Coke unveils plans to steal our culture

I understand your anger and frustration, but I feel there are more than two sides to be on in this market/terrain.

Feel free to elaborate, Andrew. I don't believe in a universe that is strictly black and white, and I know it's impossible to want purity out of every situation. But the truth in that old union song is that there comes a time when either you cross that picket line, or you don't. Is this not one of those times? Show me where I'm wrong.

Well, to start, I don't think "Coke and W+K" are one side, and the workers are the other. I feel compelled to separate Coke from W+K in this scenario, in the same way that we might distinguish Coke's corporate image and brand identity from its labor practices.

If Coke is going to use W+K to establish a "cool" image that will be used to undermine legitimate critiques of its labor practices, then by railing against the "cool" image created by W+K we take up the very battle Coke wants us to be waging.

Separating Coke's branding efforts from its actual corporate practices is a first step toward taking up the cause of its workers.

Andrew, in what way are they seperate? I don't follow you at all.

It makes sense to draw attention to the contradictions between the branding efforts and the corporate practices, thus exposing the branding efforts as fundmentally fraudulent. It makes no sense to give W+K an ethical pass, though. Admen, consumers, and governments all are responsible for enabling the company to do this shit.

The claim that a company's brand identity contradicts its corporate practices is too easy, I think. It is too easily discounted, because to conflate the two, or even to point out their contradictions, is essentially to make people feel that if they drink a bottle of Coca-Cola, they are suppressing wages in factories or contaminating Indian drinking water.

While you can certainly move step to step from purchasing a Coke to Coca-Cola's use of profits, there is no direct causal relationship between drinking a Coke and contaminating Indian drinking water.

Trying to make people think that drinking a Coke makes them responsible for disparity in the global economic situation is not a productive use of energies that could otherwise be directed specifically toward regulating Coca-Cola's business practices.

Does this make sense?

"Lobby the government" as a solution as opposed to "Get mad at an advertising agency for developing creative marketing content."

Andrew,
Our effectiveness at lobbying the government is extremely limited because we don't have any money. We give billions of dollars to Coca-Cola though, so they can have very effective lobbyists. Who are the ones convincing us to give billions of dollars to Coca-Cola?

Isn't the observation that our choices as consumers have consequences for the third world kind of obvious?

Isn't it okay to encourage people to use their creative energies for good, not evil?

I obviously think it is "okay to encourage people to use their creative energies for good, not evil." I don't think protesting a corporate website with creative marketing content is the way to do it.

It is easy to overestimate the impact of advertising on consumer behavior, and I am simply not willing to go there with you. I went to the Coca-Cola website, I saw the Coca-Cola/Grand Theft Auto ad in the theater before watching "Ricky Bobby." Exposure to these messages has not transformed me into the kind of indiscriminate, "billions of dollars" consumer you posit, and I don't think I am special in this regard.

Plenty of people don't think about their consuming habits, and I think they should be encouraged to think about what they are buying and consuming. However, I am of the opinion that pointing out "direct" consequences of consuming Coca-Cola (obesity, ADD, other health risks and its horrible nutritional value per dollar spent) is just as effective, if not more effective, than protesting a website.

I'm not interested in making any particular instance of marketing the object of an extended protest, but this one in particular riles me up because of my feelings of personal investment.

Andrew you're once again demonstrating the populist reflex, making your judgment on the basis of the standard: "What does this imply about the power of the people?" rather than "What does the evidence show?"

Frank: "If we were to ask people how ads work, most people would say, 'They work by tricking people but they don't trick me.' Everyone wants to think they are so much more clever, think for themselves, and do not act as the ad men expect them to."

But they do. You do, and I do. We all do.

What does Frank's "evidence" show? That 80-90% of albums produce lose money? That the vast majority of film and other media properties lose money?

I could just as easily direct you to Michael Schudson's, "Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: It's Dubious Impact on American Society," which is a much more even-handed treatment of the subject than Frank's alarmist approach.

This conversation is getting a little "pretentious academic," so I will only reiterate that I understand your frustration, but feel compelled to defend W+K and arts organizations (funded partly by Coca-Cola) like PICA. There is a difference between PICA and the Coca-Cola corporation, and lumping together only undermines the credibility of your protest.

What is the relevance of "albums" and "films" to anything I am discussing?

The evidence shows that we've increasingly become saturated in corporate commercial speech, there's been a parallel systematic rolling back of all kinds of labor laws, consumer protections, media ownership rules, and the gap between the rich and poor is getting worse, dissent stifled, leading us toward a free-market fundamentalism. Yes, Andrew, I am alarmed. Labeling something "alarmist" isn't an argument any more than when Exxon calls Al Gore "alarmist".

Also, I haven't criticized PICA.

My entire criticism of your post about Coke and W+K stems from what I perceive to be the misguided/misplaced energies, "protesting" a website or getting upset about it "appropriating" our culture.

I must have wrongly assumed your cryptic note about a "protest mobilization in October" was an idea for something protesting W+k and/or the upcoming PICA TBA Festival.

I think such a protest would be stupid, and that was the point I was trying to make.

Your opinion of the nonexistent protest against PICA is noted.

hi. i was just thinking.

"[T]here is no direct causal relationship between drinking a Coke and contaminating Indian drinking water."

ok...

it seems you two disagree on if drinking coke is a symbolic act (which doesn't effect indian water drinkers or colombian unionists) or an economic one (which does, at the margins).

but: why separate symbolic from economic acts to proscribe some protest as "stupid"? doesn't assuming that there's no "real" connection just make us feel divided, both internally and from others?

with the students for a coke-free campus at the u of calif, we're doing symbolic-cum-economic action, asking students who were bottle-fed the shit in the OC "which side" they're on. first time they'd thought of it, mostly. if enough decide coke's lame and the UC ends its contracts (which they might--consider UC's anti-sweatshop moves), then coke is in symbolic and immediate economic trouble. institutions can be foci for protest cos the cogs in the profit machine (if i may) are easy to find and sabotage at this level. (and i'm not sure how a website is different?) but exploitation exists at the multinational level too, even if this seems abstract to our small selves.

Thus: "Trying to make people think that drinking a Coke makes them responsible for disparity in the global economic situation is not a productive use of energies...."

but if doing otherwise can effect change (albeit through mechanisms we must un/dis-cover) how are we not responsible?

coke wants us to believe what you say, andrew, that it's all disconnected: http://www.asucla.ucla.edu/cocacola/index.asp?ref=pro

but it IS connected: we can forge this argument, and it's powerful. isn't the goal of a any student of social life still to uncover the non-obvious "inner connections" of this totality?

and if that doesn't affect the way we re-create the world, what's the point?

All excellent points, azj. Arguing with Kevin has forced me to overstate my opinion, which is a more theoretically based one, that economics are not the only thing that matters.

A way to restate the point I was making is to say that criticizing the actual advertisements and marketing campaigns (the topic of this post on Kevin's blog) is a waste of time, while the energies spent to un-Coke the UCLA campus are definitely positively directed.

There is understandable confusion, because advertising is connected in many ways to corporate economic practice.

I find myself in a strange situation. I love the advertising more than I love the product. User-created content is awesome, and I don't think it's fair to say that a giant company isn't free to use the resource of it's fanbase. People are FANS of Coca-Cola... when the millionaire dude with the killer 'stache talks about the culture of Coke he isn't kidding. There are tradeshows for collectables, and people who are very, very invested in the advertising of the company.

Which sells caffinated sugar water...

The idea that they are doing this doesn't bother or surprise me. Doesn't every cultural "item" go from indie to mainstream via the idea of selling something (usually coke)?

Mikey, I think the stache guy is correct in saying that the "culture" of coke exists. I am saying: this is not "the independent creative process". It is not something to be celebrated. It is a surrendering of our tools of resistance, our creative energies and the "culture" that it produces is junk.

It is also not inevitable.

Bret Lunsford on this theme:
"The Attention Economy redefines wealth as a state of mind—quite literally self-possession of territory almost involuntarily ceded to corporate colonizers. The “goods” economy having turned into so much emotionally and environmentally toxic landfill. Acquisition of goods via debt demands IV extraction of our humane attention. Unless attention ceases to be an obligatory payment and is instead revered & preserved: Spent as if one were voting for the meaning of life."

Yet, it does seem that having reservations about the commodification of independently produced culture is increasingly viewed as a sign of "outmoded" idealism, or "cultural pessimism", to borrow a phrase from the dickwads at Reason magazine. Perhaps this is because we're not used to talking about why independent culture matters: it's not a genre, an arbitrary artistic/aesthetic choice, but as an experiment in sustainable healthy economic and communication models. Thus for Coke the task is not so much legitimization--that battle is, apparently, long since over--the new task is infiltration, pointing us toward a future where artists and admen are indistinguishable from each other. They're doing a good job of it!