The Tanning of America (30 page)

The radical disruption came next. If it could be used the same way it had been employed in the marketing of “Nuthin' but a ‘G' Thang,” then all bets were on the iPod and iTunes becoming the new frontier. How were they going to pull it off? With a music video, of course. As it so happened, when the partnership between Apple and Interscope was coming together, the number one song and video was 50 Cent's “In Da Club.” 50's album
Get Rich or Die Tryin',
on Interscope, was also at number one and he was getting ready to film the video for the next single, “P.I.M.P.”

The video release was perfectly timed for a marketing bonanza for the iTunes store. And there was no subtlety in how Apple's coolest new gadget was featured at the opening of the star-studded, hilarious, sexy video—complete with 50 Cent in a swank bedroom, dressed in all-white, surrounded by beautiful women in white lace panties and bras, as the camera zooms in on his hands and he fingers the dial of his white iPod, clicking on a selection that reads “Playlist.”

The single, album, and video downloads, exclusive on iTunes, blew the roof off. 50's G-Unit by RBK also received product placement and swiftly became the fastest-selling sneaker in the country. With a scene in the video that included a mafioso-style meeting—with Snoop Dogg at the head of the table—there was no violence, no guns, just P.I.M.P.in'. The video even featured a real pimp, Magic Don Juan out of Chicago, complete with headphones. Talk about art imitating life! It was gangsta remix, fun, outrageous, still in the hip-hop authentic lane where the gritty realities of the street meet the fantasy of limitless luxury. Not very many could afford the fantasy life, but they could afford the iPod. And some artists who could afford this life but had never really fixed the iPod on their radar all of a sudden were calling up Interscope and asking to get their hands on the devices. Once the iPod was in the hands of famous tastemakers, consumers gravitated en masse to Apple's offerings.

Within two years, Apple had sold over twenty-eight million iPods and the company controlled 75 percent of the digital music player market, with its overall earnings having quadrupled as a result of this chapter of the company's growth. On a wide screen the story was, as we at Translation later liked to say, “It's not the iPod, it's the iProcess.” That is to say that products are not what sells; an understanding of culture is what sells.

On another level, a case could be made that iTunes was the music version of what would happen if you legalized a street trade. After all, an illegal online business had gone legit, and Apple had figured out the mechanism for doing that and making sure everyone in the supply chain got a piece of the action.

There were and are still more challenges to confront with future shock remix. The music business had to adjust to the fact that consumers were now going to be buying a lot more singles than albums—which continues to test the resilience of the recording industry. Gone were the days of consumers paying $11.99 for a CD that probably only contained one song, which had been promoted to them and they liked. Oh, and then there was another form of online piracy and hijacking that had gone under the radar for years.

With music companies spending the money to make and promote videos online, the premise was that viewers would get excited and want to go download the music. What happened instead was that Web providers like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and You-Tube were showing the promotional videos on their sites and then selling advertising based on all the traffic the music was attracting—not paying the record companies or the artists a penny from all the ad revenue!

One Saturday when Doug Morris, head of Universal Music Group, was at home, he went online to check out 50 Cent's “In Da Club” and noticed that before the video came on there was a Toyota commercial leading into it. Knowing something didn't feel right, he first checked with his chief operations officer to ask, “Did we get paid for this?”

Well, no, he learned, the video was promotional. This shouldn't have been surprising. After all, for almost twenty years the purpose of getting music videos played on TV was to promote sales of the music itself, not to generate revenue. Doug understood the importance of promotion, of course. His concern was, then, if the advertisers were paying the Internet companies for showing the videos, shouldn't the content creators participate in the revenues? This notion eventually led to Vevo, a video music hub that partners with Sony, UMG, EMI, and Google, and is at the time of this writing the number one streamed music video site in the world. Before any of that happened, the immediate consequence of Doug Morris's discovery was that every music video belonging to Universal's acts was pulled off Web sites until deals paying everyone on the record could be worked out. Initially, none of the Web providers wanted to pay for what they were used to getting for free. But after a short time, as they watched their sites lose traction quickly—with hits diminishing now that consumers weren't visiting to see the videos—deals were eventually reached. With other music companies following suit, rules and regulations were implemented that made the brave new world of the Internet a place where content could be protected to a greater extent and where revenue could be shared with the artists responsible for the video content. In the end, content is where the cool lies. The recording industry, thanks to that reality, lived to fight on another day—by being willing to change.

Thanks to the Interscope connection and Jimmy Iovine's perceptions and help, Apple successfully set a new standard in technology—by removing it from the equation so that the iPod found abundant life and that the prophecy of Steve Jobs that music “would never be the same again” came true.

When Translation first opened, my initial partners, Charles Wright and John McBride, two of the most brilliant guys I've ever met, instigated a discussion between the three of us about the relevance of new technologies to urban youth culture. While this might seem like a statement of the obvious, we wanted to go deeper and to understand how technology was behaving in culture in a way that music had for years—especially in terms of bringing like-minded kids from different backgrounds together.

The three of us hadn't arrived at this discussion from the same route either. Charles Wright, African-American, had started with me at Interscope as a product manager. Originally from North Carolina, Charles had left home to seek his fortune and ended up in New York City, bringing with him great fashion sensibilities and an exacting feel for taste and style. Always impeccably put together, Charles thinks very much in the same way—developing concepts that are very, very neat and make total sense for everyone on board, yet touch on aesthetics that are irresistibly hip. John McBride, a white Midwesterner, traveled around the U.S. in his younger days, surfing and paying attention to cultural differences, and then got his professional education as a design engineer at Kodak. From design, he made the leap to strategy at Translation, bringing with him a razor-sharp understanding of marketing causes and effects, as well as his ability to look at aspects of packaging and product development in solving brand problems.

Like me, both Charles and John share an anthropological view of pop culture and they value a historical context for looking at trends. When we were starting out, I was the quarterback and they were my two touchdown-making wide receivers. The team spirit really was fired by a mutually held cultural curiosity.

So as we talked about the tanning force of technology—in so many words—we began to look at the generations and shared sensibilities reflected in the popularity of games, gadgets, online connections, social networking sites, etc. We thought it was interesting that though the entry points were different, there was a global affinity to the experience and the associations with having fun, hanging out, and spending a good percentage of leisure time connected to some form of technology and on a regular basis. My frame of reference takes me back to neighborhood bodegas where you could play for hours, going back and forth between the three or four video games installed in the back. Charles and John noted they and others were first exposed to the same electronic entertainment in other kinds of venues not in urban America but dotted everywhere across the American landscape—in kid-friendly arcades, bars and taverns, honky-tonks, pool halls, and college pubs. There was no game that was marketed to one demographic over the other. Everybody loved Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders and everyone wanted to go over to whoever's house had an Atari or ColecoVision game system. And from that point on, as the video game industry has exploded exponentially—expanding the consumer base from very little kids with handheld electronics to much older weekend warriors at home battling foes on their TV screens—the universal appeal has provided opportunities for further cultural exchanges. There has been as much exporting of culture as there has been importing of meaningful aspects of other cultures from around the globe. No racial barriers or demographic lines prevent any group of consumers around the world from loving Madden and Halo, as two favorite examples, any more or less than any other group. Just because the visual representations include, say, Japanese, Korean, or Russian lead players and accents, that doesn't make them any less heroic for the other nationalities playing the game. The playing field, virtual though it is, through electronic games made here and abroad, has only bolstered the growing polyethnic global population of youth culture. Gaming thus has become the same kind of unifying force as has music. Again, as Wright and McBride like to remind me, the main currency behind these forces of tanning is something primitive—the desire to have fun, to share in something cool.

At Translation, we came to the early conclusion that when we were being brought in to address issues for a long-established brand that was suffering in the marketplace, very often it was because they had landed on the wrong side of cool. And because they haven't adapted to the new rules of the new economy that require having the communication skills to speak with consumers of cool, brands who are faltering may not have any way of knowing where they fall on the bell curve of being cool, on the upslope, at the crest, or on the plunging far side, way past cool. As an example, we sometimes present brands with a diagram of that bell curve or hill to show where they fall in terms of pop culture relevance. If “not cool” precedes the slope and “cool” is at the crest of the hill and “over” is on the far side of it, they are asked to determine where they are and where they would like to be.

Many times when we meet brand managers who don't know what their marketing issues are, either they have no idea what their position is relative to cool or they'll admit they're pretty much in the “not cool” flats. A well-designed strategy can address the state of being “not cool” and is actually much easier to approach than being in the ugly state of “over.”

In these days of future shock remix, the activation or reactivation of cool in a brand ultimately comes back to harnessing and leveraging the cultural influences and heat of the youth mind-set. To do that with companies that sell technology, as we've been talking about, requires not just a change in conversation but one that creates urgency. The emphasis isn't
If I don't take part in this brand's offering now, I won't be cool.
We prefer a conversation, as one suggestion, that leads to the discovery of a status definer, or something that acts as a badge. It doesn't just relate to price, although that's one aspect that can be cool. It may be a Swatch watch, as a classic example, that is a reflection of who you are. It says,
When I have X brand, people feel about me in Y way, and it shows my level of success.
Status definers can be badges that are descriptive of your personality, style, and what makes you stand out in a crowd. When the feeling connected to having the brand is meaningful to many, the coolness value fuels urgency and mass consumption.

A lack of urgency was one challenge that Hewlett-Packard had brought to us during a period of struggle for the brand. On the heels of the announcement from Apple that “hell froze over” a deal had been struck with HP to make good on the promise that the iPod would be compatible with the PC. In return for a minuscule piece of the profit, Hewlett-Packard was, in a sense, becoming the distributor and sales team of iPod for PC users—a great deal for Apple to get their technology into PC users' hands but of little lasting value to HP. There was nothing about the device that was unique to Hewlett-Packard, nothing that made them more than the reseller or would raise the level of cool about their brand by giving them proximity to a cool product. In fact, the device looked just like an iPod, and you had to read the small print or look at the logo on the back to even realize it was HP. So smart was Apple's deal that not only did HP distribute the iPod for Steve Jobs, but Hewlett-Packard was forbidden to make music for a certain period of time.

From a marketing standpoint, it was baffling that hell had frozen over and there was this revolutionary relationship between Apple and PC users with nothing to be gained for Hewlett-Packard. They couldn't even customize the color schemes because the deal required that it look exactly like the iPod at the time—all white.

As I pointed out to my team, “HP needs something proprietary around the iPod.”

To that end, we came up with various ideas that were terrific but nothing really jumped. Then I had a breakthrough idea to do aftermarket customization and touch a pulse point of consumers—self-expression. We pitched the concept that if you wanted to print tattoo-style skins that would fit on your iPod, you could personalize them online with die-cut designs and then print them out with special paper that would transform your plain white iPod into something that was one of a kind and all the more cool. After I went to Interscope and asked if music icons would like to donate artwork, celebrities like Sting and Gwen Stefani contributed their personal designs that consumers could download and print out for their iPod skins—offering the choice of their own design or that of a famous artist. Besides the buzz this created, it went back to using and elevating one of HP's core competencies—which is printing. Hewlett-Packard now had something proprietary to promote around the iPod that in turn reminded consumers of the excellence of their other products related to printing—special papers and other printing materials, stickers, and photographic compatibility. We ran ads with directions in
Spin
and
Rolling Stone,
inserting the donated artwork with instructions as a free sample so that readers felt invited to this new way to wear your iPod by customizing the face. The immediate word of mouth was sensational. In coming up with a way for HP's deal with Apple to make any sense, we scored such a success that printable iPod skins became one of
Time
magazine's Top 10 Ideas of 2004.