Being “Different” Taking Over Advertising
The cool factor has become a booming business
The PBS Frontline documentary “The Merchants of Cool,” was my inspiration for this blog. Diversity automatically puts race, gender, sexual orientation and other vague categories into my head. After watching this documentary I understood more about how advertisers and corporate brands are paying a lot of money to define and sell what is “diversity” or a young adult vocabulary translation – “cool.”
What is it to be diverse or “cool?” Corporate brands and Web sites like the Better Business Bureau formulate surveys like the one we did in class with Frank to decipher what commercials, television shows, clothing styles and music could encompass that into a package that is sellable. As modern advertising keeps changing, it seems as if ads are not just selling a music artist, soda, or beauty products anymore, they are selling a lifestyle. This is the fastest and easiest way to get to a young target group.
Teenagers are the main focus of many companies or researchers that are trying to sell products. A statistic from “The Merchants of Cool” states that teenagers occupied 32 million people of the United States population in 2001. The documentary also claims that this generation is “even larger than their baby boomer parents.” The vast amount of teenagers with their own money and their parents’ money to blow is an obvious reason of why they are targeted.
A perfect example of a company that zeros in on teenagers and in many ways develops and sells what is “cool” in the millennium generation is MTV. It launched in 1981 (i). MTV was defined as Music Television. But shown in “Merchants of Cool,” they were so much more than that.
MTV has always been an icon of diversity and “cool.” Bands like Limp Bizkit became famous because of MTV. MTV also used their music and placed them in a scene that would catch on with the teenage viewer and also made another brand apparent to the teenage scene (Sprite.com party with MTV cameras everywhere.) However, this was the 2001 MTV, present day MTV has been taken over by trashy reality television that for some reason captures many young adult and teenagers’ attention. Ed Hardy was non-existent and definitely not cool until Jersey Shore first aired in December of 2009 (ii).
“The Merchants of Cool” also uses the television show 7th Heaven as an example of a marketing strategy. The television channel WB wanted to make a television show that a family could watch together. This was a show that I used to watch with my mother’s daycare kids on a daily basis. But when a show like Dawson’s Creek comes along with a sexual edge and portrayed “realistic” story of teenager’s life during high school, tasteful 7th Heaven goes down the toilet.
-- YouTube
7th Heaven Season 11 Opening Credits
--YouTube
This raises a question to me that asks, how radical will media mega companies like Viacom or consumable brands like Sprite go to get teenagers or anybody’s attention? How far will companies push the envelope to be “cool” or have the most diverse products on the market? The competition to be the most diverse television channel or product seems to always veer toward a sexual image.
Take the Dove campaign that was mentioned in class. Yes, the idea behind that campaign was supposed to be about real women being as beautiful as the models and airbrushed celebrities on all other commercials. But is it necessary to portray these “real” women and their beauty with pictures of them nude or in their underwear? I don’t think so. This is what made Dove diverse. They were the only company that had a campaign with older women or unique women as their spokeswomen at the time. And the best way to grab a consumer’s attention and make them think that Dove is the right product for a natural and real woman is sexual images. It is another example of how sex is proven time and time again to almost guarantee an ad campaign to stand out and shine.
Diversity is something that makes advertising possible. It betters the industry in some ways, and is also a downfall in others. What makes a product “cool” always goes back to the consumers that purchase or watch these products. The word “cool” will be something that advertisers will spend millions of dollars trying to keep up with. It is a never ending process that I am hopeful to become a part of after the Bemidji State chapter of my life is finished.
These three images are all from the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign. All taken from Bing Images
i -- Wikipedia on MTV -- MTV History
i -- Wikipedia on MTV -- MTV History
ii -- Jersey Shore Wikipedia
Frontline "The Merchants of Cool" - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=frol02p70&continuous=1
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