As high budget cartoon dystopias go, DEWmocracy is the mother of all corporate cannibals, riffing on the Matrix, The Invisibles, 1984, while managing to include a requisite Native American (with a really bad wig) to tell our skateboarding hero that he is “The One.” Hard to believe, but this bad acting trumps Keanu Reeves. Mountain Dew even includes pseudo participation in which user generated designs can become the next Dew label. Yeah for democracy.
The project also has a bunch of mysterious interrogation videos uploaded to YouTube, by one mysterious seedvideos1234, which is an odd bit of art imitating life given the recent scandal of the alleged destruction of CIA torture videos. But you won’t see the viral videos on YouTube associated with the DEWmocracy site, either because it’s just so bad PesisCo is disowning it, or it’s now too old to be bothered with (I have been sitting on this post for six months– sorry to be so out of it).
Just for fun, here’s an anti-Dew piece that attacks Pepsi for hypocritically advocating corporate responsibility while plastering the city with its ad graffiti.
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Hmmm. Don’t copy me, but buy this T-shirt (like everyone else).
Is this reflecting an ironic posture in relationship to the fact that everything is copied now, or is this a legitimate protest against the proliferation of our digital identities? Or maybe this is just a dump marketing slogan.
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This ad takes a systems approach to anxiety by showing the psychological impact of buying the wrong shoes. Though tongue and cheek, the ad makes visible its own persuasion technique. This should be considered a small victory for us viewers because we have become so cynical about advertising they need to show us that we’re right. But still buy their shoes anyway!
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What the GOP doesn’t seem to realize, because they are idiots, is that “the change you deserve” is the registered advertising slogan of Effexor XR, a drug that many of you might have started taking as a result of all the…you know — terrorism. (Hat tip to Bluestem for catching this gem.)
Effexor, also known as Venlafaxine, is approved for the treatment “of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults.” Its common side effects are very much in keeping with the world the House Republicans have striven to build: nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss, and - and I swear I am not making this up - “electric shock-like sensations also called ‘brain zaps.’”
Its less common side effects are equally awesome in their appropriateness.
And when the Food And Drug Administration reviewed the ad copy that included the tagline, “The change you deserve,” it took issue with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Effexor, saying that the company made “unsubstantiated superiority claims.” Sounds like the GOP have picked an ironically accurate tagline for their efforts!
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File this one under WTF. Adidas finds a safe rebellion to latch onto to give it some street cred by creating a little action movie about rebel gardeners with GPS, night vision and an assortment of other TV crime show devices. Notice the quasi-’70s-era bongo suspense music. Thing is, gardens take nurturing, building and developing their niches, in other words, an ecological context. Additionally, what about starting a *community* garden? In this case I at least hope once they plant these beautiful set pieces that someone will water them!
Sadly, as much as I think guerrilla gardening is a cool action worth promoting, the ad is so trite and contrived I think most that would potentially be inspired by the idea will see through Adidas’ ploy as yet another tactic to equate fashion with revolution. Rather than pass itself off as a device for urban rebellion, just sell the damn product for what it is: a shoe! And stop pretending your dumb-ass sneakers are a tool for social transformation.
Still in case you are enthused, here’s a link to a nonpartison group, Guerilla Gardening, which may inspire you to do your own action (with or without corporate sponsorship).
And not to disappoint, there are a number of DIY books on how to start your own urban (gardening) revolution:
As evidence that cognitive dissonance permeate our culture, look no further than this specimin of the pop culture complex.
It’s not clear why Belgian’s Che Magazine took on as it’s namesake the Argentine revolutionary, but perhaps the transformation of the South American rebel into a pop icon made him game to become a cigar smoking, beard sporting poster man for the postironic set. Che Magazine, in its ever ending quest to rid the world of feminism and all its gains, has no problem invoking the cad personality, but updates it with high tech glee. It’s a man’s world after all, when more than a one syllable name is too complicated.
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It used to be that hoaxing was the province of pranksters and artists. But now Burger King? WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! I suppose when Aqua Teen Hunger Force inadvertently hoaxed terrorism, the florescent light went off in the heads of a multitude of marketing geeks.
The videotaped hoax was a twist on a market research technique called “deprivation research,” in which marketers measure how loyal consumers are to a brand or product by taking it away from them. The insight gained helps marketers design new marketing and ad ploys that will resonate better with consumers.
A range of marketers have tried the technique. Dunkin’ Brands’ Dunkin’ Donuts, for instance, two years ago forced a group of its customers to drink Starbucks coffee for a week instead. Verizon Wireless also tried it a year ago, getting a group of teens, at least half of them Verizon customers, to give up using cellphones — theirs or anyone else’s — for a weekend.
[Shocked Customer]
A shocked customer learns the Whopper has been taken off the menu.
“It’s a great tool to understand what role a product plays in peoples lives,” says Lesley Bielby, chief strategy officer at Interpublic Group’s Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, who helped conduct the research for Dunkin’ Donuts and Verizon. Still, experts say it’s rare for the method to be used in actual consumer advertising.
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I was intrigued by the fashion brand Urban Decay because I thought it was strange how they appropriated gang typography (or is it Suicide Girls now?) to give the veneer of one of these bogus DIY operations like Hot Topic. Then I stumbled on their page for Cory Kennedy who is their fashion model for Spring 2008 (the text above is from the Urban Decay site). Sad to say, but I feel a generation gap coming on strong. Then I fell down the wormhole further and ended up in thecobrasnake.com. What the hell is this, Gucci punk? Man, I’m freaking out. And I’m feeling sooo uncool right now.
It’s days like this that make me wish punk never happened.
So I went to Corey’s MySpace page and clicked around dazed and confused. I’m sure she is a nice girl who means well, but I’m baffled by how someone so completely vacuous can be considered the world’s most interesting Internet personality. I find it even more strange that some kind of collective intelligence would emerge and suddenly crown one person as the “it” girl of the Web world. So much for emergence. It goes to show that not all slime molds congeal into complex civilizations. (For an explanation of all these strange allusions, please read Emergence. I promise it won’t hurt.)
PS Reality check: for the celebrity amnesiacs, Eddie Sedgwick was the one and only it girl of the universe.
PPS Goes to show that photography does have a way of stealing people’s souls because right now I’m feeling way too judgmental for my own good.
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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.
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.”
Once again the fake news surfs the real, and gets down and dirty by reporting on the “real” Iraq. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant commentary how how news is staged.
I don’t know about you, but I hate these damn things and refuse to use them at the store. I often joke with the cashier that when I refuse the bags I’m trying to save plastic trees (most don’t get it), but this is a deadly serious problem. It was a sad post-ironic moment when the plastic bag industry lashed out at environmentally conscious consumers by making this bag design:
The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They’re made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.
Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide — about 2 percent in the U.S. — and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that’s not always the case. “They’re so aerodynamic that even when they’re properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter,” says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It’s as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we’re not talking about your everyday eyesore.
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Apparently some Americans are not quite ready for rasquachismo, the Mexican practice of folk kitsch appropriation (I blogged a while back about it here). When NaCo, my favorite Mexican design outfit (I blogged about them here) offered T-Shirts at Macy’s proclaiming “Brown is the new white,” vociferous and scared anti-immigration activists pressured the retail giant to pull the T. Too bad. People need to take their cultural status less seriously. After all, it is the irony of all ironies that those of European descent who are so against Mexican immigration call themselves “nativatists.” I wonder how those from the First Nations think about that? Still, the fact that NaCo is in Macy’s means the battle is being lost. I recall that Gabriel García Márquez once said that Latin American didn’t need to invade the US with armies. It would take over with telenovelas (soap operas). The sooner the better!
Macy’s, however, quickly found that not everyone is amused by NaCo’s sense of humor. Its T-shirt with the fashion-parody slogan “Brown is the new white” drew immediate fire from a conservative anti-immigration website, generating e-mails to Macy’s threatening a boycott and online rants about racism and immigrants trying to take over America (one poster pointed out a possible link between Macys’ red-star logo and communism). Fox News did a story, and Macy’s pulled the “Brown is the new white” shirt.
