Yeah, yeah, we're selling out MySpace, too.
But I refuse to feel guilty about it.
Y'all know MySpace - the big social networking site that also acts as a marketing platform for, well, everyone - right? If you don't, you can check it out: people and bands and now everyone else create homepages and link to a network of friends. I'm on it; as are some of my friends; and some of the bands that I like, too.
Increasingly, the Fox-purchased behemoth - it went for something like a floppity-jillion dollars just a few months ago - has been used by non-musicians to market their products. It's another example of the way that young people don't differentiate between their consumer choices, their cultural choices, and their social choices - it all gets rolled up into one.
So since MySpace has billed itself as being an advertiser's haven, we thought we would use it, and have created a campaign for BBCKids called "Rated K" that we're pretty happy with. The client didn't have a massive budget, but did have a real commitment to doing something interesting and relevant (yay!) and let us bust a move on this one. Part of what we're doing is creating MySpace pages for each of the shows that we want to highlight, like this one for Little Britain.
What's amazing is how quickly MySpace has gone from being this sort of authentic, user-created and user-managed website to a massive corporate shill. It's not that I mind - I'm a just amazed, in that five or six years ago (at the height of No Logo mania) there would have been a massive backlash to this sort of direct corporate involvement. Now there isn't, and I am glad about that: truthfully, I think this is far more authentic, far more real, and makes the involvement of marketing in culture more overt, which is how we need to treat it. Yes, this is a marketing program, and yes, this works best for cultural marketing (as opposed to a detergent brand, say - no one wants to be connected to Tide's MySpace page). But if you like Doctor Who or Hollyoaks, you want to be connected to them, even to their marketing initiatives (just as young people have always wanted to be connected to the bands that they love: what is 60s-era fanclub membership but a beta version of being connected to a band's MySpace page?). This just seems like a more authentically responsive connection to marketing, as it continues to live in our culture and play by our culture's rules. If it's good, why not endorse it? That sentiment is light-years removed from where we were at the turn of the millennium, where marketing was bad, period. Like most other things, it's just a tool, and blaming the problems of business or the problems of consumer culture on marketing makes about as much sense as thinking we're all immune to it.
Y'all know MySpace - the big social networking site that also acts as a marketing platform for, well, everyone - right? If you don't, you can check it out: people and bands and now everyone else create homepages and link to a network of friends. I'm on it; as are some of my friends; and some of the bands that I like, too.
Increasingly, the Fox-purchased behemoth - it went for something like a floppity-jillion dollars just a few months ago - has been used by non-musicians to market their products. It's another example of the way that young people don't differentiate between their consumer choices, their cultural choices, and their social choices - it all gets rolled up into one.
So since MySpace has billed itself as being an advertiser's haven, we thought we would use it, and have created a campaign for BBCKids called "Rated K" that we're pretty happy with. The client didn't have a massive budget, but did have a real commitment to doing something interesting and relevant (yay!) and let us bust a move on this one. Part of what we're doing is creating MySpace pages for each of the shows that we want to highlight, like this one for Little Britain.
What's amazing is how quickly MySpace has gone from being this sort of authentic, user-created and user-managed website to a massive corporate shill. It's not that I mind - I'm a just amazed, in that five or six years ago (at the height of No Logo mania) there would have been a massive backlash to this sort of direct corporate involvement. Now there isn't, and I am glad about that: truthfully, I think this is far more authentic, far more real, and makes the involvement of marketing in culture more overt, which is how we need to treat it. Yes, this is a marketing program, and yes, this works best for cultural marketing (as opposed to a detergent brand, say - no one wants to be connected to Tide's MySpace page). But if you like Doctor Who or Hollyoaks, you want to be connected to them, even to their marketing initiatives (just as young people have always wanted to be connected to the bands that they love: what is 60s-era fanclub membership but a beta version of being connected to a band's MySpace page?). This just seems like a more authentically responsive connection to marketing, as it continues to live in our culture and play by our culture's rules. If it's good, why not endorse it? That sentiment is light-years removed from where we were at the turn of the millennium, where marketing was bad, period. Like most other things, it's just a tool, and blaming the problems of business or the problems of consumer culture on marketing makes about as much sense as thinking we're all immune to it.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home