The Tanning of America (28 page)

Once I got back to work, I was immersed in an ad campaign for Chrysler's new Jeep Liberty. They had named it that and had shot the commercial before 9/11 and, in what had come out of someone's imagination, included rousing images of the Jeep climbing up the side of the Statue of Liberty. Not sure at all about how the public was going to take this, I was very wary of a spot that featured the Statue of Liberty at a time when smoke was still coming up from Ground Zero.

And right as I was thinking about recommending that Chrysler scrap it, I had a stroke of inspiration. Two marketing challenges when taken separately were problems. But if you put them together—the Jeep Liberty commercial and the song “Hero”—the combination could be something redemptive for everyone in the very traumatic period we were going through. I went back to Interscope and worked with the head of new media, Courtney Holt, on setting the song to the commercial. When I took our rough version and presented it to everyone at GM, they loved it and went crazy, hoping that this could really solve their strategic problem.

There was a hitch. Since the publishing rates for the use of songs in commercials are typically very steep, we knew that Jeep would balk at going for a record already in release by a global superstar. But then it occurred to me there was a way around that issue. We approached Marty Bandier, EMI Music Publishing chairman, and said, “Marty, we're here to ask for six months.” After a pause during which he said nothing, we proposed that if he would waive the publishing for six months, then Chrysler would be spending its assets—ten million—in media. And how was this good for the publisher? The argument from us was, “If you believe that ten million of media works, you know that we're gonna sell more albums and you're gonna make all that money in addition to making back the money you waived in giving the six months of the publishing.”

The logic is clear today. But it made zero sense when we suggested it. The answer was initially, “Say what? Invest the publishing rights?” Nonetheless, I knew that it would tap a nerve, benefit the client, and sell albums like crazy. Sure enough, we put the commercial and the song together and debuted it during
Monday Night Football
. And that's how we began the launch of the campaign and how “Hero” cemented Enrique's place in the heart of America. As the result of the platform of
Monday Night Football
, radio stations put the record into heavy rotation. In turn, as it was played, the Jeep was successfully launched into the new millennium.

Many of these changes had been predicted in a ground-breaking book entitled
Future Shock,
written by Alvin Toffler in 1970. Toffler had predicted a state of future shock for generations that had already come of age and were not ready to deal with the rapid pace of changes in technology, globalization, and culture—changes that he believed future generations would be better equipped to handle. In an era that predated Microsoft and Apple, “TMI” was not yet in the vernacular—although Toffler saw the perils of “too much information” that would accompany those technologies and the challenges of coping with the resulting media onslaught. For those industries unable to remain “fluid,” as he put it, the future didn't bode well. For those producers/ purveyors that could find a more direct way to link to their consumers, however, the shock of the future would be absorbed.

In the last of my days in the music business, some inklings of this paradigm shift were becoming clear to me. In fact, I had floated many of the elements that became known as “360 deals”—whereby a record company, for example, would invest in artists and become their partners in all avenues of entertainment, brand endorsement, merchandising, live performance, and so on, and participate in the revenues. Having everything under one roof, in the service of that artist, just made sense for all involved. But in 2001 when I was pitching the idea, pretty much everyone laughed.

Guess what? It took the demise, more or less, of the industry for everyone to realize that partnering in this way, working with advertising companies, was the future that had arrived. Record companies' marketing launches now needed to be subsidized and brands wanted in on that cool.

Again, there were old attitudes coming out of yesteryear, when the idea of artists and record companies aligning with marketing products was selling out to commercialism. Not to me, needless to say. The key, once more, was authenticity. How was it selling out if the product or project was authentic to an artist and to the audience aligned with the music already? If the uniform of country music stars was a pair of Levi's jeans, it was only natural that those artists should enjoy the rewards of keeping that brand, and whatever products they were already repping for free, current. The prime example is Bob Seger's “Like a Rock,” which became synonymous with American rugged individualism by providing the slogan for Chevy trucks and led to more than a decade as the brand's advertising theme song.

Though my argument for forging partnerships between artists, record labels, and brands fell mostly on deaf ears in the early '00s, a decade later, it's a practice that's helping to resurrect the record business.

Be that as it may, at around this same period, on their own the properties of tanning were providing the more resilient brands with new means of connecting to consumers successfully—leading to a kind of future shock remix. So part of my job description as I got into the marketing world was to better understand and be able to translate these new tools, as well as the nuanced code our multilingual target consumers were speaking.

In mid-'03, when I went to register and trademark the firm name, Translation, for my new marketing and consulting agency, I was very happy and frankly shocked that it was available. Now that I was opening up my own shop, I had decided to gain experience on the other side of the marketing fence by investing in a relatively new brand, Carol's Daughter, a line of hair and body products created by Brooklyn-bred entrepreneur Lisa Price.

Besides the beautiful, earthy, incredibly fragrant appeal of the products—luxurious body butters and rich hair pomades—I related to the brand values and to the story of natural beauty secrets that had been handed down through three generations of women and made with love and ingredients from nature. There was also something very cool about how Lisa had built her business through hand-selling that kept her in touch with her multicultural consumers, mostly women, who connected emotionally to her products.

In '04, when the doors to my marketing company, Translation, first opened, I brought those insights to the table when the team and I began major strategy sessions for a growing array of accounts. We quickly realized that if we were asking brand managers and corporate executives to drop their old categories for boxing consumers into demographics, we had to find ways to talk about the psychographics that were meaningful to their efforts. Instead of approaching this task in a more traditional way—that is, through data about where consumers live, what they earn, how they spend, if they belong to religious institutions, how or if they vote, what their educational levels are (all valid)—we wanted to explain our consumer target, also known as the millennials, in terms of their shared values and experiences. Broadly, millennials are seen as the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s.

While it is hard to pinpoint age, we were able to begin with a list of key virtues: a) Our consumer target is a mind-set, b) our consumer is urban, c) our consumer is savvy, and d) our consumer is in control. Elaborating on each of these virtues, we then went on to explain them in the context of the changes happening in the real world at the time—posing questions to get into the heart of our approach.

1.
What distinguishes the mind-set of the target consumer?
The mind-set of millennials is adaptive. Today as boundaries dissolve and information moves without restriction, demography tells us less about the “who” we want to engage. Within our general market consumer universe there exists this psychographic dimension that adapts and responds as a creative collective—igniting pop culture trends, as well as propagating them into mainstream culture. The polyethnic consumers of this mind-set are inclined to make brands their own and within their diverse social networks leverage brands as creative new material in composing self-image and style.

2.
Where does our urban consumer live? “
Urban” evokes the images of New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all cities or places where people live in close proximity to one another. In the '00s, “urban” is no longer confined to a literal definition or location. Urban consumers are movers who span urban/suburban /global. Urban consumers are confident and proud of their backgrounds and distinct cultural histories but would not be considered ethnocentric. Urban consumers are truly cross-cultural. They are exposed to, they understand, and they embody this mixing innately. The urban audience, millennially speaking, cannot be entreated in a superficial manner with style cues or compelled by inauthentic, prepackaged, or homogenized messaging. “What to have” and other status definers are all intertwined within the media they consume. The urban consumer is, in essence, the most exacting, precise consumer on the planet—influential not just individually or as a segment but as a megamovement. Their time is now.

3.
What kind of needs and wants define the savvy consumer?
With the ongoing debate as to who exactly comprises the hip-hop generation—whether it's late boomer adults who connected to the music and culture in the seventies and eighties or Gen X and Gen Y youth and adults who came of age in the late eighties and nineties, or the Now and Next teens coming of age—these savvy consumer millennials are marketing veterans. They have been marketed to—directly and indirectly—since birth and through their parents, giving rise to an extraordinarily aware and often cynical audience. Belief, therefore, is granted only by experience. They want attention and need a certain level of scarcity. Authenticity and aspiration remain critical for the savvy consumer, in both the need and want categories. They are fickle and can spot brands that feign understanding ; they spot and shun brands that pretend to know them. The savvy millennial consumer wants to align with brands as badges of identity—as indicators of status. The need is for a much more meaningful relationship than simple utility. The savvy consumer wants to believe in brand properties that confer both instant and perpetual cool.

4.
What characteristics describe our consumer in control?
Above all, the consumer in control seeks out, takes pride in, and celebrates the unique expressions that define one's self. Consumers in control drive tastemaking forces behind consumption in a range of areas including fashion, technology, media, and entertainment. They are highly connected, infinitely mobile, literate, and empowered by technology. In the '00s, especially, the consumer in control goes beyond the mere functional use of technology to a self-motivated adoption, utilization, and creative expression.

 

What else? You'll have noticed by now that in describing the consumer target as a mind-set, as urban in their point of view, as savvy and in control, we haven't pinpointed age. Truthfully, the more we honor the psychographics, the less we can assert that there is an age range. Because we know that youth is a state of mind, not an age, we have identified a youth mind-set that complements the tan mental complexion—both of which are aspects of youth culture. While we already knew that those with a youth mind-set have a more profound relationship to technology than other consumers, we wanted to provide an overview of passion points for youth culture that were going to be valuable in our strategies. By no means comprehensive, the list includes: music, sports, entertainment, gaming, fashion/beauty, style/ design, creativity and self-expression, social connections (real and virtual), the Internet, and, again, technology.

There was something else that we made sure to recognize going in and that is the fact that the remix of culture—which is exactly what hip-hop did from the start and continues to do—is the happy domain of the millennials. They know the history of what's been perpetually cool and they know absolutely what is over. This may explain why Betty White, Tony Bennett, and Jack Nicholson, each seen as having perpetual cool, have a youth following. Millennials like to identify cool and school other consumers. The millennials, raised on hip-hop as a fact of life, believe fundamentally in the power of authenticity. They keep demonstrating that the cool of technology isn't about the technology. It's about what we get to experience as a result of the technology.

To say that Silicon Valley produced more technology that changed America and the rest of the world than anywhere else is really just stating the obvious. But what we don't point out often enough is that it was those very brainy Silicon Valley guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who made it cool to be a geek. And they started a movement of fellow cool geeks too—founders of search engines with funky names, social networking sites, and little garage tech start-ups that went on to sell for billions. Does it make them cool 'cause they got rich? Yes, being resourceful with whatever you've got definitely makes you cool. As far as I'm concerned, the boldness to be real and be different and even proclaim your geekdom is crazy cool. The first time I heard that the tech support team for Best Buy had started as a company that branded themselves the “Geek Squad”—those guys and gals that you invite into your home to solve technology problems—I wished that I'd thought of it!

Not surprisingly, brands that make and market technology live or die depending on their fluency with youth culture and on their proximity to cool. Let me provide some famous examples that may or may not be familiar. It's hard to remember that there was a point in time, not too long ago, when there was actually a wide-open race for what company would deliver the successor to the Sony Walkman when portable audio devices began their transition to digital. Why Sony didn't ultimately figure that out and failed at beating everyone else to the punch was not a competency problem. This was, after all, a corporation that owned music and film companies and technology companies—all the ingredients to make such a device.