Not So Fast My Fat Friend

A quick follow-up to my previous post. Here's Coca-Cola's site where it explains how it pretty much commandeered the Santa Claus image and attempted to link it indelibly to its corporate brand.

Coke Holiday Ads Through The Years

By the way, the little boy with the bottle cap hat? That's 'Sprite', of course.

And here's Snopes who says not so fast: "at best what Coca-Cola popularized was an image they borrowed, not one they created." Yes, but the crafting of that image, its ubiquity, and the indelible association of it in the popular mind with the brand's product cannot be denied. They are playing a long game. Their next move, by the way, is polar bears. You've seen the ads. They're associating themselves with concern about global warming. Watch for it.

Santa Claus Sells Out

Over the holidays there was some controversy emanating from those provocative googahs over at Fox Snooze about Santa Claus being white. Well, frankly, they weren't wrong—given, that is, their limited universe of knowledge.

Wisdomie brought his S.O. home from Hawaii and wanted to show her some of the tourist sites here in the ATL. We took her to the GA Aquarium (which is the tits, btw. Wisdoc and I scubaed there for our 24th Anniversary a couple years back—with whale sharks, hammerheads, manta rays, goliath groupers, etc.) and the Coca-Cola Museum. The latter is, if nothing else, a tribute to what was/is the greatest marketing campaign in the history of the world—corporate, that is (let's exclude, say, Catholicism). If you are a 'Mad Man' and want to see how a corporate branding campaign made a logo into the world's No. 1 most recognizable brand (including the Olympics), it's worth a tour.

[Of course, if you are an anti-corporatist, Occupationist throwback, you might want to take a pass. Unless, that is, you want to keep your enemies closer kinda' thing.]

Back to the point: One of the very real triumphs of Coke's long-game marketing campaign has, indeed, been the corporation's crafting of the Santa Claus image. There is an exhibition in the museum about the evolution of what we now instantly recognize as Santa Claus over the decades by the marketing geniuses at Coke. Do you think it is merely coincidental that the predominant cultural image of Santa Claus is robed in precisely the same color and shades as the Coca-Cola logo? If you do, then you are frankly naive and should check out how they did it at the museum.

There is another exhibit in the museum showing how Coke's marketing folks incorporated several images from the American artist Norman Rockwell into their ad campaigns. Wisdomie said as we walked through, "What a sell out!" I replied, "No, Rockwell wasn't just 'a' sell out, he was the original sell out. His selling out to Coke was the template for the phenomena—at least in corporate America. He set the standard, and Coke bought him whole."

Unfortunately, I don't know if that's entirely true. What about Toulouse-Lautrec? Or, to take another category: what about Michaelangelo (or any religious or patronized art)?

Anybody have any ideas about any other major or prominent (let's say American) artists who "sold out" their let's call it "artistic integrity" for corporate marketing purposes?

[This being brought to mind after seeing Inside Llewyn Davis last night re: 1960's NYC folk scene and the momentous arrival of Dylan thereupon (selling out being a prominent feature and thus theme thereof). Oh, and thereafter reading Ben Marcus's reply ["Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction"] to Jonathan Franzen's diss of Wm. Gaddis, "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books." It can be "pleasurable," says Marcus, "to get what we knew we wanted – that is, after all, why we wait in line to sit on Santa's lap." Indeed.]

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So, here's a cool song from ATL locals, the Black Lips, currently running in a T-Mobile ad. Love the song, and want the local lads to do well. But still...



And then, of course, there's:

The Who Sell Out?

I think it's going to take some time for me to wrap my head around this one. Lexus, the Japanese luxury car company, has hired nine writers to write one chapter each in a long-form copy ad for one of its new model cars. They are calling it a "novella". [Tip of the hat to Jeff B. over at Syntax of Things for alerting us to this.]

The writers? Arthur Phillips, Richard McCann, Curtis Sittenfeld, Brian Antoni, Bob Shacochis, Pam Houston, Robert Ferrigno, Mary Otis, and Jane Smiley.

We've read much about the commercialization/commodification of literature. For example, here:

AMS: An American reads a book, and often as not it is treated as an economic reality rather than as a political risk. Book packaging will receive as much attention as what’s being packaged. I don’t want to demean contemporary literature at all, but it is constrained perhaps by the emphasis on what the next thing will be to make a splash.

WHG: That commercialization process increasingly bothers me. It has gotten so much worse, and it has made the art world a zoo. When I was writing this piece recently for "New York Review" on Johns, I just kept thinking, what does it do to a painter to know that every brush stroke is inescapably another hundred thousand dollars? How does one manage to deliver the right critical notice? I’m glad literature is spared that, or rather, that it is milder in our case. [Interview with Wm. S. Gass]

But this is something new entirely.

In the Sixties and Seventies, there was a great uproar about Bob Dylan "selling out" by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Nowadays, you've got Led Zep songs in Cadillac commercials, Wilco songs in VW ads, and "Ginger" by The Lilys in yet another Caddy addy. Still, these guys aren't yet writing original songs for the ads (tho', a number of rockers have always written anonymous jingles and movie soundtracks).

This is one of the unintended consequences of Warhol's pop art movement, perhaps its obverse: instead of "the transfiguration of the commonplace" we have the commercial utilization of the aesthetic.

I think it would be altogether too facile to dismiss this "novella" because these writers are merely writing "copy". After all, patronage has a long and distinguished history in the arts, whether in the form of sponsorship or commissioning—from the Medici boys who managed to get their visages immortalized in Rafael's Transfiguration to Maxim Gorky's glorification of the Soviet state to Bach's transcendent sacred musics. And, who knows, judged by objective—let's call it New Critical—standards, the damn thing might be well written, even if by committee. By the same token, it would be entirely fatuous for these writers to claim their marketing of Lexuses is merely "product placement" as we see in all the movies.

Who are we to say these writers can't do what they need to to earn a living wage? In the U.S., unless you write commercial or genre fiction, or resort to memoir or hit the jackpot with a screenplay, it's tough to sell your work. Still, in our mind there's now a bit of an "ick" factor attached to their names and we will have some trouble getting past it when it comes to reading, much less purchasing, any further work of any of these writers.