The Authenticity Paradox and The Perils of Youth Marketing
As a veteran of youth counterculture, I'm watching with curiosity the importance of youth voices as a gage for the so-called "real," not in the philosophical sense, but in the "keeping it real" sense. Marketers are not concerned whether or not adults think what they see is "real": it's the skeptical teen audience that is more challenging.
In the critique of the history of advertising it has been said that marketing in its modern form was invented to solve a problem for business: to sell a surplus of products that no one needs. Little did these futurists of behavioral science in the '20s and '30s who established the intellectual foundation of modern advertising imagine that in the future, advertising would develop its own problem: a lack of authenticity.
Few may realize that the US peaked in its industrial production in the mid-1960s, and since then the market has been saturated with such things as toasters and refrigerators. The average household has what it needs. Thus a prime market is the penetration of the youth demographic, people who are yet to furnish houses or buy cars but do have cash and want to spend it on mostly ephemeral things like entertainment. Reaching this coveted group achieves three goals: garner lifetime loyalty to a brand, develop consumer habits, and encourage the purchase of commodities.
In response to this growing need has been the advent of so-called "cool hunters," research agencies that "spy" on youth culture to determine how and what to market to them, and to also regurgitate as quickly as possible any trends that might be out there waiting to explode on the cultural scene. The increasing speed of the cycle of hype and decay in youth culture these days is astonishing. Consequently, within the 24/7-culture rotation of hip, advertisers are struggling about what to do. A recent conference announcement for youth marketers explained the problem succinctly:
"Teens are wired different than any another consumer group. They navigate through media clutter with a heightened 'BS' meter to sniff out hidden advertising agendas. In a post-scarcity media world, there is no shortage of brands or media pipeline channels. Attention is the new scarcity. Loyalty, trust and affinity become the new pipeline. When there is so much choice, what is the new role of earned attention?"
This is not the only instance in which marketers seemed a little starved for the "real." Fresh-Films.com boasts in its on-line advertising "authentic user generated content" and its website features a graphic of a post-it note with "your company logo here" above the photos of fresh-faced youth. Look-Look, the cool hunters made famous in Douglas Rushkoff's Frontline documentary, The Merchants of Cool," states on its Web site,
"Look-Look believes that youth culture has always been a subculture. An uncensored raw voice that demands to be heard. Look-Look wants to share these subcultures with the rest of the world. We want people to be inspired by the creative and brilliant young minds from around the globe that shoot photos, write poems, make art and think. We also want young people to know that there is a home for their collective voice that turns it into a two-way dialogue between our clients and these subcultures."
Cool hunters offer "field correspondents," "journalists," and "ethnographic research," all a strange new taxonomy that combines anthropology, journalism and marketing. The knee-jerk reaction would be to assume that these are nefarious companies that are out to undermine youth culture by couching their practices in New Agey terms of empowerment. The other backlash (coming from both the Right and Left) is to assume that today's youth are "narcissistic."
But I like to think of this situation as a leverage point. If it's true that teens are skeptical of what is being offered to them, it's also not surprising that they are creating their own media on a scale never experienced, due largely to the advent of social network spaces like MySpace and Facebook, and the prevalence of free media production tools. When a kid can make a video with her cell phone and edit it into a clip and instantaneously upload it to an audience of millions, this is an amazing feat.
It's no wonder that marketers are starting to use Internet aesthetics as part of their marketing, as Pepsi did when it partnered with Yahoo to make a site of video clips that mimic vlogging ala Rocketboom and YouTube. Not surprisingly, the big trend of the 2007 Super Bowl was "user generated" commercials. The results were not interesting, but the novelty of user created ads was the marketing meme of choice. It was meant to represent a kind of consumer democracy, or triumph of the viewer, but there was little remarkable. A better example was when Chevy invited people to remix their Tahoe commercial on the Web. What resulted was a hilarious rebellion that attacked the concept entirely and turned Tahoe ads into anti-SUV diatribes.
This is walking the razor's edge of "authenticity." Marketers want to claim the aesthetic of the "real," but their intentions don't fulfill the promise. To me this means there is a leverage point: the potential for youth media to hack this desire for authenticity. There will always be an eternal thirst for the "real" – real friends, real relationships, real love. That marketers could pretend otherwise is grandiose self deception. But search they will, on and on, for that magic elixir that advertising will never provide: a truly authentic relationship with the world.
Tweet- 12-31-07
- Antonio Lopez's blog
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Comments
Cool hunting
Propaganda Anonymous
I met a cool hunter back in the day. She asked me to come in and speak with a focus group. I showed up late, and didn't get into the room. This cat gave me $100 just for showing up! That was cool.
My intention was to try and subvert the focus group somehow. Talk about all this absurdist shit. This was before Rushkoff dropped his 'Merchants of Cool' doc. So I didn't know what I might've been walking into. The focus group stuff seems to be on-lock. It's pretty crazy.
But that grasping for what is 'cool' so it can be mirrored back towards young consumers for a price seems like it will accelerate waaaay more Before the shit breaks down. It's happening with Myspace(and I think Antonio you touch on that)
personalization
On cool
The thing about Poetry is...Rumi "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.I will meet you there".... you could say beyond Gap and Pepsi, there is Cool! The writing on the wall cannot be made into a consumer product.I said that.So cool.
Beautifully stated!
Cool actually does have a specific history: it is the temperament of capitalism. Sociologists call it the "post-Fordist" face. Fordism was the practice of the factory. Ford was strongly against any show of emotion in the workplace, this is why he argued that workers should have leisure time; he wanted them to get their ya-yas out at the movie theater on the weekend, not on the factory floor where it could turn into organizing.
The mirrorshade image of cool comes after WWII. In a sense it could probably be argued that it was an unconscious coping mechanism for the post-traumatic stress of the war, a way to keep emotional distance from the reality of what happened. The Beats, in dialog with Capitalist culture probably regurgitated that in a process of reverse osmosis.
As we have transitioned into the knowledge work economy, the post-Fordist face is now expressed as irony, a technque for dealing with heavy things without being heavy. All this is by way of saying that cool is a kind of distraction, emotional horizon line where the contradictions of capitalism are sorted out into some kind of harmony, or disharmony as was the case with punk.
brand vs. quality
cool etc
great article and comments.
the question that comes up for me is how to utilize this type of understanding to push the logic of the marketing system toward sustainability and social change (reducing gross inequity, environmental and social justice, etc). Analysis is always useful but then what tools do the outside cultural creators have that can drive the system in a new direction? The sad aspect of punk - and why it fit in to contemporary culture without a problem - was its nihilistic rejection of working to change the system - this a result to the failure of the 60s to deliver on its tangerine dreams.
What some perceive as the breakdown of old categories is an opportunity to change the cultural dialogue and social direction, but this opportunity must be strategically recognized and tactically seized. That would really be "cool."
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
Rebirth of cool
Punk - Grunge - Diapheneity
As someone who negotiated adolescence through the lens of Nevermind, by Nirvana, and Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins I felt the whole grunge scene was a generation admitting to itself that it felt sick. Despite all of the luxuries, at its core western civilization was a howl of nihilism, and grunge was the way young people expressed that feeling. Grunge wasn't nihilistic, it was the birth cry of something that sought new life elsewhere. It was anti-nihilism ultimately, in that it struk against the shiny happy people conformity ethic and expressed what was hurting... At least, thats how it felt to me age 14. Perhaps being from the UK I was infected by the "second summer of love" vibe, Stone Roses, Acid House...
It could be argued that it was all part of an inevitable progression. Traditionally, you heal what hurts by singing to it. Punk located the wound, became grunge and allowed itself to weep (see maybe Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins). This was a move toward a transparency, or diapheneity and a union of thought and action that is anathema to the mainstream. I may be biased, but it seems to me that grunge and the new age were wedded, and hit the mainstream together. Am I mistaken in seeing them come to maturity in the entheogenic shamanism scene? Ayahausca's pretty grungy ;-)
Anyway, this is a very interesting article and comments which I am following with interest. Corporate mediated authenticity certainly seems to be an insurmountable paradox to me, so far.
Authentic Optimism
"Which should we follow - the example of an idealist upbeat person ready to work their butt off to change the world or a defeated self-absorbed person wanting to tell you how unhappy they are?"
To my mind, the self absorbed, defeated person has begun the alchemical process of turning inward, and transmuting the base matter of egocentric being into the gold of an ego-free being. Recognising the pain, the inner fragmentation that our nihilistic and narcissistic culture encourages is essential. If your idealist has gone through this process and emerged hale, whole and hearty, then yes, I'd hold him up as an example. But if he is simply concerned to toe the party line of optimism, then as an exemplar he becomes a risky proposition. Authentic optimism is something that must be earned, like gnosis - I don't think it can really be put on like a cool hat. Authentic optimism is infectious, but put on optimism is a real turn off, and belongs to the kind of idealist whose imagination presents an incomplete map of the terrain.
From an old punk
In my article on Dharma Punx I wrote a bit about what happened to punk on a spiritual level (you can read it here: http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/823), but in short, I think we were a mirror and a consequence of the 1960s. In 1981 when I got into punk in Los Angeles, the attitude was that the hippies had failed, Reagan was in power, and that nuclear annihilation hung over our heads. Additionally, we were reacting to the over-the-top stadium rock ethos of the '70s. I suppose that what we wanted was something organic instead of industrialized. Punk ate itself mostly due to drugs and alcohol. We had become an alternative tribe from dysfunctional lives: therapy cults, substance and sexual abuse, a perception of no future prospects for a good life, etc. There were many punks that were also political activists. The anti-nuke and Central American solidarity movement was full of punks.
But I think punk in LA was much different than punk in England. Whereas British punks could really protest their socioeconomic plight, LA punks were more middle class and suburban. But in the case of the LA scene, there was a sense that suburban life was a sham. If you want to see the origins of punk in LA, I suggest watching the documentary Dogtown and Z Boys. I think punk arose from skate culture, and that skate culture was a way of surfing the bullshit reality that was LA at the time. Finally, I believe ultimately punk was the last gasp of Dada, finishing and killing what was started back in the day.
Hippipunkoramagrungegangsta!
Propaganda Anonymous
Interesting comments concerning cultural musical movements over the past 30 years.
When Daniel speaks about "Punk's" nihilistic tendencies that left very little to action, I concede to some of that.
However, Let's not forget the most seminal Punk stars Jonny Rotten and Joe Strummer. Strummer especially, that man was ALL about postive action.
And about 'Punk' as more a philosophical approach towards their world at the time. It was the birth ot the Neo-liberal agenda (1973) being implemented in England and abroad.
Strummer and Rotten both said "Punk" was NOT about a Fashion or even a Music, per se. It was an ATTITUDE about getting to the heart of every matter. And fucking doing something about it. Strummer nearly always did something about it.
Now in addressing Richard's comment about 'Gangsta Rap' Guns and Butta. The birth of Gangsta Rap being Ice-T, Scholly-D, Kool G Rap, and NWA.
Sure there was a lot of crazy shit being said. But there's been a lot of fucked shit happened to the African American culture for years on end.
I'm not completely condoning everything these cats said, Personally, Rakim I think is more 'positive' but still I steer clear of placing 'blame' on some musical movements 'failed'. Music comes from a cultural contexts I believe, and play their parts. And some NWA fucking rocks anyway.
As far as I see the Grunge movement. there was a whole hell of a lot of integrity behind the birth of that music. The scene in Seattle seems super authentic to me.
What became known as 'Grunge' on lots of MTV stuff, seems to have been some co-opted mess. The cultural vultures swooped in and sought to turn a quick buck. They picked up some starving artists and kids whose socio-political acumen wasn't too developed and went to work.
This seems to be THE Struggle in most 20th century music movements in the US and England.
'Corporate 'Co-opting' has increased along side Neo-liberal greed for more markets, and has infected youth culture and beyond.
Today, we are faced with Global Climate Change possibly acting way quicker than projections can project. So yeah, maybe a new approach besides 'Up Against The Wall MotherFucker' need to be born.
But this new approach, as I see, should still have the capability to draw clear distinct boundaries of 'That's you over there complicitly following the status quo' and 'this is me and my friends doin some cool shit. Do you want in or what'
That's the EDGE of all this music. But I am somewhat flexible on the topic of boundaries within a world of dissolving boundaries. Maybe it's an energetic vibration thing. As KRS-ONE sez, "You must learn" And maybe that teaching can be done in the coolest way possible.
the dada chord
Consumer Marketing
I'm happy when reading