Mediacologyputting the ‘eco’ into media ecology (and other tangential meditations)

A clip from Honeyshed

A clip from Putney Swope

In case you haven’t been paying attention, “branded content” is an emerging marketing tactic to deal with the downfall of traditional media. Because people are rightly rebelling by editing out ads from their viewing, marketers are trying to create entertainment spaces that I call “product placement planets,” which are realities that you can visit that are 100% unadulterated brand.

Honeyshed is one such world. Apparently someone watched Putney Swope– the 1969 film about an ad agency turned on its head by surreal black militants–and actually got inspired to turn an absurd critique of the advertising business into a form of branded content (minus the critique, or course). Created by Droga5, Honeyshed is a bizarre Web shopping network with product clips that look like they are produced by bored (or stoned) public access channel pranksters. This is part of the strange territory of postirony, which is to take the aesthetic of irony– an emotionally distant form of social critique or engagement– and to vacate the critique part. So the net result is a posture of “ha, ha, ads are stupid” while simultaneously selling something.

You are somehow supposed to believe you are not watching a shopping channel, but guess what folks, you are watching a fucking shopping channel. This is mental guerrilla counterinsurgency warfare, a backdoor effort to subvert our cynical disposition against marketing. To quote Horkheimer and Adorno, “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.” (The Culture Industry) I would rephrase this to say the triumph of advertising is to turn culture jamming into a marketing style, but also to put the onus on the marketer, not the consumer. It’s marketers who self-hypnotize in order to believe their own hype (otherwise they can’t keep convincing their clients to keep returning). I think the audience is skeptical; it’s the marketer who is behind. So the triumph of the culture industry is really that they keep self-perpetuating themselves though self-deception guised as style. They flail and experiment, yet people find a way to navigate and see right through them anyway.

More on Honeyshed:

Droga Seeks to Give King Content a Throne With Honeyshed Launch – Advertising Age – Teressa Iezzi:

The site, created through a partnership between David Droga and his agency, Droga5, and production company Smuggler, with funding from Publicis, seeks to engage 18- to 35-year-old consumers with entertaining video content that “celebrates the sell.” No, it’s not an e-commerce site, but it does aim to facilitate online shopping on behalf of multiple marketers by offering a curated hub of brand information and culture. “Everyone is scrambling to do branded content, but for the most part, there is no real home for it,” Droga says. “The strategy has mainly been to create entertaining content and then seed it, put it on YouTube or elsewhere. So content is king, but the king didn’t really have throne. Our idea was to have a site where you could be overt about the brand. The site gets at the entertainment value and the sociability of shopping.”

Technorati Tags: Honeyshed, Putney Swope

Tags: Marketing, Postirony

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Marketing, Postirony. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.