Rant in HTML:
The Corporate Counterfeit
or: How Your Anti-Marketing Ideals Will Make You a Marketing Mascot
It is a wise habit to start an informative article with a quote; it draws your readers in and provides an interesting thesis for the feature itself. And who better to give the honor of opening my article than the esteemed Bill Hicks?
If anyone here is in marketing or advertising: kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, just planting seeds is all i'm doing. No joke here, just kill yourself. You have no rationalization for what you do, you are satan's little helpers, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself...
You know what bugs me though? Everyone here who's in marketing is thinking "Oh cool, Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market."
And yet as witty as our friend Bill is, the "Anti-marketing dollar" is not merely a punchline. It's actually an extremely popular practice in marketing. In fact, two recent examples of it have caught my interest, personally, because i consider myself a fairly avid supporter of the things they exploit.
The first is that of Nike Skateboard's 'Major Threat' campaign which features, perhaps, the company's most iconic art ever save the signature swoosh. The problem? That iconic art didn't belong to them. In fact, the Major Threat campaign was really just a Minor Threat album cover modified to sell Nick shoes.
As soon as i saw the linked article, i wrote Nike this brief response:
I realize Nike (or rather, their graphic designer) was trying to pay homage to Minor Threat, but stealing artwork without consent is not the way to do it. If you can't get permission to use something of someone else's (and clearly, Dishord wouldn't want Nike to use their most iconic image) than you just don't use it. Blatant theft is not going to win over the crowd Nike is trying to appeal to.
And at first, i received only this in reply:
Your e-mail has been Submitted
The reference number for your e-mail is '050624-000664'.
But clearly, i wasn't the only Minor Threat fan to lose his temper. No less than two days after Pitchfork ran that article, Nike Skateboards issued a public apology to "Minor Threat, Dischord Records and fans of both". The written apology expressed the companies resentment at jacking Dischord's most famous image and for any problems they caused. They promised to remove all forms of the ad, both print and digital, and thankfully the whole ordeal passed by without any legal action taking place.
The second example is less conclusive. By now, you web-savy readers, i'm sure you've come across at least one of Don Hertzfeldt's inspired animations. They spread across the internet like a disease, but unlike most every other viral file on the world wide web, Don Hertzfeldt works actually deserve to. In the unthinkable event that you've never heard of this guy, let me explain.
Don has possibly the most distinct drawing style since Charles Shultz. All of his characters are very simplistic, black and white doodles that squiggle slightly when they move and whose antics can only be described as criminally insane. Don is a mad man. He draws every frame of his cartoons himself. No computers are involved in any stage of the process, and he doesn't even use cels. That means if he ever uses backgrounds (which is rare), they're as minimalistic as his two tone characters because he'd literally have to redraw it every single frame.
Don's most well-known animation is the infamous cartoon Rejected, a collections of fake advertisements Don drew for fictional companies that eventually, as they continually got rejected, fell apart and began literally taking on a life of their own.
Irony doesn't even begin to describe what happened next. After years of floating around the internet, some dick headed marketing exec (undeniably upper class and white, probably considers himself a fan of alternative counter-culture and therefore listens to a lot of Nickelback) caught Rejected and decided to use Don's distinct animation style to sell real products, but without Don himself.
The result is another ad campaign, this time hawking Pop-Tarts with the tagline "Craaazy Good!" The first time i saw one of these commercials, i actually thought Don had sold out and started drawing cartoons for Kellogg's. The character design, the black and white environments, the off beat timing, and the general minimalism throughout was so blatantly stolen from him. The only thing that made me realize Don had nothing to do with it, in fact, is that they weren't even remotely funny.
It should come as no surprise, then, that this upset me too, so i set off to Don's website to see if he mentioned these atrocities. This is what i found:
Don has never had anything to do with the production of a corporate television commercial and has publicly vowed many times that he never will. Unfortunately, it seems to be "the vogue" these days to directly rip off his style and his artwork, which is why you may be noticing an abundance of vaguely familiar yet shitty looking squiggly stick figure things on television hawking tampons or Pop Tarts. It was amusing and sad at first, however the recent surge in this stuff and the confusion it's creating has compelled us to seriously weigh our rights and legal options on a case-by-case basis. Everybody is stupid.
Indeed they are. By now i had gotten a little used to customer service pages so i sent another letter via Kellogg's. The response this one got was even less promising. It was nothing more than "Thank you for your message. We appreciate your interest in our company and products." I suppose that was decent after i had just told them i wouldn't buy any Kellogg's products until Don's animation style wasn't being forced into the corporate mascot position.
What's so interesting about both of these examples of corporate theft is not necessarily what they decided to steal, but rather the irony of doing so. Let's look at Minor Threat first. Minor Threat was a band so hell-bent on anti-marketing that they literally formed their own label, Dischord Records, just to avoid using a corporation to distribute their music. They never made t-shirts, they never played a show if it was over five dollars, they refused to be interviewed by corporate sponsored magazines and tv shows; they remain one of the most successful forms of corporate rebellion to date. And what happens to them twenty years later? They find their logo selling shoes for the biggest athletic corporation in the entire world.
Don Hertzfeldt's story is no less ironic. Rejected, the very cartoon that made him famous, was also his public dismissal of corporate advertising. He used his characters to show the absurdity of "what sells" and somehow, they became what sells themselves.
What does all of this mean? Simply that the anti-marketing scheme is actually marketing's most successful. Pay attention to the advertising surrounding you today. It's all over, you've just gotten used to looking at it. A vast majority of those commercials, whether televised, printed, or programed annoyingly into the middle of your favorite websites, contain countess examples of graffiti, hip-hop, punk rock... anything street, anything underground the corporate marketing machine can steal, distort to sell their products, and therefore blunt the power of.
The marketing industry is based in taking something we, the rebellious youth of the nation, feel very strongly about and destroying every ounce of creativity, originality and innovation within it to force down the throats of the mainstream consuming public. Weather it's music or animation, if it's new and powerful, marketing types across the world are already thinking about how they can deviate it, pervert it, and warp it to their whims. Counter-culture is the new mainstream, and your next big idea is corporate marketing's next big seller.
or: How Your Anti-Marketing Ideals Will Make You a Marketing Mascot
It is a wise habit to start an informative article with a quote; it draws your readers in and provides an interesting thesis for the feature itself. And who better to give the honor of opening my article than the esteemed Bill Hicks?
If anyone here is in marketing or advertising: kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, just planting seeds is all i'm doing. No joke here, just kill yourself. You have no rationalization for what you do, you are satan's little helpers, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself...
You know what bugs me though? Everyone here who's in marketing is thinking "Oh cool, Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market."
And yet as witty as our friend Bill is, the "Anti-marketing dollar" is not merely a punchline. It's actually an extremely popular practice in marketing. In fact, two recent examples of it have caught my interest, personally, because i consider myself a fairly avid supporter of the things they exploit.
The first is that of Nike Skateboard's 'Major Threat' campaign which features, perhaps, the company's most iconic art ever save the signature swoosh. The problem? That iconic art didn't belong to them. In fact, the Major Threat campaign was really just a Minor Threat album cover modified to sell Nick shoes.
As soon as i saw the linked article, i wrote Nike this brief response:
I realize Nike (or rather, their graphic designer) was trying to pay homage to Minor Threat, but stealing artwork without consent is not the way to do it. If you can't get permission to use something of someone else's (and clearly, Dishord wouldn't want Nike to use their most iconic image) than you just don't use it. Blatant theft is not going to win over the crowd Nike is trying to appeal to.
And at first, i received only this in reply:
Your e-mail has been Submitted
The reference number for your e-mail is '050624-000664'.
But clearly, i wasn't the only Minor Threat fan to lose his temper. No less than two days after Pitchfork ran that article, Nike Skateboards issued a public apology to "Minor Threat, Dischord Records and fans of both". The written apology expressed the companies resentment at jacking Dischord's most famous image and for any problems they caused. They promised to remove all forms of the ad, both print and digital, and thankfully the whole ordeal passed by without any legal action taking place.
The second example is less conclusive. By now, you web-savy readers, i'm sure you've come across at least one of Don Hertzfeldt's inspired animations. They spread across the internet like a disease, but unlike most every other viral file on the world wide web, Don Hertzfeldt works actually deserve to. In the unthinkable event that you've never heard of this guy, let me explain.
Don has possibly the most distinct drawing style since Charles Shultz. All of his characters are very simplistic, black and white doodles that squiggle slightly when they move and whose antics can only be described as criminally insane. Don is a mad man. He draws every frame of his cartoons himself. No computers are involved in any stage of the process, and he doesn't even use cels. That means if he ever uses backgrounds (which is rare), they're as minimalistic as his two tone characters because he'd literally have to redraw it every single frame.
Don's most well-known animation is the infamous cartoon Rejected, a collections of fake advertisements Don drew for fictional companies that eventually, as they continually got rejected, fell apart and began literally taking on a life of their own.
Irony doesn't even begin to describe what happened next. After years of floating around the internet, some dick headed marketing exec (undeniably upper class and white, probably considers himself a fan of alternative counter-culture and therefore listens to a lot of Nickelback) caught Rejected and decided to use Don's distinct animation style to sell real products, but without Don himself.
The result is another ad campaign, this time hawking Pop-Tarts with the tagline "Craaazy Good!" The first time i saw one of these commercials, i actually thought Don had sold out and started drawing cartoons for Kellogg's. The character design, the black and white environments, the off beat timing, and the general minimalism throughout was so blatantly stolen from him. The only thing that made me realize Don had nothing to do with it, in fact, is that they weren't even remotely funny.
It should come as no surprise, then, that this upset me too, so i set off to Don's website to see if he mentioned these atrocities. This is what i found:
Don has never had anything to do with the production of a corporate television commercial and has publicly vowed many times that he never will. Unfortunately, it seems to be "the vogue" these days to directly rip off his style and his artwork, which is why you may be noticing an abundance of vaguely familiar yet shitty looking squiggly stick figure things on television hawking tampons or Pop Tarts. It was amusing and sad at first, however the recent surge in this stuff and the confusion it's creating has compelled us to seriously weigh our rights and legal options on a case-by-case basis. Everybody is stupid.
Indeed they are. By now i had gotten a little used to customer service pages so i sent another letter via Kellogg's. The response this one got was even less promising. It was nothing more than "Thank you for your message. We appreciate your interest in our company and products." I suppose that was decent after i had just told them i wouldn't buy any Kellogg's products until Don's animation style wasn't being forced into the corporate mascot position.
What's so interesting about both of these examples of corporate theft is not necessarily what they decided to steal, but rather the irony of doing so. Let's look at Minor Threat first. Minor Threat was a band so hell-bent on anti-marketing that they literally formed their own label, Dischord Records, just to avoid using a corporation to distribute their music. They never made t-shirts, they never played a show if it was over five dollars, they refused to be interviewed by corporate sponsored magazines and tv shows; they remain one of the most successful forms of corporate rebellion to date. And what happens to them twenty years later? They find their logo selling shoes for the biggest athletic corporation in the entire world.
Don Hertzfeldt's story is no less ironic. Rejected, the very cartoon that made him famous, was also his public dismissal of corporate advertising. He used his characters to show the absurdity of "what sells" and somehow, they became what sells themselves.
What does all of this mean? Simply that the anti-marketing scheme is actually marketing's most successful. Pay attention to the advertising surrounding you today. It's all over, you've just gotten used to looking at it. A vast majority of those commercials, whether televised, printed, or programed annoyingly into the middle of your favorite websites, contain countess examples of graffiti, hip-hop, punk rock... anything street, anything underground the corporate marketing machine can steal, distort to sell their products, and therefore blunt the power of.
The marketing industry is based in taking something we, the rebellious youth of the nation, feel very strongly about and destroying every ounce of creativity, originality and innovation within it to force down the throats of the mainstream consuming public. Weather it's music or animation, if it's new and powerful, marketing types across the world are already thinking about how they can deviate it, pervert it, and warp it to their whims. Counter-culture is the new mainstream, and your next big idea is corporate marketing's next big seller.