Authors: Benjamin Barber
4.
Lewis Cole, “Screenplay Culture,”
The Nation
, November 4, 1991, pp. 560–566.
5.
Bernard Weinraub, “Ovitz Firm Gets AT&T Executive,”
The New York Times
, June 17, 1994, p. D 1.
6.
Lester Brown et al., eds.,
Vital Signs 1993: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future
(Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1993), pp. 80–81.
7.
Ibid. Also see Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1994).
8.
Fortune
, July 26, 1993, pp. 188–204. The loss in prestige of a traditional brand name can devastate a company, as the recent history of Ovaltine, White Cloud bathroom tissue, Old Gold cigarettes, or Lavoris mouthwash suggests.
9.
Luciano Benetton in an interview “Krieg ist Realität” [War Is Reality], in
Der Spiegel
, September 1994, p. 127. He adds that honesty has not cost Benetton any market share.
10.
In fact, this HIV ad was the first salvo in a campaign to introduce a new magazine being published under Benetton’s logo called (naturally)
Colors
. Why is an apparel company publishing a hip international magazine? For the same reason Sony has put
Sony Style
on the newsstands: to exploit a new merchandising strategy, the magalog. “Part life-style book, part catalog, there are now more than 100 of these hybrids whose strategy is to reach customers directly and treat every page as a marketing opportunity.” Charles Lee, “Trends: Advertisers Move into Publishing,”
Newsweek
, November 1, 1993, p. 69.
11.
Roddick has been compelled to back off on some of her environmental claims recently.
12.
Quantum Systems Inc. in Ramsey, New Jersey, has patented a system that replaces telephone ringing sounds and busy signals with fifteen-second ads. Theresa Riordan, “Patents,”
The New York Times
, June 27, 1994, p. B 2.
13.
“A major uproar followed the announcement last month that Space Marketing Inc. of Roswell, Ga., in cooperation with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Colorado, planned to launch a one-mile-wide display satellite into orbit around Earth. The spacecraft, made of thin plastic film, would reflect sunlight to Earth from aluminized letters or symbols.” Malcolm W. Browne, “City Lights and Space Ads May Blind Stargazers,”
The New York Times
, May 4, 1993, p. C 1.
14.
Quoted by Donella Meadows, “The Global Citizen,”
The Berkshire Eagle
, July 5, 1993.
15.
“Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free,” reads the MTV ad for advertisers. “If this guy doesn’t know about you, you’re toast. He’s an opinion leader. He watches MTV. Which means he knows a lot more than just what CDs to buy and what movies to see. He knows what car to drive, what clothes to wear and what credit card to buy them with. And he’s no loner. He heads up a pack.” Reproduced in
Adbusters
, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer, 1994.
Adbusters
is an extraordinary Canadian quarterly “journal of the mental environment,” devoted to deconstructing the advertising industry.
16.
A Nike ad from a few years ago offered women’s magazine readers a steamy twelve-page “passion play in six acts” called “Falling in Love,” with scenes entitled “lust,” “euphoria,” “fear,” “disgust,” and “the truth” in which shoes were definitely (at best) bit players.
17.
Annetta Miller and Seema Nayyar, “Ads of Our Lives,”
Newsweek
, September 26, 1994, pp. 48–50.
Nintendo, a cowboy hero on the cyberspace frontier, knows this very well. In a new 1994 ad campaign aimed at its primary market of teenagers, it sells not its game machines and software but the kids themselves back to the kids so that, according to Nintendo advertising manager Don Coyner, they will know Nintendo speaks “kidspeak” in “a way they can totally relate to.” Nintendo’s “Play It Loud” commercials are “wild and frenetic, mocking a mother who yearns for ‘a doctor in the family’ and a security guard who intones, ‘No running, no spitting, no loud music, no skateboarding, no skating.’” A kid screams, “We want to be free to do what we want to do,” and a voice tells viewers to “hock a loogie at life” (spit at it) and “give the world a wedgie” (bunched-up underwear). See Stuart Elliot, “The Media Business: Advertising: Nintendo Turns Up the Volume,”
The New York Times
, July 1, 1994, p. D 15.
18.
Stuart Elliot, “In Search of Fun for Creativity’s Sake,”
The New York Times
, January 3, 1994, p. C 19.
19.
Time
magazine as cited by Stuart Elliot, “Advertising,”
The New York Times
, June 1, 1994, p. D 15.
20.
“The LOOK,” BBC special on the fashion industry.
21.
Sallie Hofmeister, “In the Realm of Marketing, the Lion King Rules,”
The New York Times
, July 12, 1994, p. D 1. It is this logic that has led Disney to buy into Broadway (having refurbished the Forty-second Street theater where
Beauty and the Beast
is breaking records; and to seek a historical venue for a new American theme park—no longer in Virginia, which scotched its plan for a civil war theme park next to Manassas, but somewhere between Orlando and cyberspace.
22.
See Frank Deford, “Running Man,”
Vanity Fair
, August 1993, p. 54. Also see Donald Katz,
Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World
(New York: Random House, 1994).
23.
Christine Brennan, “The Athletic Shoe Company That Won’t Tread Softly,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, May 31—June 6, 1993, p. 20.
24.
Nike 1992 Annual Report.
25.
Among the companies he endorses, General Mills (Wheaties), Wilson Sporting Goods, and Sara Lee (which puts him in Hanes briefs
and
puts Ball Park Franks in him) pay him a million each, Gatorade $2 million, and Nike—his big contract—$20 million a year. Is Nike crazy? Probably not: Air Jordan is a $200 million-a-year brand, which accounts for 5 percent of Nike’s 1992 revenues. Curry Kirkpatrick, “Up, Up, and Away,”
Newsweek
, October 18, 1993, pp. 65–67. His 1995 late season return to basketball can only inflate these figures.
For a brilliant account of advertising’s history see Jackson Lears,
Fables of Abundance;
for an account more in the spirit of advertising itself, see Randall Rothenberg,
Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
26.
Nike’s Annual Report thus boasts that “people anxiously await the debut of new advertising, and are equally enthusiastic in their response. The U.S. women’s print campaign [of which the passion play is presumably a part], for instance, has garnered acclaim for its message of honesty and self-empowerment.” The aim is “creating emotional ties with consumers, giving them an opportunity to believe in the products and motivations of Nike.”
27.
Michael Lev, “Store of Future: It Also Sells Shoes,”
The New York Times
, June 17, 1991, p. D 1. According to P. K. Anderson, editor of
Visual Merchandizing and Store Design
, “There is less leisure time today so people need to have fun. You have to use every trick in the book to keep those shoppers lingering longer.”
In addition to its Portland store, Nike plans to build fourteen similar Nike Towns by the end of the decade. It has also installed ten mini—Nike Towns—“presentation stores”—in America, and plans eighty more worldwide. Nike recently opened a Vienna office with a view to East European sales possibilities. Ken Hamburg, “Nike Planning Lay-offs Globally,”
The Oregonian
, September 21, 1993, p. B 18.
28.
“There is a crisis in America right now,” says CEO Knight, and Nike wants to help. Reebok has its own version of P.L.A.Y. called The Reebok Foundation, which sponsors a Human Rights Awards Program that aspires to “make a difference in the larger world.” (Paul Fireman, Reebok CEO, in the Reebok 1992 Annual Report.)
Corporate philanthropy by moguls who have sucked markets dry is of course an old American tradition. Today’s efforts are novel only in the causes to which they are devoted—ideally both politically correct
and
aimed at creating new consumers for their products (women, kids). Carnegie built libraries, he did not subsidize new generations of steel buyers.
29.
PepsiCo’s new 1993 ad campaign dumped “Gotta have it!” in favor of “Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi,” presumably because visionary executives believe consumers will reverse the order of words and the logic words convey in their soft-drink-softened brains and drink Pepsi
in order to
have fun and become young. “We want to keep the notion alive that Pepsi is for people who want to feel and be young,” says Phil Dusenberry, the advertising executive responsible for the new campaign. Patricia Winters, “Pepsi Harkens Back to Youth,”
Advertising Age
, June 25, 1993, pp. 3, 43.
30.
Coca-Cola 1992 Annual Report.
Earl Shorris discusses the general impact of advertising on culture in
A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture
(New York: Norton, 1994).
31.
As Mark Pendergrast tells the story in his
For God, Country and Coca-Cola
(New York: Scribner’s, 1993), Coke has been doing whatever it takes to
penetrate markets ever since accommodating the Nazis (who were claiming Coke was a Jewish-American company because it sold Kosher-stamped bottles) by passing out samples at Hitler Youth rallies, and accommodating Stalin by decaramelizing “White Coke” and shipping fifty cases in clear bottles with red-star-embossed white caps for his approval. Coke was also there recently when the Berlin Wall came down, handing out six-packs. Pendergrast sums it up unsentimentally: “In World War II, Coke was an American imperialist symbol, a kosher food, a fake Communist beverage and the drink of Hitler Youth. Most people thought the war was about good, evil, competing ideologies and so on, but for Coca-Cola the issue was simpler: more Coke or less Coke.” See Mark Pendergrast, ibid., and his short piece “A Brief History of Coca-Colonization,” in
The New York Times
, August 5, 1993, p. F 13.
32.
Take an example from another consumer area: are microwave ovens “necessities”? In the United States, 44 percent of the population think so; in Mexico, only 19 percent think so. If another 25 percent of Mexicans can be persuaded that they “need” microwaves, the market for American microwaves—especially in the era of NAFTA—is dramatically enhanced. Figures from Anthony de Palma, “Mexico’s Hunger for U.S. Goods Is Helping to Sell the Trade Pact,”
The New York Times
, Week in Review, November 7, 1993. Section 4, pp. 1–2.
33.
In the 1992 Coca-Cola Companys Annual Report entitled appropriately to our theme here “Worlds of Opportunity.”
34.
The New York Times Magazine
, December 25, 1994, pp. 36–37. It is perhaps in the name of the ideology of fun that “junior toiletries” and “infant fragrances” like Jacadi’s “l’eau des petits” are being marketed by all the major parfumeurs. Shao Ko of Paris has fragrances aimed at juveniles named after Babar, Celeste, Mickey, and Minnie—the theme-parking of perfumes. See “L’esprit du Bébé,”
The New Yorker
, February 6, 1995, p.28.
35.
See Edward C. Banfield with the assistance of Laura Fasano Banfield,
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society
(New York: The Free Press, 1958).
1.
Figures from Bill Orr,
The Global Economy
(New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 101.
2.
Ibid., p. 99.
3.
John Holusha, “The Risks for High Tech,”
The New York Times
, September 5, 1993, p. F 7. Much of the decline results from cutbacks in public sector spending, but even private sector spending has remained flat.
4.
Fortune
, August 26, 1991, pp. 165–188.
5.
Fortune
, August 23, 1993, pp. 160–196.
6.
Figures and quotes from D. J. Connors and D. S. Heller, “Viewpoints: The Good Word in Trade is ‘Services,’”
The New York Times
, September 5, 1993, Section 3, p. 9.
7.
Fortune
, May 31, 1993, pp. 206–208.
8.
Pat Cadigan, “Pretty Boy Crossover,”
Synners
(New York: Bantam, 1993) as cited in John Leonard, “Gravity’s Rainbow,”
The Nation
, November 15, 1993, pp. 580–588.
9.
Quoted by Bernard Weinraub, “Robert Altman,”
The New York Times
, July 29, 1993, p. B 1.
10.
Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes! France Rallies,”
The New York Times
, January 2, 1994, p. H 1.
11.
Ibid.
12.
Cited by Daniel Pipes, “The American Conspiracy to Run the World,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, Nov. 14–20, 1994, p. 25.
13.
Corporations are especially fond of this language: thus General Electric Chairman Jack Welch called Sony founder Akio Morita (felled recently by a cerebral hemorrhage) “spiritually global.” Jolie Solomon with Peter McKillop, “We Have Lost a Very Important Player,”
Newsweek
, December 13, 1993, p. 50.
14.
In a special issue of the
International Political Science Review
(Vol. 14, No. 3, July 1993) on “The Emergent World Language System” [the title already makes the point!], Abram de Swaan writes: “In the midst of this galaxy there is one language that is spoken by more multilingual speakers in the supranational language groups than any other and that is therefore central to all central languages. This supercentral language is, of course, English,” p. 219. David D. Daitin goes further in an argument that corresponds to the battle between Jihad and McWorld when he writes, “The logic of globalization suggests that world languages such as English will begin to challenge national vernaculars in such a way as to threaten their existence as living languages.” “The Game Theory of Language Regimes,” ibid., p. 226.