Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [181]
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.