Check this wonderful bit about the new West Virginia Tourism campaign:
Readers flipping through the newest edition of O, The Oprah Magazine might stumble upon an ad headline that reads, “Whatever you do, don’t come to West Virginia!” Continue reading
Start here, if you haven’t seen it already.
This little internal morale-fluffer seems innocuous enough, and by middle-aged corporate white guy standards it might even pass for clever. Hey, maybe if you’re part of the Bank of America context and you know all the people personally, this rip of the U2 classic is actually pretty funny and uniting and let’s-run-out-of-the-room-and-conquer-the-industry inspiring.
However, in a world with YouTube and zillions of people who see everything they ever cared about commodified and used to sell toothpaste every day, BoA has perhaps crossed a line. No, there won’t be torches and pitchforks and a mad dash to the barricades (a la the OJ/FOX “If I Did It” trainwreck, which has now been cancelled), but there is this: now the BoA brand is being mocked by a very popular comedian and an alternative guitar icon in a way that effectively positions the bank as the anti-brand of choice for millions. A former student of mine told me a few minutes ago that he was going to call his friend, who’s in a very popular band, to suggest that they start covering the BoA version, too.
Wow – how very viral.
There are lessons here. For one thing, corporate meetings ain’t Vegas (what happens there doesn’t necessarily stay there), and for another, when you do something that you think is funny, you need to be sure that your key constituencies agree with you. If the Pat Boone crowd you work with is laughing but your customers are more the Green Day type, you might oughta seek some external validation. (And if you need to be told this, you’re probably in the wrong line of work to start with.)
Time will tell whether this achieves the sort of mythic status of, say, the Appalachian is Hot Hot Hot debacle, but as somebody who doesn’t believe art’s higher purpose has anything to do with moving product, I can only hope so.
Cobain beats Elvis as richest artist (deceased)
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 25 October 2006
Death is not always the dumbest of career moves, especially if you are a rock star of enduring appeal. Kurt Cobain, the one-time frontman for Nirvana who committed suicide in 1994, earned $50m (£25m) over the past year, according to Forbes magazine’s annual list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities published yesterday.
That figure catapulted Cobain into first place, beating the most reliable of posthumous money-spinners, Elvis Presley, as well as a predominantly musical dozen of also-rans including John Lennon, Ray Charles and Bob Marley. (Story.)
Fascinating stuff. For my part, I’d like to earn a bit of money before I die. But that’s just me, I guess.
The full top ten looks like this:
Oddly, this list arrives at a time when I’ve been thinking about a related issue – the question of control in the image business. Once you begin cooking for the Kennedys you lose a great deal of your ability to control your own brand, and every time I see another dead celeb being danced around like a grotesque digital marionette hawking product, I have to tell you, I get a little queasy. John Wayne. Humphrey Bogart. Steve McQueen. And now Audrey Hepburn, expressing herself to sell skinny black pants for GAP.
We live in a world where people become brands and identities are routinely co-opted by the demands of celebrity and commerce, and it’s a little disturbing to realize that if I became famous, video of me shot today could be deconstructed and reconstructed after I die and put in service to things I would never support in life. Hell, by that point they won’t even need video – just give them a couple photographs and they’ll create the rest.
Aren’t there some pretty powerful ethical questions in all this? Sure, a lot of the income in that list above issues directly from the continued sale of the work the artists produced while they were alive, and that’s fine. But there ought to be a line somewhere, right? For instance, all recording artists have outtakes laying around. Songs that aren’t released, often for good reason. If an artist chose not to release a song while alive, isn’t it unethical to cash it in after his/her tragic death?
This question is actually part of a much larger issue I’ve been pondering lately – has the “digital revolution” completely annihilated the possibilty of controlling message and image? Well, that’s a rhetorical question. The real conversation needs to address the negotiational strategies and tactics that have to replace old modes of control (primarily a marcom and PR question) and the ethical implications of image and visual communication (on the ad side).
Hmmmm….
Last weekend I tripped across an almost archetypal case study of what can happen when a business does everything right on the traditional branding front, but pays too little attention to the customer’s hands-on interaction with the brand.
My wife and I drove up to Raffaldini Vineyards in the heart of North Carolina’s emerging Yadkin Valley wine country for the winery’s Second Annual Italian Festival. Continue reading
I attended a great show last night: Jeffrey Dean Foster & the Birds of Prey, with the legendary Mitch Easter opening for them. Free show, three blocks shut down, end of summer celebration, the whole nine yards. (More on the show, which was really wonderful, especially once the rain hit.)
Anyway, events like this always have plenty of sponsors. The local civic development sponsoring body has banners out, and three or four key corporate backers have their logos and messaging displayed prominently, according to the size of their financial investment. Pretty standard stuff. Continue reading
A buddy of mine who works in the agency world made an interesting point when we were catching up the other week. He said that when you go to pitch something to Wal*Mart, the first thing they say is “you have to lower the price.” When you go to pitch Target, the first thing they say is “let’s see the packaging.”
If you’ve seen a Target ad (and if you haven’t, welcome to Earth) or walked through one of their stores, this tidbit makes perfect sense. Continue reading
When I was younger I worked in restaurants. Waited tables, bartended, and supervised a staff of 50+ waiters. Waiting, in particular, taught me a lot of lessons. For instance:
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