intangible · 2009-02-15 11:16

I’m a bit dizzy from reading a few articles about products, marketing, celebrity, advertising, music and TV. It’s a swirl of money, and it’s really hard to see who’s doing well out of this.

P Diddy receives half of a vodka brand’s profits and TV programmes are trying to become record labels and concert promoters.

But are adverts about selling products or selling music, or is advertising more about creating blipvert content? Ad companies may not be making soap operas any more, but they circle the watering holes, previously a watercooler, now, Youtube. What about an ad company making a TV drama that breaks bands to make music for adverts… and then record it all for Youtube, a reality TV series, and a documentary film.

As my friend Paul says – any port in a storm. Are all these industries in such terminal decline that they’re grasping around for any revenue stream or way out? Or is this the converged future, where business and culture are one and the same? Not only can’t I tell whether things are real or marketing vehicles any more, I can’t even determine what’s being marketed.

comments

Well, that’s easy: in the case of Ciroc, anyway, it’s clearly Sean Combs that is being marketed. What always kills me is that there are apparently many, many people afflicted with the sort of taste and/or grasping sense of personal insignificance that makes this a going proposition for Diageo, and then some.

The other billboard featuring Mr. Combs that is currently visible around New York is for his line of perfumes. That line is called, and the advertisements read, I AM KING. We found the conception and naming of this line to be an almost painfully transparent window into both Mr. Combs’s psyche and that of anyone who would spend money on acquiring this product.

This doesn’t necessarily speak to the larger questions you raise, but it is surely true of everything this individual touches.

— AG    15.02.09    #

Now that MTV in the US no longer shows music videos, it’s interesting to see commercials using bumper titles or on-screen labelling for songs, not just because it anticipates the what’s-that-song element to watching ads these days, but also embraces a familiar but out-of-commission vocabulary.

— nick s    15.02.09    #

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