Popular Music and the Marketplace

From Story Narrative to Narratives of Self—music genre as interpolation in advertising

In this section I shall get to the heart of the matter that I outlined in my introductory post.  That is “those times at which advertisers attempt to accrue a musical audience wholesale by attaching the ideology of that music to the ideology of their product, or their own morality.  The genre of music is specifically made to tell the story the advertiser intends in the hope that the diegetic sound will enter into synergy with the morality or the product of the film’s purveyor.”

I will first discuss two successful attempts at such a venture.  I will then, continuing to move backwards through time, look at a third piece of footage, one that was never released, but which I was lucky enough to come across in the course of first hand research.

The Yeo Valley Boys

The recent Yeo Valley Campaign presented by ‘The Yeo Boyz, feat Lil’ Massey’ is not quite what you would expect from an organic dairy producer.  Of course, on one level the idea of a group of farmers rapping like gangster rude-boys as they till the land is purely ironic.  However the message remains clear; “Organic Yoghurt is not just for aging upper-middle class predominantly white families, it is for everyone.” 

This is an intelligent campaign that works on many levels.  The almost unbelievably clunky nature of the lyrics and the ridiculous moments in the film (such as a break-dancing tractor) ensure that the advert works on a purely comic level and that what might be considered Yeo Valley’s target audience (those upper-middle class educated oldies) are not lost.

However, the single’s release over Youtube and its style make it undeniably aimed at ‘the Youth’ element.  While one can hardly expect thousands of rap and hip hop lovers to start ‘getting down’ to the Yeo track, the pastiche has the same softening affect on them as watching Labour Politicians desperately attempt to ‘boogie’ to Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream.  And just as they might disseminate clips of Tony Blair doing ‘big-fish little fish cardboard box’ among their friends, so too will they spread the link to The Yeo Boyz. Testament to this is the video’s 99,741 (more by now most likely) hits.

And once in dissemination, though comic rather than truly a work of great music, the message is clear—“OK, we are not like you, we are country farmers in wellingtons driving tractors, not city kids in trainers catching buses,  but neither do we take ourselves totally seriously, and, we are here for you.”

Essentially, a genre is manipulated to encourage an unlikely audience to see a product as part of their culture where they would not have done otherwise.

One can break the process down as follows:

1)      Target audience chosen

2)      Music genre that unites the audience adopted

3)      Genre and product identified as in symphony by a commissioned track

4)      Target audience hear track and identify with it either genuinely or for its comic value

5)      Target audience therefore identify with product

6)      Track gets fixed in audience’s mind (Earworm affect)

7)      Track gets hugely successful

8)      Target audience re-identifies with product each time the track is played

9)      A new market is opened up

I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke

In 1971 Coca Cola released a revolutionary advert.  They gathered a group of young people on a hillside in Italy to perform a commission track entitled “I’d like to buy the world a coke.” The idea was to transform a popular but faceless product, a soft-drink into an ideology of unity and world peace; a symbol for young people the world over.

1)      Target audience of young, politically aware idealists chosen

2)      Music genre that unites them chosen- the pop/folk genre of the song, the sort of jingle one can strum on a guitar in a field, at a demo against Vietnam or on a Greenpeace demonstration, or while travelling the world with your friends who form the first every gap-year generation

3)      Genre and product identified as in symphony by a simple and affective commission track with a simple but perfectly fitting chorus and harmonies

4)      Target audience hear track by people like them the world over and identify

5)      Target audience therefore identify with the product more actively than ever before

6)      Track gets fixed in audience’s mind (Earworm effect)

7)      Track gets hugely successful (Bill backer, the man behind the campaign organises it’s release as a single by the New Seekers and it tops the charts for two weeks)

8)      Target audience identifies with the product each time the track is played

9)      A new market is opened up

This is an incredibly clever process.  However, it is not one that is always easy to judge or necessarily successful. 

One example of how such a project might have failed:

Imaging Nike had adopted Coca Colas campaign.  Imagine that in 2001, at the time of the fair-trade uproar and the release of Naomi Klein’s Bestselling work ‘No Logo’ that Nike had released ‘I’d like to dress the world in Nike,’ targeting the campaign at the politically aware youth the world over.  I will hesitate to make this speculation; the campaign would have been catastrophic.

And this brings me to a piece of footage I discovered by a girl band called “The Ladybugs” from 1965.  

The Ladybugs

The premise is simple and follows our stages.  The target audience chosen are young people, the new teenage generation discovering pop-music for the first time; disco goers, Dusty Springfield fanatics. The track is commissioned.  The idea that factory farming is a good thing is expressed in the popular song genre of the day by two attractive young women expressing their sexuality in a way their forebears could never have imagined doing. However, this is where the project un-sticks.  Identification with the track is impossible, just as identifying Nike with folk-pop would have been in 2001. Why?  Because the advertising ploy in both cases is overtly reactionary; an attempt at self defence, rather than a genuine appeal to a new market or for a new level of appreciation.

The 1964 release of Ruth Harrison’s famous book Animal Machines meant that public feeling had been very much turned against the ideas of factory farming by the end of 1964.  In such a climate genre manipulation could not, I would argue, have worked.  Instead of acting in symphony or creating sympathy, the genre would have expelled the Ladybug’s track as a disgusting appropriation of a musical form most easily linked to ideas of liberation, not ideas of caging.

In a way, ‘The Factory Farming Song’ would have been the equivalent of John Major fighting the 1997 election to Bon Jovi’s ‘Keep the Faith.’