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Forum nameOkay Activist Archives
Topic subjectRE: 'artist' is different to 'advertiser'
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=22&topic_id=27201&mesg_id=27239
27239, RE: 'artist' is different to 'advertiser'
Posted by moot_point, Tue Mar-29-05 05:02 PM
The interesting thing is that the most successful advertising and branding agencies got wise the primary/secondary signification paradigm (to which I alluded earlier) some time ago. The most valuable commodity to the biggest companies now is not their product, but their brand. In some sense the product is incidental to the brand, which accounts for the proliferation of ads that don’t even show the product they wish to sell. In effect, the brand constitutes the very essence of secondary/connoted signification. It sells - not useful products - but dreams and aspirations, which the target consumer associates with. Once you capture the consumer’s imagination, any number of products can then be attached to the brand.

So what is the relevance? Well, isn’t there an affinity between brands such as Nike and Disney and brands such as P. Diddy or Jay-Z? Both P.Piddy and Jay-Z are established brands, who sell a hugely eclectic range of products. Jay-Z even acknowledges this on the BluePrint;

‘If somebody would have told him that, ho would sell clothing?
Not in this lifetime, wasn’t in his lifeline
That’s another difference that’s between me and them,
I smartened up, opened the market up’

But capturing the imagination the demographic is no mean feat for some branders. And of late, Mcdonalds has been struggling for credibility. It’s sometimes easier to cut and paste the credibility of another ‘brand’ and incorporate it into your own message. Enter McRap. I don’t think anybody will disagree that from the perspective of popular culture, black is cool. When the bigwigs at Hilfiger realised that blacks were stealing their clothing, they were astute enough to turn a blind eye to it. As Hilfiger suddenly became ‘street’ the white middle classes started having wet dreams for Hilfiger merchandise: a license to print money.

Branders see rappers as cool. The problem arises herein; the more a global such as McDonalds to cut and paste their street credibility in order to sell burgers, the greater the void is left, where said rapper’s credibility used to be. He sells out and ultimately we are left with a minority of rich rappers, a mass of fat kids and an impotent artform.