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Nikon Corp. has unveiled a new print campaign to further promote its partnership with Yahoo!-financed photo-sharing website Flickr™. The Flickr™ logo appears on the ad pictured above to the right, while Flickr™ is merely mentioned in the ad on the left. Click on the pictures to see larger versions of the pictures.
Another ad in the campaign (not pictured) doesn't mention Flickr™, but Nikon has set up a gallery dedicated to scraping photos tagged with "nikonstunninggallery" from Flickr™ and posting them for all to see. Nikon Stunning Gallery sounds to me like Network Associates Coliseum. Certainly the precedent for something like this was set in the sports world, and it will be interesting to see if this sort of model proliferates on social networking sites like Flickr™, MySpace, et al. Flickr™'s (attractive) logo appears on the Nikon Stunning Gallery website, along with Nikon's (not so attractive) "yellow box" design.
If "youth" has been the advertising buzz word since the 1960s, surely "creativity" is the consumer ideal of the 21st century. Apple has built its entire corporate image on the conept. Many others talk about "interactivity," the "creative class," etc. There is of course a "creative class" proper to acknowledge, but there is as well a "creative consumer" being forged in the contemporary marketplace. Maybe this is all obvious, but it seems like twenty years from now this moment, as advertising has represented it, will reflect the wholesale destabilization of "creativity" as a tenable concept.
Nikon's Flickr™ print campaign truly transmits the allure and appeal of "creativity," and of being part of a community of artists, and it is interesting how quickly (post-Silicon Valley) the bohemian communal/artistic ethos has become the new consumer ideal. Perhaps this is something to be lamented. Of course, it was always our desire to have more people think like us (as the artists of the 60s sought to make people "think young"). Maybe the new artistic underground will be comprised of lone geniuses, forsaking community, creativity, "sharing" and interactivity to stare mindlessly at their hands. This could be the new rebellion. Staring at our hands. Descartes did it, and we're still talking about him.
I guess staring at our hands has some staying power.
Clearing out my podcast subscriptions this evening, I managed to listen to the September 4th broadcast of KCRW's 'The Business', which took for its main subject the New Line Cinema motion picture production Snakes on a Plane. It seems "the business" is shaking its head in disbelief, sighing audibly over the frankly underwhelming performance of SoaP at the box office. The film has taken in a paltry $13 million, compared to the apparently much larger (but unstated) monetary expectations of its producers.
Though the folks at 'The Business' recognized the way the SoaP phenomenon was fundamentally orchestrated by fans and internet nerds, and not the marketing-vps and reps at New Line, they lamented this fact. SoaP is, for these experts in the field of movie marketing, a cautionary tale, exposing for an instant the internet's infinite potential for dissemination of marketing messages, only to dash these hopes upon realization that such tremendous power is unwieldy, unmanageable, and ultimately unknowable.
Just how "unknown" the web community is to the aforementioned marketing-vps and radio talk show hosts is made evident by their naive expectation of a sizable box office in the first place. As I have been an enthusiastic consumer of SoaP's fan-generated media (parodies, pranks, etc.) since learning of the project over a year ago, I'm obliged to confess that I, like many of you, never had much interest in seeing the actual film. The "concept" was the pleasurable thing: the lore of its coming into being, the shameless irrationality of its existence, the story about Samuel L. Jackson demanding that the title never be changed... These are the "products" we spectators consumed (and generated), and if we are honest with ourselves, we must inevitably drop the ruse, let the marketing-vps in on the joke, and admit once and for all that the film never interested us entirely. The film event of the 1950s has given way to the "high concept" film of our youths (also an event), and now the "concepts" of these films take on a life of their own. The Hollywood high concept film attains a higher order of abstraction with SoaP, elevated in this case to the status of internet meme: a branded word! like Coca-Cola or Brillo.
This is what SoaP represents, and in my opinion, nothing "went wrong." There was nothing to "go wrong" in the first place. Having generated for themselves a cultural brand name with which they are not ashamed to (humorously) identify, consumers can now consume any number of products in the SoaP category. Among these are the use of the meme itself, the making of parodies, reference, quotation and, perhaps, way down at the end of the line, maybe, if you're with your friends, or rowdy strangers, and drunk enough, watching the film.
Sitting alone in a bar, on San Pablo Ave., and drinking two pints of Pilsner Urquell (a very fine Czech beer), I managed to mentally marathon my way through the "Architecture" chapter of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. As per the usual I was viscerally confronted by the shameful inadequacies of my own thinking on all subjects; most pointedly architecture in this case, for obvious reasons. Having hemmed and hawed my way through Jameson in the past, it all seemed utterly new and fresh to me tonight, perhaps through the veil of those aforementioned Pilsner Urquell pints, or perhaps merely because of my as-of-late more generous reception of highly sophisticated attempts to determine the nature of our existence.
In the bar I was approached by a man, with a very small mixed drink, whom I at first (rightly) assumed was heading to the bathroom. He was a drunken man, and when forced from his probably carefully plotted urinary course, this drunken man was inclined to bestow two very influential statements of pure and unadulterated wisdom upon me. The first of these wisdoms follows:
"Why am I listening to Jimmy Smith in a bar, when I could be listening to him at home... LOUD?"
The impact of this first wisdom, while no doubt extraordinary, did not have nearly the impact of the second wisdom, conferred ten minutes later in an agreeable, and slightly apologetic tone:
"It is a better thing to be grounded in nonsense, than to risk a dangerous seize of thought."
This latter phrase really struck me: dangerous seize of thought. What does it mean? Probably I misheard the drunken man, and this probably due in part to the two pints of Pilsner Urquell now twice aforementioned. Needless to say I was floored by the incomparable wisdom, and look forward to future visits to this bar on San Pablo Ave., future readings of Fred Jameson, and future meetings with strange men, and strange thoughts held suspended between rigorous academic study and small mixed drinks.
I am officially beginning the writing phase of this research project, and so have returned to where I first ended up, with a complete proposal to hand in to the Haas Scholars committee. One can never be sure if one's blog is ever actually read, but I thought I would reproduce in part the original research proposal. Reading it now, I'm struck by how much things have changed, while still remaining essentially the same. I had at first thought that "children's film" would be a major component of the research, and now it seems less so. I had also thought that Thomas Frank's book, The Conquest of Cool, would provide an invaluable model for interpreting co-branded advertising. Now I am considering Frank, along with Mark Crispin Miller and Michael Schudson, but taking for my interpretative model Thomas More's Utopia and the litotes, a Greek rhetorical figure of speech.
Even these precious thoughts of antiquity are subject to radical change, and who knows where I will end up, in the end?
Below is the text. For time and all eternity. On the web.
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Co-branded advertising is a movie marketing strategy pairing films like Star Wars (1977) and E.T. (1982), with brands such as Burger Chef and Atari, respectively. This advertising differs from traditional film marketing, in so far as it explicitly adopts the language of the product advertisement, and not the movie trailer. Co-branded advertising has so charmed the American film industry, that in 2004 the Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards, which annually recognizes excellence in the field of movie marketing, added a category honoring co-branded audio/visual content. The aim of my project is to determine the conventions and implications of co-branded advertising. By focusing my research on the co-branding of children's films, I will be able to examine the practice in its most ubiquitous mode. Limiting my research to co-branded television commercials will allow me to focus exclusively on moving images. Commercials preserved at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and stored online in the AdLand database, will facilitate this research.
Background and Justification
Since the advent of feature film narrative, advertising and movies have engaged in a mutually shameless relationship. Sumiko Higashi has argued that Cecil B. DeMille's melodramas of the 1920s contained product placement so relentless as to reflect "increasingly ostentatious and even outré levels of consumption." One scene in DeMille's Why Change Your Wife? (1920), juxtaposes a conspicuously fashionable young woman (Gloria Swanson), with a close-up of her name brand perfume. The perfume swivels slightly on its own, as if on a rotating pedestal, literally acting out what Marx termed, "the mystical character of commodities." The scene seems corny now, but in the early years of film, the cinema had a powerful ability to set national trends of consumption, and advertisers wanted a share of that spectacle.
By the 1960s, foreign competition and the looming threat of TV programming had made the Hollywood studios profoundly insecure. American avant-garde films enjoyed their most significant flourish, as independent filmmakers conversed with the countercultural movements that so characterized the decade. Large corporations purchased many of the ailing studios, and the resulting partnerships led to the convergence of music, television, film, and consumer products. The Hollywood studios increasingly came to be seen by their parent companies as makers of one product in a field of many, and films were marketed accordingly. Thomas Frank has shown that advertising too changed drastically during the sixties, as corporations responded to the demands of increasingly media savvy consumers. Unconventional campaigns full of self-parody replaced the stodgy scientific ads of the 1950s, as advertisers actively engaged with the mass society critique of the countercultural movement. Avis Rent-A-Car touted itself, "Number Two" in the business, while Volkswagen, in sharp contrast to the marketing campaigns of bigger-is-better domestic carmakers, emphasized the car's diminutive size and ugliness. These ads undermined criticisms levied at the invasive consumerism of mass media by parodying the advertising medium itself: what Frank calls the "strategy of preemptive irony. The ads were hugely successful in establishing brand loyalty and consumer confidence, and with movies now just one product in a diversified field of consumer entertainment, similar approaches to movie marketing could be expected. Where advertising had once encroached upon the spectacle of early cinema, the Hollywood studios would now insinuate their myths ad infinitum into the thriving ruse of the modern ad campaign.
Co-branded advertising officially emerged in the late 1970s as the marketing strategy of choice for Hollywood filmmakers: most notably in ads for the movie Star Wars, which featured now notorious TV spots such as that depicting androids C3PO and R2D2 visiting a Burger Chef fast food restaurant. By the end of the 1980s, co-branded advertising was all-pervading. Janet Wasko's laundry list approach to marketing analysis for Willow (1988), another George Lucas film, attests to this fact: the film appeared in commercials for Quaker Oats Co., General Foods, Hunt-Wesson, Kraft, Wendy's Intl., Tonka Toys, Parker Brothers and Random House. While Willow did not achieve the box office success many had planned for it, these advertising partnerships brought in over $50 million in tie-in revenues: a financial success that significantly cushioned the fall of an otherwise underwhelming film. Nearly all of these co-branded advertising campaigns were tied exclusively to children's films. Marsha Kinder has argued that modern children's entertainment "teaches viewers that commercial interactivity empowers precocious consumers by enabling them to assimilate the world as they buy into the system."
In this sense, a kinship exists between the new consuming strategies of the 1960s and the current state of children's programming. Modern advertising language, with its rhetoric of empowerment and individuality, provides an ideal model for reaching the child consumer: repressed, as were the consumers of the straight-laced 1950s, by a stultifying lack of agency. Through examining the way modern advertising techniques are employed in co-branded advertisements for children's films, this link between idioms of empowerment can be further explored.
Contemporary American cinema does not, as it did in the 1920s, simply allow advertising admission into the filmmaking process; it actively pursues the advertisement, and is perhaps best characterized as a subsidiary of the advertising industry, not the other way around. Despite the increasing importance of advertising to the modern film industry, film scholars have largely neglected the actual content these partnerships create, instead focusing their scholarship on the economic details of business mergers. While this aspect of the film industry is no doubt essential, co-branded advertising is itself profoundly interesting. A recapitulation of the film/advertising relationship is long overdue, and by fully examining the most ubiquitous mode of co-branded advertising—in the form of TV commercials for children's films/products—the changing role of cinema in the contemporary media landscape can be pinpointed and articulated. This new conception of cinema will serve to reorient our commonly held notions of film spectatorship, while providing a crucial insight into the role of film in our modern commodity culture.
Project Plan
The focus of my summer research will be on viewing co-branded advertisements for children's films. Within the category of children's films, my first priority will be earlier ads, such as those for Star Wars and E.T.; my goal will be to comprehensively examine the practice at the time its conventions were first formalized.
For access to television commercials, I will rely heavily on the UCLA Film & Television Archive's Key Art Awards collection, which contains over 4,000 TV spots for commercial films from 1982-2005. The collection, as well as the Archive's online database, is fully searchable and I have already located a wide variety of co-branded advertising spots: most notably for films made in the past three years, which comprise the bulk of UCLA's Key Art collection. For earlier advertisements, I will rely on surprisingly comprehensive fan and hobbyist websites. The most thorough of these online archives is AdLand (www.ad-rag.com); the website is also fully searchable by keyword, and indexed by year. Advertisements aired between 1977 and 1989, of which AdLand has over 1,100 titles, will be of particular interest to me. Through this resource, I have already been able to acquire and watch a commercial for E.T. and Atari.
Fellow Haas Scholar and amateur photographer Dashal Moore made known to me recently the latest trend in food product licensing: Disney® California fruit, SpongeBob Squarepants® spinach and Tasmanian Devil apples. Time-strapped readers and those skeptical of links to external sites like "CNN.com" can follow the action below, as I recapitulate the violence of the article's opening section:
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob and the Tasmanian Devil are coming to a produce aisle near you.The cartoon characters are popping up on fruit and vegetable packaging across the country as growers strike licensing deals with entertainment companies hungry to cultivate positive images among health-conscious parents and kids.
Walt Disney Co., with its overwhelming cartoon capital and cultural clout, is the most significant entry in the produce business.
The entertainment giant is licensing characters to Indianapolis-based produce distributor Imagination Farms LLC, which has deals with 15 large growers across the country to provide fruits and vegetables for the Disney Garden brand.
"We're doing it predominantly because it is the right thing to do, but secondarily because it is the right business to be in," said Harry Dollman, head of food products licensing for Disney.
"Concerns about the right nutrition for kids is not a fad; it's not something that will be overtaken by another trend," he said.
Neither Disney nor Imagination Farms would discuss terms of the deal.
"Imagination Farms" seems to be one of those giant limited liability corporations mass producing non-organic, low nutrient fruits and vegetables. And then we read this brain buster:
Organic apples with Winnie the Pooh -- the mascot for Disney Garden organic selections -- are due out sometime in September.
Disney and Imagination are, it seems, in on the organic craze too. Which is a good thing, though of course who knows what organic certification requires? And there are those more eloquent than I who have better understood the complexities of major LLCs entering into the rapidly growing organic market.
It may seem that I am hedging a bit, and that is correct. Something about branded fruit still seems so sinister, and so while all parties involved are expressing their altruistic intentions, I am searching for the deeper, darker (sinister) meaning of it all.
Enter the PEZ, that dispenser of all things candy coated; pure sugar in a plastic lever, your cartoon pals puke it up, you munch it up, etc., etc. In the PEZ we discover the double standard behind it all, the truth, as it were, behind Disney and Warner Bros. decision to enter the "organic" food market. When it is profitable to do so, either in actual, realizable profits, or in symbolic brand enhancement via association with healthy eating habits, Disney and Warner Bros. will sign on the dotted line.
This is, again, not necessarily a bad thing. Disney, for instance, recently terminated its contract with McDonald's to provide licensed Disney characters for Happy Meal® promotions. Though Disney denied that child obesity concerns were a motivating factor behind the split, it is at least telling that ABC News, a division of ABC and thus subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co., would publish an article alleging the contrary. Clearly Disney wants people to think the split was a child obesity issue, even as they publicly reassure McDonald's. No burning bridges, that sort of thing.
So now we have PEZ: future casualty of Disney's need to publicly align itself with healthy eating habits? Only time will tell. Perhaps Disney has already stopped licensing its characters to PEZ manufacturers. There are of course many, many other candied products featuring cartoon characters, and there is no reason to think the owners of these images will refrain from having their cake and eating it too. Kids can now do the same, and polish off their Disney fruit snacks with a delicious Disney PEZ.
Two days ago, I presented a tentative outline to my mentor and advisor, Prof. Linda Williams, who provided great feedback and generally made me feel positive about the direction this project is heading. There are several different threads I am trying to weave together into a coherent narrative and/or definition, responding to the many times previously stated question: What is Co-Branded?
So, having discussed some of these things at great length already, I will here describe my very awesome, and yet still very tentative, outline, which consequently makes no sense without explanation.
Here is the context for my research project, and something I have really not dealt enough with thus far on this blog. Theoretically speaking, the "mass culture" critique is easy enough to identify, but difficult to work through. Generally, arguments proceed along the lines of, "Capitalism has created a mass culture, which prescribes popular culture, which forms a consumerist society, with these effects, and those effects, etc." Obviously this is a reduction of what are in reality very complex and intellectually stimulating arguments.
In lieu of attempting to wholly refute the The Frankfurt School school of criticism, however, I am merely going to attempt to mend, or at least complicate, the common belief in an antagonistic relationship between advertising and cinema. This is really not something that these cultural critics would be interested in, as they already see both advertising and cinema as part of the same awful capitalist beast. There are those that love both (business) and those that love one (cinema) and not the other (advertising). I count myself as one of this latter group, and for that reason, and really that reason alone, I am interested in reconciling the undeniably commercial nature of cinema with its equally undeniable artistry. Finding a way, or ways, for advertising and cinema to intertwine, without that co-operative relationship foreclosing on the possibility of interesting and/or culturally relevant forms of expression, is the core purpose for writing my thesis. As such, previous (low) opinions of product placement, and (apocalyptic) forecasts of a future inundated by branded entertainment, will have to be grappled with.
The key points here are that the institution of cinema has the capacity to influence and shape advertising, and that simultaneously advertising and commodity culture have modified our relationship as spectators to films. Usually it is the latter of these points that gets the most airtime: "Product placement, ever since E.T. and mostly because of Steven Spielberg, and also because of the consolidation of media companies, has forever altered the institution of cinema and transformed all films into product advertisements." Again, this is a reduction of the general argument.
In place of this sort of statement, I am going to argue that films have, since the 1950s and 60s, increasingly been presented as branded commodities. Prior to WWII, in the so-called "classical" period of cinema, most film trailers were manufactured by one company, National Screen Service (NSS). The monopoly of NSS on film advertising embodies the general homogeneity of the advertising itself during this period: flashy titles, P.T. Barnum-style text, star wipes, etc.
After the breakup of Paramount Pictures, Inc. forced the studios to dismantle their vertically integrated production and distribution system, smaller firms began to secure contracts, producing various aspects of a film's promotional campaign. Many of these firms came from Madison Avenue, and as a result the graphic, iconic, "branded" style of advertising in this period began to directly influence the presentation of feature films. One of the earliest examples of such a film is The Man with the Golden Arm. The designer of its ad campaign, Saul Bass, was a veritable institution in the industry, and was thus honored with the first ever lifetime achievement award given by The Hollywood Reporter's Key Art Awards, which annually recognizes excellence in the field of film marketing.
So, more than simply influencing (i.e. "dumbing down") the content of films, trends in advertising have altered the way films are presented to spectators, and that coupled with new technologies that literally transform films into consumable commodities (VHS, DVD), is perhaps a more productive and interesting way of conceptualizing the impact of advertising on film than the all-too-easy claim that product placement has forever ruined the cinematic experience. What's more, films have become more "high concept" over the years: ad campaigns reducible to a single graphic image, narrative reducible to a single sentence, able to be flexibly applied to any number of products in ancillary markets. This is, interestingly, also an accurate description of brand behavior: McDonald's golden arches, "I'm Lovin' It!", continually evolving menu...
On the other side of the coin, we have something that has not yet been significantly addressed: cinema's effect on advertising. Certainly there are cinematic conventions that creep into and intermix with the advertising conventions, but there are even more direct (i.e. co-branded) ways in which film style converges with product advertising to create a kind of hybrid content. Because such a potentiality has not yet been fully addressed, I believe it's important to look closely at co-branded advertising for films, as more than simply a nascent form of branded entertainment (but also of course as that), but also as a genuine site of negotiation, between advertisers and cinema, between the consumer experience and the cinematic one.
I have previously discussed the Simonin & Ruth essay on brand alliances, and had help from a friend in addressing the complexities of Yum! Brands, Inc. Having established the economic practice of co-branding and its implications, it might be worthwhile to look specifically at co-branded advertising for films and make some broad distinctions.
First, there is co-branded advertising for family or children's films, which is often presented in a humorous way, but rarely ever with irony. In co-branded spots for The Incredibles, for instance, it is natural that Mrs. Incredible would use Tide laundry detergent. The question, "Isn't it weird that Mrs. Incredible is talking about Tide right now?" is never posed within the logic of the advertisement itself, though clearly I believe it ought to be.
The second type of co-branded spot, often found in advertising addressed to the teen boy demographic, uses irony to address the incompatibility of a film with a product, but glosses this incompatibility to ultimately present the relationship again as a natural one. The best example of this I have found is in Burger King/Star Wars: Episode III co-branded spots, which feature various of the Star Wars characters "working" at BK, and the tagline, "Star Wars is at Burger King." The joke, as it were, is that Star Wars and Burger King don't really go together. However, though the question, "Do Star Wars and Burger King go together?" is posed, it is immediately answered with humor. Thus: "Yes it is an illogical relationship, and yet it is perfectly illogical, on account of it being so damn funny."
The third type of co-branded advertising is the most interesting to me personally, though I have only one example of it thus far: Sprint Nextel spots featuring Will Ferrell as Ricky Bobby from the movie Talladega Nights. In these advertisements, the relationship between Sprint Nextel and Ricky Bobby is presented as illogical and thus humorous, but the pairing is not glossed to the extent of the Star Wars/BK ads. The best way I can think to illustrate the distinction I'd like to make between this sort of humorous co-branded spot and the "ironic" type of co-branded spot, is to point out the difference between Jerry Seinfeld's style of stand-up comedy, and Will Ferrell's style of character-based comedy. With Seinfeld, or Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian has a privileged position of authority over what it is he is providing commentary on: Foxworthy provides his ironic take on redneck life. Ferrell, on the other hand, provides a kind of "take" on NASCAR/redneck life, but it is more parodic than ironic. In fact, I would argue that it is not ironic at all, but rather a form of very sincere parody.
"Sincere parody" is something that only character-based humor can accomplish, with sincere commitment to the realities and complexities of the parodic character the comedian has created. According to this reading of what Will Ferrell, or Adam Sandler, does, they have much more in common with method-acting film stars like Marlon Brando or Robert DeNiro than they do with the stand-up tradition I have highlighted above. I would also argue that "ironic stand-up" has traditionally been the overall tone of advertising, at least since the 1950s and 60s: advertisements offering their "ironic take" on advertising and consumption, or life in general. So it is easy to see in this way how film's potential influence on advertising is one of bringing this other, character-based, sincerity based, "character realism" to the form.
This continues my previous thought. There are these humorous forms of parody, which, in my opinion, offer up a kind of critique, which is not the same as the detached, arrogant irony of the traditional "stand-up comedy" style; but is a critique, voiced decidedly from the left, nonetheless. Stephen Colbert is a great example of this, as his aim is undoubtedly political. While it may be possible to read Colbert's sincere parody as actual sincerity, there is at least the possibility in the humor he is creating through commitment to his parodic Bill O'Reilly-esque persona for solidarity among those of us on the left who already see O'Reilly as a self-parody. In this way, the Colbert/Ferrell/Gervais type of parody offers a real and powerful public forum for expressing political as well as economic frustrations.
This is less of a conclusion, really, than what I have previously written about Colbert/Ferrell/Gervais. I am still working on what conclusion(s) the analysis of co-branded spots has brought me to, and certainly want to avoid making any kind of definitive, "I know something you don't know" kind of claim. However, I would be interested in feedback if anyone has managed to read this far. I know it is boring, for a blog, but it is all I have to offer you at this time.
Sincerely,
Andrew "Fun" Peterson
