a malicious affront to their nostalgia).
What struck me most was that the debate revolved entirely around the sanctity of the past, with no recognition of present-tense cultural challenges. Despite the fact that the anniversary festival was primarily marketed to teenagers and college students and showcased then-up-and-coming bands like Green Day, not a single commentator explored what this youth-culture "commodification" might mean to the young people who would actually be attending the event. Never mind about the offense to hippies decades after the fact; how does it feel to have your culture "sold out" now, as you are living it? The only mention that a new generation of young people even existed came when the organizers, confronted with charges from ex-hippies that they had engineered Greedstock or Woodshlock, explained that if the event wasn't shrink-wrapped and synergized, the kids today would mutiny. Woodstock promoter John Roberts explained that today's youth are "used to sponsorship. If a kid went to a concert and there wasn't merchandise to buy, he'd probably go out of his mind."2 Roberts isn't the only one who holds this view. Advertising Age Advertising Age reporter Jeff Jensen goes so far as to make the claim that for today's young people, "Selling out is not only accepted, it's considered hip." reporter Jeff Jensen goes so far as to make the claim that for today's young people, "Selling out is not only accepted, it's considered hip."3 To object would be, well, unhip. There is no need to further romanticize the original Woodstock. Among (many) other things, it was also a big-label-backed rock festival, designed to turn a profit. Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition-a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock '94, for whom generational identity had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city spaces. This loss of space happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical space but of mental space. To object would be, well, unhip. There is no need to further romanticize the original Woodstock. Among (many) other things, it was also a big-label-backed rock festival, designed to turn a profit. Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition-a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock '94, for whom generational identity had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city spaces. This loss of space happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical space but of mental space.
In a climate of youth-marketing feeding frenzy, all culture begins to be created with the frenzy in mind. Much of youth culture becomes suspended in what sociologists Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson call "arrested development," noting that "we have, after all, no idea of what punk or grunge or hip hop as social and cultural movements might look like if they were not mined for their gold..."4 This "mining" has not gone unnoticed or unopposed. Both the anticorporate cultural journal This "mining" has not gone unnoticed or unopposed. Both the anticorporate cultural journal The Baffler The Baffler and the now-defunct and the now-defunct Might Might magazine brilliantly lampooned the desperation and striving of the youth-culture industry in the mid-nineties. Dozens, if not hundreds, of zines and Web sites have been launched and have played no small part in setting the mood for the kind of brand-based attacks that I chronicle in Part IV of this book. For the most part, however, branding's insatiable cultural thirst just creates more marketing. Marketing that thinks it is culture. magazine brilliantly lampooned the desperation and striving of the youth-culture industry in the mid-nineties. Dozens, if not hundreds, of zines and Web sites have been launched and have played no small part in setting the mood for the kind of brand-based attacks that I chronicle in Part IV of this book. For the most part, however, branding's insatiable cultural thirst just creates more marketing. Marketing that thinks it is culture.
To understand how youth culture became such a sought-after market in the early nineties, it helps to go back briefly to the recession era "brand crisis" that took root immediately preceding this frenzy-a crisis that, with so many consumers failing to live up to corporate expectations, created a clear and pressing need for a new class of shoppers to step in and take over.
During the two decades before the brand crisis, the major cultural industries were still drinking deeply from the river of baby-boomer buying power, and the youth demographic found itself on the periphery, upstaged by the awesome power of classic rock and reunion tours. Of course actual young consumers remained a concern for the industries that narrowly market to teens, but youth culture itself was regarded as a rather shallow and tepid well of inspiration by the entertainment and advertising industries. Sure, there were plenty of young people who considered their culture "alternative" or "underground" in the seventies and eighties. Every urban center maintained its bohemian pockets, where the faithful wrapped themselves in black, listened to the Grateful Dead or punk (or the more digestible New Wave), and shopped at secondhand clothing stores and in dank record stores. If they lived outside urban centers, tapes and accessories of the cool lifestyle could be ordered from the backs of magazines like Maximum Rock 'n' Roll Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, or swapped through networks of friends or purchased at concerts.
While this is a gross caricature of the youth subcultures that rose and fell during these decades, the relevant distinction is that these scenes were only halfheartedly sought after as markets. In part this was because seventies punk was at its peak at the same time as the infinitely more mass-marketable disco and heavy metal, and the gold mine of high-end preppy style. And while rap music was topping the charts by the mid-to late eighties, arriving complete with a fully articulated style and code, white America was not about to declare the arrival of a new youth culture. That day would have to wait a few years until the styles and sounds of urban black youth were fully co-opted by white suburbia.
Where I'm from there wasn't no scene I got my information reading Highlights Highlights magazine magazine-Princess Superstar, "I'm White," Strictly Platinum So there was no mass-marketing machine behind these subcultures: there was no Internet, no traveling alternative-culture shopping malls like Lollapalooza or Lilith Fair, and there certainly weren't slick catalogs like Delia and Airshop, which now deliver body glitter, plastic pants and big-city attitude like pizzas to kids stuck in the suburbs. The industries that drove Western consumerism were still catering to the citizens of Woodstock Nation, now morphed into consumption-crazed yuppies. Most of their kids, too, could be counted on as yuppies-in-training, so keeping track of the trends and tastes favored by style-setting youth wasn't worth the effort.
The Youth Market Saves the Day All that changed in the early nineties when the baby boomers dropped their end of the consumer chain and the brands underwent their identity crisis. At about the time of Marlboro Friday, Wall Street took a closer look at the brands that had flourished through the recession, and noticed something interesting. Among the industries that were holding steady or taking off were beer, soft drinks, fast food and sneakers sneakers-not to mention chewing gum and Barbie dolls. There was something else: 1992 was the first year since 1975 that the number of teenagers in America increased. Gradually, an idea began to dawn on many in the manufacturing sector and entertainment industries: maybe their sales were slumping not because consumers were "brand-blind," but because these companies had their eyes fixed on the wrong demographic prize. This was not a time for selling Tide and Snuggle to housewives-it was a time for beaming MTV, Nike, Hilfiger, Microsoft, Netscape and Wired Wired to global teens and their overgrown imitators. Their parents might have gone bargain basement, but kids, it turned out, were still willing to pay up to fit in. Through this process, peer pressure emerged as a powerful market force, making the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism of their suburban parents pale by comparison. As clothing retailer Elise Decoteau said of her teen shoppers, "They run in packs. If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their class and everyone in their school." to global teens and their overgrown imitators. Their parents might have gone bargain basement, but kids, it turned out, were still willing to pay up to fit in. Through this process, peer pressure emerged as a powerful market force, making the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism of their suburban parents pale by comparison. As clothing retailer Elise Decoteau said of her teen shoppers, "They run in packs. If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their class and everyone in their school."5 There was just one catch. As the success of branding superstars like Nike had shown, it was not going to be sufficient for companies simply to market their same products to a younger demographic; they needed to fashion brand identities that would resonate with this new culture. If they were going to turn their lackluster products into transcendent meaning machines-as the dictates of branding demanded-they would need to remake themselves in the image of nineties cool: its music, styles and politics.
Cool Envy: The Brands Go Back to School Fueled by the dual promises of branding and the youth market, the corporate sector experienced a burst of creative energy. Cool, alternative, young, hip-whatever you want to call it-was the perfect identity for product-driven companies looking to become transcendent image-based brands. Advertisers, brand managers, music, film and television producers raced back to high school, sucking up to the in-crowd in a frantic effort to isolate and reproduce in TV commercials the precise "attitude" teens and twenty-somethings were driven to consume with their snack foods and pop tunes. And as in high schools everywhere, "Am I cool?" became the deeply dull and all-consuming question of every moment, echoing not only through class and locker rooms, but through the high-powered meetings and conference calls of Corporate High.
The quest for cool is by nature riddled with self-doubt ("Is this cool?" one can hear the legions of teen shoppers nervously quizzing each other. "Do you think this is lame?") Except now the harrowing doubts of adolescence are the billion-dollar questions of our age. The insecurities go round and round the boardroom table, turning ad writers, art directors and CEOs into turbo-powered teenagers, circling in front of their bedroom mirrors trying to look blase. Do the kids think we're cool? they want to know. Are we trying too hard to be cool, or are we really cool? Do we have attitude? The right right attitude? attitude?
The Wall Street Journal regularly runs serious articles about how the trend toward wide-legged jeans or miniature backpacks is affecting the stock market. IBM, out-cooled in the eighties by Apple, Microsoft and pretty well everybody, has become fixated on trying to impress the cool kids, or, in the company's lingo, the "People in Black." "We used to call them the ponytail brigade, the black turtleneck brigade," says IBM's David Gee, whose job it is to make Big Blue cool. "Now they're the PIBs-People in Black. We have to be relevant to the PIBs." regularly runs serious articles about how the trend toward wide-legged jeans or miniature backpacks is affecting the stock market. IBM, out-cooled in the eighties by Apple, Microsoft and pretty well everybody, has become fixated on trying to impress the cool kids, or, in the company's lingo, the "People in Black." "We used to call them the ponytail brigade, the black turtleneck brigade," says IBM's David Gee, whose job it is to make Big Blue cool. "Now they're the PIBs-People in Black. We have to be relevant to the PIBs."6 For Pepe Jeans, the goal, articulated by marketing director Phil Spur, is this: "They [the cool kids] have to look at your jeans, look at your brand image and say 'that's cool...' At the moment we're ensuring that Pepe is seen in the right places and on the right people." For Pepe Jeans, the goal, articulated by marketing director Phil Spur, is this: "They [the cool kids] have to look at your jeans, look at your brand image and say 'that's cool...' At the moment we're ensuring that Pepe is seen in the right places and on the right people."7 The companies that are left out of the crowd of successfully hip brands-their sneakers too small, their pant-legs too tapered, their edgy ads insufficiently ironic-now skulk on the margins of society: the corporate nerds. "Coolness is still elusive for us," says Bill Benford, president of L.A. Gear athletic wear,8 and one half expects him to slash his wrists like some anxious fifteen-year-old unable to face schoolyard exile for another term. No one is safe from this brutal ostracism, as Levi Strauss learned in 1998. The verdict was merciless: Levi's didn't have superstores like Disney, it didn't have cool ads like the Gap, it didn't have hip-hop credibility like Hilfiger and no one wanted to tattoo its logo on their navel, like Nike. In short, it wasn't cool. It had failed to understand, as its new brand developer Sean Dee diagnosed, that "loose jeans is not a fad, it's a paradigm shift." and one half expects him to slash his wrists like some anxious fifteen-year-old unable to face schoolyard exile for another term. No one is safe from this brutal ostracism, as Levi Strauss learned in 1998. The verdict was merciless: Levi's didn't have superstores like Disney, it didn't have cool ads like the Gap, it didn't have hip-hop credibility like Hilfiger and no one wanted to tattoo its logo on their navel, like Nike. In short, it wasn't cool. It had failed to understand, as its new brand developer Sean Dee diagnosed, that "loose jeans is not a fad, it's a paradigm shift."9 Cool, it seems, is the make-or-break quality in 1990s branding. It is the ironic sneer-track of ABC sitcoms and late-night talk shows; it is what sells psychedelic Internet servers, extreme sports gear, ironic watches, mind-blowing fruit juices, kitsch-laden jeans, postmodern sneakers and post-gender colognes. Our "aspirational age," as they say in marketing studies, is about seventeen. This applies equally to the forty-seven-year-old baby boomers scared of losing their cool and the seven-year-olds kick-boxing to the Backstreet Boys.
As the mission of corporate executives becomes to imbue their companies with deep coolness, one can even foresee a time when the mandate of our elected leaders will be "Make the Country Cool." In many ways, that time is already here. Since his election in 1997, England's young prime minister, Tony Blair, has been committed to changing Britain's somewhat dowdy image to "Cool Britannia." After attending a summit with Blair in an art-directed conference room in Canary Wharf, French president Jacques Chirac said, "I'm impressed. It all gives Britain the image of a young, dynamic and modern country." At the G-8 summit in Birmingham, Blair turned the august gathering into a basement rec room get-together, where the leaders watched All Saints music videos and then were led in a round of "All You Need Is Love" no Nintendo games were reported. Blair is a world leader as nation stylist-but will his attempt to "rebrand Britain" really work, or will he be stuck with the old, outdated Brit brand? If anyone can do it, it's Blair, who took a page from the marketers of Revolution Soda and successfully changed the name of his party from an actual description of its loyalties and policy proclivities (that would be "labour") to the brand-asset descriptor "New Labour." His is not the Labour Party but a labor-scented party.
The Change Agents: Cooling the Water Cooler The journey to our current state of world cool almost ended, however, before it really began. Even though by 1993 there was scarcely a fashion, food, beverage or entertainment company that didn't pine for what the youth market promised, many were at a loss as to how to get it. At the time that cool-envy hit, many corporations were in the midst of a hiring freeze, recovering from rounds of layoffs, most of which were executed according to the last-hired-first-fired policies of the late-eighties recession. With far fewer young workers on the payroll and no new ones coming up through the ranks, many corporate executives found themselves in the odd position of barely knowing anyone under thirty years old. In this stunted context, youth itself looked oddly exotic-and information about Xers, Generation Y and twenty-somethings was suddenly a most precious commodity.
Fortunately, a backlog of hungry twenty-somethings were already in the job market. Like good capitalists, many of these young workers saw a market niche: being professionally young. In so many words, they assured would-be bosses that if they were hired, hip, young countercultures would be hand-delivered at the rate of one per week; companies would be so cool, they would get respect in the scenes. They promised the youth demographic, the digital revolution, a beeline into convergence.
And as we now know, when they got the job, these conduits of cool saw no need to transform themselves into clone-ish Company Men. Many can be seen now, roaming the hallways of Fortune 500 corporations dressed like club kids, skateboard in tow. They drop references to all-night raves at the office water cooler ("Memo to the boss: why not fill this thing with ginsenglaced herbal iced tea?"). The CEOs of tomorrow aren't employees, they are, to use a term favored at IBM, "change agents." But are they impostors-scheming "suits" hiding underneath hip-hop snowboarding gear? Not at all. Many of these young workers are the real deal; the true and committed product of the scenes they serve up, and utterly devoted to the transformation of their brands. Like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire Jerry Maguire, they stay up late into the night penning manifestos, revolutionary tracts about the need to embrace the new, to flout bureaucracy, to get on the Web or be left behind, to redo the ad campaign with a groovier, grittier feel, to change quicker, be hipper.
And what do the change agents' bosses have to say about all this? They say bring it on, of course. Companies looking to fashion brand identities that will mesh seamlessly with the zeitgeist understand, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, "When a thing is current, it creates currency." The change agents stroke their bosses' middle-aged egos simply by showing up-how out of touch could the boss be with a radical like this on the same intranet system? Just look at Netscape, which no longer employs a personnel manager and instead has Margie Mader, Director of Bringing in the Cool People. When asked by Fast Company Fast Company, "How do you interview for cool?" she replied, "...there are the people who just exude cool: one guy skateboarded here for his interview; another held his interview in a roller-hockey rink."10 At MTV, a couple of twenty-five-year-old production assistants, both named Melissa, co-wrote a document known as the "Melissa Manifesto," calling on the already insufferably bubbly channel to become even more so. ("We want a cleaner, brighter, more fun MTV," was among their fearless demands.) Upon reading the tract, MTV president Judy McGrath told one of her colleagues, "I feel like blowing everybody out and putting these people in charge." At MTV, a couple of twenty-five-year-old production assistants, both named Melissa, co-wrote a document known as the "Melissa Manifesto," calling on the already insufferably bubbly channel to become even more so. ("We want a cleaner, brighter, more fun MTV," was among their fearless demands.) Upon reading the tract, MTV president Judy McGrath told one of her colleagues, "I feel like blowing everybody out and putting these people in charge."11 Fellow rebel Tom Freston, CEO of MTV, explains that "Judy is inherently an anti-establishment person. Anybody who comes along and says, 'Let's off the pig,' has got her ear." Fellow rebel Tom Freston, CEO of MTV, explains that "Judy is inherently an anti-establishment person. Anybody who comes along and says, 'Let's off the pig,' has got her ear."12 Cool Hunters: The Legal Stalkers of Youth Culture While the change agents were getting set to cool the corporate world from the inside out, a new industry of "cool hunters" was promising to cool the companies from the outside in. The major corporate cool consultancies-Sputnik, The L. Report The L. Report, Bureau de Style-were all founded between 1994 and 1996, just in time to present themselves as the brands' personal cool shoppers. The idea was simple: they would search out pockets of cutting-edge lifestyle, capture them on videotape and return to clients like Reebok, Absolut Vodka and Levi's with such bold pronouncements as "Monks are cool."13 They would advise their clients to use irony in their ad campaigns, to get surreal, to use "viral communications." They would advise their clients to use irony in their ad campaigns, to get surreal, to use "viral communications."
In their book Street Trends Street Trends, Sputnik founders Janine Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca concede that almost anyone can interview a bunch of young people and make generalizations, "but how do you know they are the 'right' ones-have you been in their closets? Trailed their daily routines? Hung out with them socially?...Are they the core consumers, or the mainstream followers?"14 Unlike the market researchers who use focus groups and one-way glass to watch kids as if they were overgrown lab rats, Sputnik is "one of them"-it is in with the in-crowd. Unlike the market researchers who use focus groups and one-way glass to watch kids as if they were overgrown lab rats, Sputnik is "one of them"-it is in with the in-crowd.
Of course all this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Cool hunters and their corporate clients are locked in a slightly S/M, symbiotic dance: the clients are desperate to believe in a just-beyond-their-reach well of untapped cool, and the hunters, in order to make their advice more valuable, exaggerate the crisis of credibility the brands face. On the off chance of Brand X becoming the next Nike, however, many corporations have been more than willing to pay up. And so, armed with their change agents and their cool hunters, the superbrands became the perennial teenage followers, trailing the scent of cool wherever it led.
In 1974, Norman Mailer described the paint sprayed by urban graffiti artists as artillery fired in a war between the street and the establishment. "You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name...your presence is on their Presence, your alias hangs over their scene."15 Twenty-five years later, a complete inversion of this relationship has taken place. Gathering tips from the graffiti artists of old, the superbrands have tagged everyone-including the graffiti writers themselves. No space has been left unbranded. Twenty-five years later, a complete inversion of this relationship has taken place. Gathering tips from the graffiti artists of old, the superbrands have tagged everyone-including the graffiti writers themselves. No space has been left unbranded.
Hip-Hop Blows Up the Brands As we have seen, in the eighties you had to be relatively rich to get noticed by marketers. In the nineties, you have only to be cool. As designer Christian Lacroix remarked in Vogue Vogue, "It's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people."16 Over the past decade, young black men in American inner cities have been the market most aggressively mined by the brandmasters as a source of borrowed "meaning" and identity. This was the key to the success of Nike and Tommy Hilfiger, both of which were catapulted to brand superstardom in no small part by poor kids who incorporated Nike and Hilfiger into hip-hop style at the very moment when rap was being thrust into the expanding youth-culture limelight by MTV and Vibe Vibe (the first mass-market hip-hop magazine, founded in 1992). "The hip-hop nation," write Lopiano-Misdom and De Luca in (the first mass-market hip-hop magazine, founded in 1992). "The hip-hop nation," write Lopiano-Misdom and De Luca in Street Trends Street Trends, is "the first to embrace a designer or a major label, they make that label 'big concept' fashion. Or, in their words, they 'blow it up.'"17 Designers like Stussy, Hilfiger, Polo, DKNY and Nike have refused to crack down on the pirating of their logos for T-shirts and baseball hats in the inner cities and several of them have clearly backed away from serious attempts to curb rampant shoplifting. By now the big brands know that profits from logowear do not just flow from the purchase of the garment but also from people seeing your logo on "the right people," as Pepe Jeans' Phil Spur judiciously puts it. The truth is that the "got to be cool" rhetoric of the global brands is, more often than not, an indirect way of saying "got to be black." Just as the history of cool in America is really (as many have argued) a history of African-American culture-from jazz and blues to rock and roll to rap-for many of the superbrands, cool hunting simply means blackculture hunting. Which is why the cool hunters' first stop was the basketball courts of America's poorest neighborhoods.
The latest chapter in mainstream America's gold rush to poverty began in 1986, when rappers Run-DMC breathed new life into Adidas products with their hit single "My Adidas," a homage to their favorite brand. Already, the wildly popular rap trio had hordes of fans copying their signature style of gold medallions, black-and-white Adidas tracksuits and low-cut Adidas sneakers, worn without laces. "We've been wearing them all our lives," Darryl McDaniels (a k a DMC) said of his Adidas shoes at the time.18 That was fine for a time, but after a while it occurred to Russell Simmons, the president of Run-DMC's label Def Jam Records, that the boys should be getting paid for the promotion they were giving to Adidas. He approached the German shoe company about kicking in some money for the act's 1987 Together Forever tour. Adidas executives were skeptical about being associated with rap music, which at that time was alternately dismissed as a passing fad or vilified as an incitement to riot. To help change their minds, Simmons took a couple of Adidas bigwigs to a Run-DMC show. Christopher Vaughn describes the event in That was fine for a time, but after a while it occurred to Russell Simmons, the president of Run-DMC's label Def Jam Records, that the boys should be getting paid for the promotion they were giving to Adidas. He approached the German shoe company about kicking in some money for the act's 1987 Together Forever tour. Adidas executives were skeptical about being associated with rap music, which at that time was alternately dismissed as a passing fad or vilified as an incitement to riot. To help change their minds, Simmons took a couple of Adidas bigwigs to a Run-DMC show. Christopher Vaughn describes the event in Black Enterprise Black Enterprise: "At a crucial moment, while the rap group was performing the song ["My Adidas"], one of the members yelled out, 'Okay, everybody in the house, rock your Adidas!'-and three thousand pairs of sneakers shot in the air. The Adidas executives couldn't reach for their checkbooks fast enough."19 By the time of the annual Atlanta sports-shoe Super Show that year, Adidas had unveiled its new line of Run-DMC shoes: the Super Star and the Ultra Star-"designed to be worn without laces." By the time of the annual Atlanta sports-shoe Super Show that year, Adidas had unveiled its new line of Run-DMC shoes: the Super Star and the Ultra Star-"designed to be worn without laces."20 Since "My Adidas," nothing in inner-city branding has been left up to chance. Major record labels like BMG now hire "street crews" of urban black youth to talk up hip-hop albums in their communities and to go out on guerrilla-style postering and sticker missions. The L.A.-based Steven Rifkind Company bills itself as a marketing firm "specializing in building word-of-mouth in urban areas and inner cities."21 Rifkind is CEO of the rap label Loud Records, and companies like Nike pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to find out how to make their brands cool with trend-setting black youth. Rifkind is CEO of the rap label Loud Records, and companies like Nike pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to find out how to make their brands cool with trend-setting black youth.
So focused is Nike on borrowing style, attitude and imagery from black urban youth that the company has its own word for the practice: bro-ing bro-ing. That's when Nike marketers and designers bring their prototypes to inner-city neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia or Chicago and say, "Hey, bro, check out the shoes," to gauge the reaction to new styles and to build up a buzz. In an interview with journalist Josh Feit, Nike designer Aaron Cooper described his bro-ing conversion in Harlem: "We go to the playground, and we dump the shoes out. It's unbelievable. The kids go nuts. That's when you realize the importance of Nike. Having kids tell you Nike is the number one thing in their life-number two is their girlfriend."22 Nike has even succeeded in branding the basketball courts where it goes bro-ing through its philanthropic wing, P.L.A.Y (Participate in the Lives of Youth). P.L.A.Y sponsors inner-city sports programs in exchange for high swoosh visibility, including giant swooshes at the center of resurfaced urban basketball courts. In tonier parts of the city, that kind of thing would be called an ad and the space would come at a price, but on this side of the tracks, Nike pays nothing, and files the cost under charity. Nike has even succeeded in branding the basketball courts where it goes bro-ing through its philanthropic wing, P.L.A.Y (Participate in the Lives of Youth). P.L.A.Y sponsors inner-city sports programs in exchange for high swoosh visibility, including giant swooshes at the center of resurfaced urban basketball courts. In tonier parts of the city, that kind of thing would be called an ad and the space would come at a price, but on this side of the tracks, Nike pays nothing, and files the cost under charity.
Tommy Hilfiger: To the Ghetto and Back Again Tommy Hilfiger, even more than Nike or Adidas, has turned the harnessing of ghetto cool into a mass-marketing science. Hilfiger forged a formula that has since been imitated by Polo, Nautica, Munsingwear (thanks to Puff Daddy's fondness for the penguin logo) and several other clothing companies looking for a short cut to making it at the suburban mall with innercity attitude.
Like a depoliticized, hyper-patriotic Benetton, Hilfiger ads are a tangle of Cape Cod multiculturalism: scrubbed black faces lounging with their windswept white brothers and sisters in that great country club in the sky, and always against the backdrop of a billowing American flag. "By respecting one another we can reach all cultures and communities," the company says. "We promote...the concept of living the American dream."23 But the hard facts of Tommy's interracial financial success have less to do with finding common ground between cultures than with the power and mythology embedded in America's deep racial segregation. But the hard facts of Tommy's interracial financial success have less to do with finding common ground between cultures than with the power and mythology embedded in America's deep racial segregation.
Tommy Hilfiger started off squarely as white-preppy wear in the tradition of Ralph Lauren and Lacoste. But the designer soon realized that his clothes also had a peculiar cachet in the inner cities, where the hip-hop philosophy of "living large" saw poor and working-class kids acquiring status in the ghetto by adopting the gear and accoutrements of prohibitively costly leisure activities, such as skiing, golfing, even boating. Perhaps to better position his brand within this urban fantasy, Hilfiger began to associate his clothes more consciously with these sports, shooting ads at yacht clubs, beaches and other nautical locales. At the same time, the clothes themselves were redesigned to appeal more directly to the hip-hop aesthetic. Cultural theorist Paul Smith describes the shift as "bolder colors, bigger and baggier styles, more hoods and cords, and more prominence for logos and the Hilfiger name."24 He also plied rap artists like Snoop Dogg with free clothes and, walking the tightrope between the yacht and the ghetto, launched a line of Tommy Hilfiger beepers. He also plied rap artists like Snoop Dogg with free clothes and, walking the tightrope between the yacht and the ghetto, launched a line of Tommy Hilfiger beepers.
Once Tommy was firmly established as a ghetto thing, the real selling could begin-not just to the comparatively small market of poor inner-city youth but to the much larger market of middle-class white and Asian kids who mimic black style in everything from lingo to sports to music. Company sales reached $847 million in 1998-up from a paltry $53 million in 1991 when Hilfiger was still, as Smith puts it, "Young Republican clothing." Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.
Indie Inc.
Offering Fortune Fortune magazine readers advice on how to market to teenage girls, reporter Nina Munk writes that "you have to pretend that they're running things.... Pretend you still have to be discovered. Pretend the girls are in charge." magazine readers advice on how to market to teenage girls, reporter Nina Munk writes that "you have to pretend that they're running things.... Pretend you still have to be discovered. Pretend the girls are in charge."25 Being a huge corporation might sell on Wall Street, but as the brands soon learned on their cool hunt, "indie" was the pitch on Cool Street. Many corporations were unfazed by this shift, coming out with faux indie brands like Politix cigarettes from Moonlight Tobacco (courtesy of Philip Morris), Dave's Cigarettes from Dave's Tobacco Company (Philip Morris again), Old Navy's mock army surplus (the Gap) and OK Cola (Coke). Being a huge corporation might sell on Wall Street, but as the brands soon learned on their cool hunt, "indie" was the pitch on Cool Street. Many corporations were unfazed by this shift, coming out with faux indie brands like Politix cigarettes from Moonlight Tobacco (courtesy of Philip Morris), Dave's Cigarettes from Dave's Tobacco Company (Philip Morris again), Old Navy's mock army surplus (the Gap) and OK Cola (Coke).
In an attempt to cash in on the indie marketing craze, even Coke itself, the most recognizable brand name on earth, has tried to go underground. Fearing that it was too establishment for brand-conscious teens, the company launched an ad campaign in Wisconsin that declared Coke the "Unofficial State Drink." The campaign included radio spots that were allegedly broadcast from a pirate radio station called EKOC: Coke backward. Not to be outdone, Gap-owned Old Navy actually did launch its own pirate radio station to promote its brand-a microband transmitter that could only be picked up in the immediate vicinity of one of its Chicago billboards.26 And in 1999, when Levi's decided it was high time to recoup its lost cool, it also went indie, launching Red Line jeans (no mention of Levi's anywhere) and K-1 Khakis (no mention of Levi's or Dockers). And in 1999, when Levi's decided it was high time to recoup its lost cool, it also went indie, launching Red Line jeans (no mention of Levi's anywhere) and K-1 Khakis (no mention of Levi's or Dockers).
They sell 501s and they think it's funny Turning rebellion into money -Chumbawamba, "That's How Grateful We Are"
Ironic Consumption: No Deconstruction Required But Levi's may have, once again, missed a "paradigm shift." It hasn't taken long for these attempts to seriously pitch the most generic of mass-produced products as punk-rock lifestyle choices to elicit sneers from those ever-elusive, trend-setting cool kids, many of whom had already moved beyond indie by the time the brands caught on. Instead, they were now finding ways to express their disdain for mass culture not by opting out of it but by abandoning themselves to it entirely-but with a sly ironic twist. They were watching Melrose Place Melrose Place, eating surf 'n' turf in revolving restaurants, singing Frank Sinatra in karaoke bars and sipping girly drinks in tikki bars, acts that were rendered hip and daring because, well, they they were the ones doing them. Not only were they making a subversive statement about a culture they could not physically escape, they were rejecting the doctrinaire puritanism of seventies feminism, the earnestness of the sixties quest for authenticity and the "literal" readings of so many cultural critics. Welcome to ironic consumption. The editors of the zine were the ones doing them. Not only were they making a subversive statement about a culture they could not physically escape, they were rejecting the doctrinaire puritanism of seventies feminism, the earnestness of the sixties quest for authenticity and the "literal" readings of so many cultural critics. Welcome to ironic consumption. The editors of the zine Hermenaut Hermenaut articulated the recipe: articulated the recipe: Following the late ethnologist Michel de Certeau, we prefer to concentrate our attention on the independent use of mass culture products, a use which, like the ruses of camouflaged fish and insects, may not "overthrow the system," but which keeps us intact and autonomous within that system, which may be the best for which we can hope.... Going to Disney World to drop acid and goof on Mickey isn't revolutionary; going to Disney World in full knowledge of how ridiculous and evil it all is and still having a great innocent time, in some almost unconscious, even psychotic way, is something else altogether. This is what de Certeau describes as "the art of being inbetween," and this is the only path of true freedom in today's culture. Let us, then, be in-between. Let us revel in Baywatch, Joe Camel, Wired Wired magazine, and even glossy books about the society of spectacle [touche], but let's never succumb to the glamorous allure of these things. magazine, and even glossy books about the society of spectacle [touche], but let's never succumb to the glamorous allure of these things.27 In this complicated context, for brands to be truly cool, they need to layer this uncool-equals-cool aesthetic of the ironic viewer onto their pitch: they need to self-mock, talk back to themselves while they are talking, be used and new simultaneously. And after the brands and their cool hunters had tagged all the available fringe culture, it seemed only natural to fill up that narrow little strip of unmarketed brain space occupied by irony with preplanned knowing smirks, someone else's couch commentary and even a running simulation of the viewer's thought patterns. "The New Trash brands," remarks writer Nick Compton of kitsch lifestyle companies like Diesel, "offer inverted commas big enough to live, love and laugh within."28 Pop Up Videos, the VH1 show that adorns music videos with snarky thought bubbles, may be the endgame of this kind of commercial irony. It grabs the punchline before anyone else can get to it, making social commentary-even idle sneering-if not redundant then barely worth the expense of energy.
Irony's cozy, protected, self-referential niche is a much better fit than attempts to earnestly pass off fruit drinks as underground rock bands or sneakers as gangsta rappers. In fact, for brands in search of cool new identities, irony and camp have become so all-purpose that they even work after the fact. It turns out that the so-bad-it's-good marketing spin can be deployed to resuscitate hopelessly uncool brands and failed cultural products. Six months after the movie Showgirls Showgirls flopped in the theaters, for instance, MGM got wind that the sexploitation flick was doing okay on video, and not just as a quasi-respectable porno. It seemed that groups of trendy twenty-somethings were throwing flopped in the theaters, for instance, MGM got wind that the sexploitation flick was doing okay on video, and not just as a quasi-respectable porno. It seemed that groups of trendy twenty-somethings were throwing Showgirls Showgirls irony parties, laughing sardonically at the implausibly poor screenplay and shrieking with horror at the aerobic sexual encounters. Not content to pocket the video returns, MGM decided to relaunch the movie in the theaters as the next irony parties, laughing sardonically at the implausibly poor screenplay and shrieking with horror at the aerobic sexual encounters. Not content to pocket the video returns, MGM decided to relaunch the movie in the theaters as the next Rocky Horror Picture Show Rocky Horror Picture Show. This time around, the newspaper ads made no pretense that anyone had seriously admired the film. Instead, they quoted from the abysmal reviews, and declared Showgirls Showgirls an "instant camp classic" and "a rich sleazy kitsch-fest." The studio even hired a troupe of drag queens for the New York screenings to holler at the crowd with bullhorns during particularly egregious cinematic moments. an "instant camp classic" and "a rich sleazy kitsch-fest." The studio even hired a troupe of drag queens for the New York screenings to holler at the crowd with bullhorns during particularly egregious cinematic moments.
With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past.
What is retro, after all, but history re-consumed with a PepsiCo tie-in, and breath-mint and phone-card brand extensions? As the re-release of Lost in Space Lost in Space, the Star Wars Star Wars trilogy, and the launch of trilogy, and the launch of The Phantom Menace The Phantom Menace made clear, the mantra of retro entertainment seems to be "Once more with synergy!" as Hollywood travels back in time to cash in on merchandising opportunities beyond the imagination of yesterday's marketers. made clear, the mantra of retro entertainment seems to be "Once more with synergy!" as Hollywood travels back in time to cash in on merchandising opportunities beyond the imagination of yesterday's marketers.
Sell or Be Sold After almost a decade of the branding frenzy, cool hunting has become an internal contradiction: the hunters must rarefy youth "microcultures" by claiming that only full-time hunters have the know-how to unearth them-or else why hire cool hunters at all? Sputnik warns its clients that if the cool trend is "visible in your neighborhood or crowding your nearest mall, the learning is over. It's too late.... You need to get down with the streets, to be in the trenches every day."29 And yet this is demonstrably false; so-called street fashions-many of them planted by brandmasters like Nike and Hilfiger from day one-reach the ballooning industry of glossy youth-culture magazines and video stations without a heartbeat's delay. And if there is one thing virtually every young person now knows, it's that street style and youth culture are infinitely marketable commodities. And yet this is demonstrably false; so-called street fashions-many of them planted by brandmasters like Nike and Hilfiger from day one-reach the ballooning industry of glossy youth-culture magazines and video stations without a heartbeat's delay. And if there is one thing virtually every young person now knows, it's that street style and youth culture are infinitely marketable commodities.
Besides, even if there was a lost indigenous tribe of cool a few years back, rest assured that it no longer exists. It turns out that the prevailing legalized forms of youth stalking are only the tip of the iceberg: the Sputnik vision for the future of hip marketing is for companies to hire armies of Sputnik spawns-young "street promoters," "Net promoters" and "street distributors" who will hype brands one-on-one on the street, in the clubs and on-line. "Use the magic of peer-to-peer distribution-it worked in the freestyle sport cultures, mainly because the promoters were their friends.... Street promoting will survive as the only true means of personally 'spreading the word.'"30 So all arrows point to more jobs for the ballooning industry of "street snitches," certified representatives of their demographic who will happily become walking infomercials for Nike, Reebok and Levi's. So all arrows point to more jobs for the ballooning industry of "street snitches," certified representatives of their demographic who will happily become walking infomercials for Nike, Reebok and Levi's.
By fall 1998 it had already started to happen with the Korean car manufacturer Daewoo hiring two thousand college students on two hundred campuses to talk up the cars to their friends. Similarly, Anheuser-Busch keeps troops of U.S. college frat boys and "Bud Girls" on its payroll to promote Budweiser beer at campus parties and bars.31 The vision is both horrifying and hilarious: a world of glorified diary trespassers and professional eavesdroppers, part of a spy-vs.-spy corporate-fueled youth culture stalking itself, whose members will videotape one another's haircuts and chat about their corporate keepers' cool new products in their grassroots newsgroups. The vision is both horrifying and hilarious: a world of glorified diary trespassers and professional eavesdroppers, part of a spy-vs.-spy corporate-fueled youth culture stalking itself, whose members will videotape one another's haircuts and chat about their corporate keepers' cool new products in their grassroots newsgroups.
Rock-and-Roll CEOs There is an amusing irony in the fact that so many of our captains of industry pay cool hunters good money to lead them on the path to brand-image nirvana. The true barometers of hip are not the hunters, the postmodern admen, the change agents or even those trendy teenagers they're all madly chasing. They are the CEOs themselves, who are, for the most part, so damn rich that they can afford to stay on top of all the coolest culture trends. Guys like Diesel Jeans founder Renzo Rosso, who, according to Business Week Business Week, "rides to work on a Ducati Monster motorcycle."32 Or Nike's Phil Knight, who only took off his ever-present wraparound Oakley sunglasses after Oakley CEO Jim Jannard refused to sell him the company. Or famed admen Dan Wieden and David Kennedy who built a basketball court-complete with bleachers-in their corporate headquarters. Or Virgin's Richard Branson, who launched a London bridal store in a wedding dress, rappelled off the roof of his new Vancouver megastore while uncorking a bottle of champagne and then later crash-landed in the Algerian desert in his hot-air balloon-all during the month of December 1996. These CEOs are the new rock stars-and why shouldn't they be? Forever trailing the scent of cool, they are full-time, professional teenagers, but unlike real teenagers, they have nothing to distract them from the hot pursuit of the edge: no homework, puberty, college-entrance exams or curfews for them. Or Nike's Phil Knight, who only took off his ever-present wraparound Oakley sunglasses after Oakley CEO Jim Jannard refused to sell him the company. Or famed admen Dan Wieden and David Kennedy who built a basketball court-complete with bleachers-in their corporate headquarters. Or Virgin's Richard Branson, who launched a London bridal store in a wedding dress, rappelled off the roof of his new Vancouver megastore while uncorking a bottle of champagne and then later crash-landed in the Algerian desert in his hot-air balloon-all during the month of December 1996. These CEOs are the new rock stars-and why shouldn't they be? Forever trailing the scent of cool, they are full-time, professional teenagers, but unlike real teenagers, they have nothing to distract them from the hot pursuit of the edge: no homework, puberty, college-entrance exams or curfews for them.
Getting Over It As we will see later on, the sheer voracity of the corporate cool hunt did much to provoke the rise of brand-based activism: through adbusting, computer hacking and spontaneous illegal street parties, young people all over the world are aggressively reclaiming space from the corporate world, "unbranding" it, guerrilla-style. But the effectiveness of the cool hunt also set the stage for anticorporate activism in another way: inadvertently, it exposed the impotence of almost all other forms of political resistance except except anticorporate resistance, one cutting-edge marketing trend at a time. anticorporate resistance, one cutting-edge marketing trend at a time.
When the youth-culture feeding frenzy began in the early nineties, many of us who were young at the time saw ourselves as victims of a predatory marketing machine that co-opted our identities, our styles and our ideas and turned them into brand food. Nothing was immune: not punk, not hip-hop, not fetish, not techno-not even, as I'll get to in Chapter 5, campus feminism or multiculturalism. Few of us asked, at least not right away, why it was that these scenes and ideas were proving so packageable, so unthreatening-and so profitable. Many of us had been certain we were doing something subversive and rebellious but...what was it again?
In retrospect, a central problem was the mostly unquestioned assumption that just because a scene or style is different (that is, new and not yet mainstream), it necessarily exists in opposition to the mainstream, rather than simply sitting unthreateningly on its margins. Many of us assumed that "alternative"-music that was hard to listen to, styles that were hard to look at-was also anticommercial, even socialist. In Hype! Hype!, a documentary about how the discovery of "the Seattle sound" transformed a do-it-yourself hardcore scene into an international youth-culture-content factory, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder makes a rather moving speech about the emptiness of the "alternative" breakthrough of which his band was so emblematic: If all of this influence that this part of the country has and this musical scene has-if it doesn't do anything with it, that would be the tragedy. If it doesn't do anything with it like make some kind of change or make some kind of difference, this group of people who feel this certain way, who think these sorts of things that the underdogs we've all met and lived with think-if they finally get to the forefront and nothing comes out of it, that would be the tragedy.33 But that tragedy has already happened, and Vedder's inability to spit out what he was actually trying to say had more than a little to do with it. When the world's cameras were turned on Seattle, all we got were a few antiestablishment fuck-yous, a handful of overdoses and Kurt Cobain's suicide. We also got the decade's most spectacular "sellout"-Courtney Love's awe-inspiring sail from junkie punk queen to high-fashion cover girl in a span of two years. It seemed Courtney had been playing dress-up all along. What was revealing was how little it mattered. Did Love betray some karmic debt she owed to smudged eyeliner? To not caring about anything and shooting up? To being surly to the press? Don't you need to buy in to something earnestly before you can sell it out cynically?
Seattle imploded precisely because no one wanted to answer questions like those, and yet in the case of Cobain, and even Vedder, many in its scene possessed a genuine, if malleable, disdain for the trappings of commercialism. What was "sold out" in Seattle, and in every other subculture that has had the misfortune of being spotlighted by the cool hunters, was some pure idea about doing it yourself, about independent labels versus the big corporations, about not buying in to the capitalist machine. But few in that scene bothered to articulate these ideas out loud, and Seattle-long dead and forgotten as anything but a rather derivative fad-now serves as a cautionary tale about why so little opposition to the theft of cultural space took place in the early to mid-nineties. Trapped in the headlights of irony and carrying too much pop-culture baggage, not one of its antiheroes could commit to a single, solid political position.
A similar challenge is now being faced by all those ironic consumers out there-a cultural suit of armor many of us are loath to critique because it lets us feel smug while watching limitless amounts of bad TV. Unfortunately, it's tough to hold on to that subtle state of De Certeau's "in-betweenness" when the eight-hundred-pound culture industry gorilla wants to sit next to us on the couch and tag along on our ironic trips to the mall. That art of being in-between, of being ironic, or camp, which Susan Sontag so brilliantly illuminated in her 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," is based on an essential cliquiness, a club of people who get the aesthetic puns. "To talk about camp is therefore to betray it,"34 she acknowledges at the beginning of the essay, selecting the format of enumerated notes rather than a narrative so as to tread more lightly on her subject, one that could easily have been trampled with too heavy an approach. she acknowledges at the beginning of the essay, selecting the format of enumerated notes rather than a narrative so as to tread more lightly on her subject, one that could easily have been trampled with too heavy an approach.
Since the publication of Sontag's piece, camp has been quantified, measured, weighed, focus-grouped and test-marketed. To say it has been betrayed, as Sontag had feared, is an understatement of colossal dimensions. What's left is little more than a vaguely sarcastic way to eat Pizza Pops. Camp cannot exist in an ironic commercial culture in which no one is fully participating and everyone is an outsider inside their clothes, because, as Sontag writes, "In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails."35 Much of the early camp culture that Sontag describes involved using an act of imagination to make the marginal-even the despised-glamorous and fabulous. Drag queens, for instance, took their forced exile and turned it into a ball, with all the trappings of the Hollywood balls to which they would never be invited. The same can even be said of Andy Warhol. The man who took the world on a camping trip was a refugee from bigoted smalltown America; the Factory became his sovereign state. Sontag proposed camp as a defense mechanism against the banality, ugliness and overearnestness of mass culture. "Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture."36 Only now, some thirty-five years later, we are faced with the vastly more difficult question, How to be truly critical in an age of mass camp? Only now, some thirty-five years later, we are faced with the vastly more difficult question, How to be truly critical in an age of mass camp?