Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [43]
Meanwhile, Creative Artists has figured out that if it wants to spin McWorld for the likes of Coke it needs to increase its synergy with the information and communications sector. In the summer of 1994 Ovitz brought aboard at C.A.A. the former chief financial officer of AT&T, Robert Kavner. His job was to “seek opportunities for directors, writers and performers in the rapidly expanding arena linking personal computers to on-line services involving, at the outset, education, shopping, films and video games;” Mr. Kavner allowed as to how “we’re in the equivalent of the industrial revolution.”5
The story of McWorld’s rise is the story of the advertising industry’s explosive growth in the same period. Global advertising expenditures have climbed a third faster than the world economy and three times faster than world population, rising sevenfold from 1950 to 1990 from a modest $39 billion to $256 billion.6 Per capita global spending has gone from $15 per person in 1950 to nearly $50 per person today. While the United States leads the pack at nearly $500 per person, countries like South Korea (whose advertising industry had an annual rate of growth of 35 to 40 percent in the late eighties) and India (where billings increased fivefold during the eighties) are racing to catch up.7 Advertising both reflects and reinforces the importance of brand over product in the global market. Brand names like Marlboro, Bud beer, Barbie doll, and Nescafé often carry their parent companies (Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, Mattel, and Nestlé), and both corporate names and product lines have brand values worth billions of dollars.8
Brand names are ciphers for associations and images carefully cultivated by advertising and marketing because they are what generate market demand. In defending his striking and deeply nihilistic Benetton campaign that displays AIDS victims and crime scenes rather than sexy models and pastel sweaters, Luciano Benetton insists “we are forging a new art of communication … we spread no lies. We say, in this world there is sickness, war and death.”9 What exactly is a picture of a naked male torso sporting a tattoo that reads HIV POSITIVE meant to communicate to potential apparel purchasers? Social commitment? A subtle warning against stereotyping or an unsubtle example of it? A political provocation? Or just some creative director’s notion of a subliminally hot hip-hop amalgam of flesh, disease, and gay politics that makes green the dominant hue in the Colors of Benetton and turns death into one more attractive lifestyle?10
American Express has also been running an ad campaign with selected retailers that tries to make shopping socially responsible but actually subordinates social responsibility to shopping. One ad in the series enthuses, “customers come into The Body Shop to buy a hair conditioner and find a story about the Xingu Reserve and the Kayapo Indians who collect Brazil nuts for us.” It turns out that The Body Shop is less interested in “selling soap” than in saving the rain forest. How? By paying Kayapo Indians to extract nut oil and get them out of logging so they will leave the tropical rain forest alone! Body Shop founder Anita Roddick repays American Express for the alchemy by which they turn a soap seller into a conservation society by mentioning at the end of the ad that “the travel I do is often dangerous. I am in bizarre places, remote places. What I use for that is the American Express Card.” The Xingu Reserve—certainly remote, also bizarre?—apparently takes