by Naomi Klein
For their part, many artists now treat companies like the Gap less as deep-pocketed pariahs trying to feed off their cachet than as just another medium they can exploit in order to promote their own brands, alongside radio, video and magazines. “We have to be everywhere. We can’t afford to be too precious in our marketing,” explains Ron Shapiro, executive vice president of Atlantic Records. Besides, a major ad campaign from Nike or the Gap penetrates more nooks and crannies of the culture than a video in heavy rotation on MTV or a cover article in Rolling Stone. Which is why piggybacking on these campaign blitzes — Fat Boy Slim in Nike ads, Brandy in Cover Girl commercials, Lil’ Kim rapping for Candies —has become, Business Week announced with much glee, “today’s top 40 radio.”13
Of course the branding of music is not a story of innocence lost. Musicians have been singing ad jingles and signing sponsorship deals since radio’s early days, as well as having their songs played on commercial radio stations and signing deals with multinational record companies. Throughout the eighties —music’s decade of the straight-up shill —rock stars like Eric Clapton sang in beer ads, and the pop stars, appropriately enough, crooned for pop: George Michael, Robert Plant, Whitney Houston, Run-DMC, Madonna, Robert Palmer, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie and Ray Charles all did Pepsi or Coke ads, while sixties anthems like the Beatles’ “Revolution” became background music for Nike commercials.
During this same period, the Rolling Stones made music history by ushering in the era of the sponsored rock tour —and fittingly, sixteen years later, it is still the Stones who are leading the charge into the latest innovation in corporate rock: the band as brand extension. In 1981, Jovan —a distinctly un-rock-and-roll perfume company —sponsored a Rolling Stones stadium tour, the first arrangement of its kind, though tame by today’s standards. Though the company got its logos on a few ads and banners, there was a clear distinction between the band that had chosen to “sell out” and the corporation that had paid a huge sum to associate itself with the inherent rebelliousness of rock. This subordinate status might have been fine for a company out merely to move products, but when designer Tommy Hilfiger decided that the energy of rock and rap would become his “brand essence,” he was looking for an integrated experience, one more in tune with his own transcendent identity quest. The results were evident in the Stones’ Tommy-sponsored Bridges to Babylon tour in 1997. Not only did Hilfiger have a contract to clothe Mick Jagger, he also had the same arrangement with the Stones’ opening act, Sheryl Crow — on stage, both modeled items from Tommy’s newly launched “Rock ‘n’ Roll Collection.”
It wasn’t until January 1999, however —when Hilfiger launched the ad campaign for the Stones’ No Security Tour —that full brand-culture integration was achieved. In the ads, young, glowing Tommy models were pictured in full-page frame “watching” a Rolling Stones concert taking place on the opposite page. The photographs of the band members were a quarter of the size of those of the models. In some of the ads, the Stones were nowhere to be found and the Tommy models alone were seen posing with their own guitars. In all cases, the ads featured a hybrid logo of the Stones’ famous red tongue over Tommy’s trademarked red-white-and-blue flag. The tagline was “Tommy Hilfiger Presents the Rolling Stones No Security Tour” — though there were no dates or locations for any tour stops, only the addresses of flagship Tommy stores.
In other words, this wasn’t rock sponsorship, it was “live-action advertising,” as media consultant Michael J. Wolf describes the ads.14 It’s clear from the campaign’s design that Hilfiger isn’t interested in buying a piece of someone else’s act, even if they are the Rolling Stones. The act is a background set, powerfully showcasing the true rock-and-roll essence of the Tommy brand; just one piece of Hilfiger’s larger project of carving out a place in the music world, not as a sponsor but as a player —much as Nike has achieved in the sports world.
The Hilfiger/Stones branding is only the highest-profile example of the new relationship between bands and sponsors that is sweeping the music industry. For instance, it was a short step for Volkswagen — after using cutting-edge electronic music in its ads for the new Beetle —to launch Drivers Fest ’99, a VW branded music festival in Long Island, New York. DriversFest competes for ticket sales with the Mentos Freshmaker Tour, a two-year-old traveling music festival owned and branded by a breath-mint manufacturer —on the Mentos Web site, visitors are invited to vote for which bands they want to play the venue. As with the Absolut Kelly Web site and the Altoids’ Curiously Strong art exhibition, these are not sponsored events: the brand is the event’s infrastructure; the artists are its filler, a reversal in the power dynamic that makes any discussion of the need to protect unmarketed artistic space appear hopelessly naive.
This emerging dynamic is clearest in the branded festivals being developed by the large beer companies. Instead of merely playing in beer ads, as they likely would have in the eighties, acts like Hole, Soundgarden, David Bowie and the Chemical Brothers now play beer-company gigs. Molson Breweries, which owns 50 percent of Canada’s only national concert promoter, Universal Concerts, already has its name promoted almost every time a rock or pop star gets up on stage in Canada —either through its Molson Canadian Rocks promotional arm or its myriad venues: Molson Stage, Molson Park, Molson Amphitheatre. For the first decade or so, this was a fine arrangement, but by the mid-nineties, Molson was tired of being upstaged. Rock stars had an annoying tendency to hog the spotlight and, worse, sometimes they even insulted their sponsors from the stage.
Clearly fed up, in 1996 Molson held its first Blind Date Concert. The concept, which has since been exported to the U.S. by sister company Miller Beer, is simple: hold a contest in which winners get to attend an exclusive concert staged by Molson and Miller in a small club —much smaller than the venues where one would otherwise see these megastars. And here’s the clincher: keep the name of the band secret until it steps on stage. Anticipation mounts about the concert (helped along by national ad campaigns building up said anticipation), but the name on everyone’s lips isn’t David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Soundgarden, INXS or any of the other bands that have played the Dates, it’s Molson and Miller. No one, after all, knows who is going to play, but they know who is putting on the show. With Blind Date, Molson and Miller invented a way to equate their brands with extremely popular musicians, while still maintaining their competitive edge over the stars. “In a funny way,” says Universal Concerts’ Steve Herman, “the beer is bigger than the band.”15
The rock stars, turned into high-priced hired guns at Molson’s bar mitzvah party, continued to find sad little ways to rebel. Almost every musician who played a Blind Date acted out: Courtney Love told a reporter, “God bless Molson…. I douche with it.”16 The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Lydon screamed “Thank you for the money” from the stage, and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell told the crowd, “Yeah, we’re here because of some fucking beer company … Labatt’s.” But the tantrums were all incidental to the main event, in which Molson and Miller were the real rock stars and it didn’t really matter how those petulant rent-a-bands behaved.
Jack Rooney, Miller’s vice president of marketing, explains that his $200 million promotion budget goes toward devising creative new ways to distinguish the Miller brand from the plethora of other brands in the marketplace. “We’re competing not just against Coors and Corona,” he says, “but Coke, Nike and Microsoft.”17 Only he isn’t telling the whole story. In Advertising Age’s annual “Top Marketing 100” list of 1997’s best brands there was a new arrival: the Spice Girls (fittingly enough, since Posh Spice did once tell a reporter, “We wanted to be a ‘household name’. Like Ajax.”18 ) And the Spice Girls ranked number six in Forbes magazine’s inaugural “Celebrity Power 100,” in May 1999, a new ranking based not on fame or fortune but on stars’ brand “franchise.” The list was a watershed moment in corporate history, marking the fact that, as Michael J. Wolf says, “Brands and stars have become the same thing.”19
But when brands and stars are the same thing, they are also, at times, competitors in the high-stakes tussle for brand awareness, a fact more consumer companies have become ready to admit. Canadian clothing company Club Monaco, for instance, has never used celebrities in its campaigns. “We’ve thought about it,” says vice president Christine Ralphs, “but whenever we go there, it always becomes more about the personality than the brand, and for us, we’re just not willing to share that.”20
There is good reason to be protective: though more and more clothing and candy companies seem intent on turning musicians into their opening acts, bands and their record labels are launching their own challenges to this demoted status. After seeing the enormous profits that the Gap and Tommy Hilfiger have made through their association with the music world, record labels are barreling into the branding business themselves. Not only are they placing highly sophisticated cross-branding apparatus behind working musicians, but bands are increasingly being conceived — and test-marketed —as brands first: the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, N’ Sync, All Saints and so on. Prefab bands aren’t new to the music industry, and neither are bands with their own merchandising lines, but the phenomenon has never dominated pop culture as it has at the end of the nineties, and musicians have never before competed so aggressively with consumer brands. Sean “Puffy” Combs has leveraged his celebrity as a rapper and record producer into a magazine, several restaurants, a clothing label and a line of frozen foods. And Raekwon, of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan, explains that “the music, movies, the clothing, it is all part of the pie we’re making. In the year 2005 we might have Wu-Tang furniture for sale at Nordstrom.”21 Whether it’s the Gap or Wu-Tang Clan, the only remaining relevant question in the sponsorship debate seems to be, Where do you have the guts to draw the borders around your brand?
Nike and the Branding of Sports
Inevitably, any discussion about branded celebrity leads to the same place: Michael Jordan, the man who occupies the number-one spot on all of those ranking lists, who has incorporated himself into the JORDAN brand, whose agent coined the term “superbrand” to describe him. But no discussion of Michael Jordan’s brand potential can begin without the brand that branded him: Nike.
Nike has successfully upstaged sports on a scale that makes the breweries’ rock-star aspirations look like amateur night. Now of course pro sports, like big-label music, is in essence a profit-driven enterprise, which is why the Nike story has less to teach us about the loss of unmarketed space —space that, arguably, never even existed in this context —than it does about the mechanics of branding and its powers of eclipse. A company that swallows cultural space in giant gulps, Nike is the definitive story of the transcendent nineties superbrand, and more than any other single company, its actions demonstrate how branding seeks to erase all boundaries between the sponsor and the sponsored. This is a shoe company that is determined to unseat pro sports, the Olympics and even star athletes, to become the very definition of sports itself.
Nike CEO Phil Knight started selling running shoes in the sixties, but he didn’t strike it rich until high-tech sneakers became the must-have accessory of America’s jogging craze. But when jogging subsided in the mid-eighties and Reebok cornered the market on trendy aerobics shoes, Nike was left with a product destined for the great dustbin of yuppie fads. Rather than simply switching to a different kind of sneaker, Knight decided that running shoes should become peripheral in a reincarnated Nike. Leave sneakers to Reebok and Adidas —Nike would transform itself into what Knight calls “the world’s best sports and fitness company.”22
The corporate mythology has it that Nike is a sports and fitness company because it was built by a bunch of jocks who loved sports and were fanatically devoted to the worship of superior athletes. In reality, Nike’s project was a little more complicated and can be separated into three guiding principles. First, turn a select group of athletes into Hollywood-style superstars who are associated not with their teams or even, at times, with their sport, but instead with certain pure ideas about athleticism as transcendence and perseverance —embodiments of the Graeco-Roman ideal of the perfect male form. Second, pit Nike’s “Pure Sports” and its team of athletic superstars against the rule-obsessed established sporting world. Third, and most important, brand like mad.
Step 1: Create Sport Celebrities
It was Michael Jordan’s extraordinary basketball skill that catapulted Nike to branded heaven, but it was Nike’s commercials that made Jordan a global superstar. It’s true that gifted athletes like Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali were celebrities before Nike’s time, but they never reached Jordan’s otherworldly level of fame. That stratum was reserved for movie and pop stars, who had been transformed by the special effects, art direction and careful cinematography of films and music videos. Sport stars pre-Nike, no matter how talented or worshiped, were still stuck on the ground. Football, hockey and baseball may have been ubiquitous on television, but televised sports were just real-time play-by-plays, which were often tedious, sometimes exciting and high tech only in the slow-mo re play. As for athletes endorsing products, their advertisements and commercials couldn’t quite be described as cutting-edge star creation — whether it was Wilt Chamberlain goofily grinning from a box of Wheaties or Rocket Richard being sentenced to “two minutes for looking so good” in Grecian Formula commercials.
I wake up every morning, jump in the shower, look down at the symbol, and that pumps me up for the day. It’s to remind me every day what I have to do, which is, “Just Do It.”
—Twenty-four-year-old Internet entrepreneur
Carmine Colettion on his decision to get a Nike
swoosh tattooed on his navel, December 1997
Nike’s 1985 TV spots for Michael Jordan brought sports into the entertainment world: the freeze frame, the close-up and the quick cuts that allowed Jordan to appear to be suspended in mid-jump, providing the stunning illusion that he could actually take flight. The idea of harnessing sport-shoe technology to create a superior being —of Michael Jordan flying through the air in suspended animation —was Nike mythmaking at work. These commercials were the first rock videos about sports and they created something entirely new. As Michael Jordan says, “What Phil [Knight] and Nike have done is turn me into a dream.”23
Many of Nike’s most famous TV commercials have used Nike superstars to convey the idea of sports, as opposed to simply representing the best of the athlete’s own team sport. Spots often feature famous athletes playing a game other than the one they play professionally, such as tennis pro Andre Agassi showing off his version of “rock-and-roll golf.” And then there was the breakthrough “Bo Knows” campaign, which lifted baseball and football player Bo Jackson out of his two professional sports and presented him instead as the perfect all-around cross-trainer. A series of quick-cut interviews with Nike stars —McEnroe, Jordan, Gretzky —ironically suggested that Jackson knew their sports better than they did. “Bo knows tennis,” “Bo knows basketball” and so on.
At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Nike took this strategy out of the controlled environment of its TV commercials and applied it to a real sports competition. The experiment started in 1995 when Nike’s marketing department dreamed up the idea of turning a couple of Kenyan runners into Africa’s first Olympic ski team. As Mark Bossardet, Nike’s director of global athletics, explained, “We were sitting around the office one day and we said, ‘What if we took Kenyan runners and transferred their skills to cross-country skiing?’”24 Kenyan runners, who have dominated cross-country track-and-field competitions at the Olympics since 1968, have always represented the “idea of sports” at Nike headquarters. (“Where’s the Kenyans running?” Phil Knight has been heard to demand after viewing a Nike ad deemed insufficiently inspiring and heroic. In Nike shorthand it means, “Where’s the Spirit of Sports?”).25 So according to Nike marketing logic, if two Kenyan runners —living specimens of sports incarnate —were plucked out of their own spo
rt and out of their country and their native climate, and dumped on a frozen mountaintop, and if they were then able to transfer their agility, strength and endurance to cross-country skiing, their success would represent a moment of pure sporting transcendence. It would be a spiritual transformation of Man over nature, birthright, nation and petty sports bureaucrats —brought to the world by Nike, of course. “Nike always felt sports shouldn’t have boundaries,” the swooshed press release announced. Finally there would be proof.
And if nothing else, Nike would get its name in lots of quirky human-interest sidebar stories — just like the wacky Jamaican bobsled team that hogged the headlines at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. What sports reporter could resist the heart-warmer of Africa’s first ski team?
Nike found its test-tube subjects in two mid-level runners, Philip Boit and Henry Bitok. Since Kenya has no snow, no ski federation and no training facilities, Nike financed the entire extravagant affair, dishing out $250,000 for training in Finland and custom-designed uniforms, and paying the runners a salary to live away from their families. When Nagano rolled around, Bitok didn’t qualify and Boit finished last —a full twenty minutes after the gold-medal winner, Bjorn Daehlie of Norway. It turns out that cross-country running and cross-country skiing —despite the similarity of their names —require entirely different sets of skills and use different muscles.
