Democratization of content
Democratization of information
Democratization of media
I’m noticing more and more use of the term “democratization” in articles about the media business.
The term is especially popular in discussions about social media. Social media, a relatively new term, has come to mean those Internet tools that facilitate the “wisdom of the crowd” model where meaning and value are derived through mass collaboration. Examples of social media sites would be such Web 2.0 stars as Wikipedia, Myspace, Facebook Digg, Flikr and Youtube.
Here’s an example from an article by Brian Solis, the owner of the Silicon Valley public relations firm FutureWorks PR.
Social Media is the democratization of content and the understanding of the role people play in the process of not only reading and disseminating information, but also how they share and create content for others to participate. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in a conversational format between authors and people.
Democratization, as I understood it, had to do with an authoritarian government moving towards a less oppressive, more open society. When applied to media or content, democratization has come to mean a move away from a perceived old and authoritarian media - the major TV networks, film studios, record companies and newspapers - towards a seemingly less oppressive, personally created environment provided by web technology where content is readily available, is free, and can be delivered based on ones likes and dislikes or even the likes and dislikes of one’s network of friends.
We are naturally attracted to words like democracy or democratization in the United States. It’s in our blood. We learn early on that democracy represents freedom. So when democracy is applied to terms like media and information, it’s easy to believe that this must be a good and positive thing.
My own feeling is that democratization can’t realistically be applied to information at all. By casting the media as authoritarian, the term can be used politically by those technologists who are trying to wrest power away from the established media towards their new Web 2.0 innovations.
Content is evaluated on quality, on how well it informs, entertains, teaches or illuminates truths. Using “popularity” as its measure is to greatly misrepresent it.
I enjoyed this blog post by Andrew Keen, author of last year’s controversial book The Cult of the Amateur. He points out in his blog post The end of the middle that democratization of media is in fact a falsehood and that, in reality, wealth and power are just being reallocated to new companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook etc.
Target Corporation has been using the Beatles classic Hello Goodbye in its recent TV advertising. One spot aired during last Sunday’s Grammy Awards broadcast. They have changed the word Goodbye to Good Buy morphing the song’s refrain into an ad slogan “Hello Good Buy, Hello Good Buy, Hello Good Buy….” The campaign is “Say Hello to Good Buys at Target”.
Hello Goodbye is a song from the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour album and was a number 1 hit for the Beatles in both the US and UK in 1967.
Licensing classic songs is attractive to advertisers (those with deep enough pockets) because they can then begin to trade on the cultural significance of the song. Hello Goodbye is part of the soundtrack for a whole generation (or more). By licensing the song, advertisers leverage this collective, accumulated experience channelling it to sell merchandise. But does our culture (do we) pay a price for this?
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There are several spots using Hello Goodbye. Each has a different musical style or arrangement. Here is one version taken from YouTube.
More evidence that the commercial jingle is making a comeback can be found in Cablevision’s campy ad for its Optimum’s Triple Play service (High Speed Internet, Digital Cable TV & Digital Phone Services).
The jingle uses the dance style Reggaeton to create a fun, over-the-top spot that targets the urban, Latin American market. Reggaeton - a dance style that blends Jamaican reggae and dancehall with Latin American dance rhythms, hip hop and electronica - first gained popularity in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican musicians and producers have spread the music to the U.S.
It’s a jingle. The music is original and was written specifically to underscore the important elements of Cablevision’s Optimum campaign. The catchiest part of it, and the part that seems to be resonating with viewers, is the chanting of the toll free phone number - the “8–7–7-3-9-3–4-4-4–EIGHT” part.
Here are some comments pulled from YouTube, Yahoo and other sites…
lmao i lovee that comerical.. its catchy lol.. i cant even memorize my boyfriends number that fast..
HAHAHAHA <3333
I Love this ssongg everyone sings it in school
When I was sick in bed this was the only thing that kept going through my head “877 393 444 EIIIIGHT!” I want to kill them.
This is GREAT!! Especially love when the hot mami’s sing,. “8–7–7-3-9-3–4-4-4–EIGHT!!!” Great!
there is no point to this video but i love it it is so funny!!!
When viewers are laughing and teasing each other with your commercial and the music, the jingle, has embedded your toll free number into their consciousness, then you have hit an advertising grand slam.
Yes there are negative comments about the commercial as well but they are mostly complaints about frequency. The ad is being shown a lot. It is currently bombarding the NYC market. But again, the frequency is probably driven by the ads apparent success.
I’ve been writing about jingles lately because I believe their power has been neglected by creatives at ad agencies. Jingles have an uncool or old-fashioned stigma and have, until recently, been ignored.
Taken individually, lifestyle spots, which typically license hit songs from the 1970s/80s/90s pop catalog as their soundtrack, seem creative and funny but they run into problems when watched one-after-another during a commercial break. The ads tend to blur together. Instead of shining a light on the product, the overall effect is weakened by a slew of similar approaches. Everyone is branding the same upbeat lifestyle. There is no product differentiation. The commercial goes to great lengths to keep viewers entertained but it forgets its actual purpose.
Jingles, on the other hand, get right to the point and directly sell your campaign.
I’m very happy to see AAMCO using an actual jingle in their latest “I Got A Guy” campaign. I believe jingles sell better than today’s “lifestyle” spots. Lifestyle spots typically show glossy images of contemporary folk enjoying life while accompanied by a recognized hit song. The ad tries to gain influence from the song’s established popularity. Lifestyle ads are the most popular type of TV commercial. And that’s the problem. The spots all merge together in the viewer’s mind. So many ads are created in this style that viewers don’t differentiate between one spot and the next. Everyone is basically selling the same upbeat lifestyle therefore the products become muddled together or just forgotten.
A jingle is more specific because it is written for the actual product. It’s a custom piece of music writing tailored tightly to the spot or campaign. Jingles are seen as hokey throwbacks but their power is still evident. If you are over 25 years of age you can probably still think of jingles you heard in your youth. That’s real branding. The jingle has ingrained the product into your consciousness, probably for life.
Jingles have been out of the picture for so long that AAMCO is almost breaking new ground with their campaign. Their “I Got A Guy” campaign features the upcoming band Whiskey Falls. With echoes of great southern rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Whiskey Falls creates a hard-driving and very entertaining spot. Make no mistake - this is a jingle. It sells the AAMCO brand and even ends with AAMCO’s famous “Double A - M - C - O” brand slogan (a slogan which was conceived during a time when jingles were valued).
The AAMCO spot shows what today’s jingle could be. The song doesn’t have to be lame or corny. There are plenty of modern music styles that could be composed directly to the product. The me, the jingle is a far better way to sell. It might not be the hippest way to sell but I’ll bet it pulls better.
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The other thing I like about the use of jingles is that they are a move away from the rampant plundering of our greatest recordings and the excessive attempts to link hit songs to products which they have nothing to do with.
Devo re-records their biggest hit “Whip it good” as “Swiff it good” in a TV ad for the floor cleaner Swiffer.
The Beatles song “All you need is love” is licensed by Luvs who use it for their campaign, “All You Need is Luvs”
“Blister In the Sun ” by the Violent Femmes, a seminal punk bank, is used in an ad campaign for Wendy’s hamburgers.
This summer Wilco licenses 6 songs from their new album Blue Sky Blue to Volkswagen who use all 6 songs in ad spots for their latest campaign marking the first time a multitude of songs by one artist/band is used in a single campaign.
Where is today’s cash cow for the music business? It’s the placing of famous or upcoming pop songs in TV commercials. We’ve all heard and seen these ads. Led Zepplin’s “Rock’n Roll” has become the main branding vehicle (no pun) for Cadillac. The ad speaks to those 40-year-olds that can now afford Cadillacs by co-opting an anthem from their youth.
There’s no doubt the trend will continue. Commercial jingles are a thing of the past. Today’s ad strategy is about branding. You put a product, no matter how bland, next to a song that has some “coolness” factor to it, or, in the case of the Beatles “All You Need is Love”, acknowledged cultural value, and voila, the product achieves instant significance or even hipness.
But by glorifying a product, no matter how banal, the song is immediately devalued. If today’s protest song can be tomorrow’s theme for toilet tissue, then the power of a song to effect culture becomes weakened. The power of the song becomes about how much money it commands when it is licensed for commercial use.
The Culture Is the Commercial
Jay Babcock, the publisher of the art and music magazine Arthur makes this point…
“What kind of culture sets up a system where the only way to hear good music is through TV commercials for products you don’t need?” Babcock said. “What little art is out there has to sneak in wherever it can, being stand-ins for jingles. It’s the sign of an unhealthy culture. The culture is eating itself.”
A recent New York Post article reports that the recording artist Fergie recently inked a $4-million deal to sing about Candie’s teen apparel on her next album. “The 32-year-old Black Eyed Peas singer is the first global star to consent to product placement in her songs - agreeing to include the provocative clothing line Candie’s in her lyrics.”
I don’t know that this matters to some bands, they are living in a music business that is sinking into chaos by the day and they are looking for cash, a reward for their work. When Wilco, a major act, licenses 6 songs to Volkswagen saying they are doing it as a way to get their music out there, you know the music business has drastically changed and these artists are looking for the type of payday that used to be available to successful bands through albums/radio play/touring. That old model of success is, apparently, broken.
According to Greg Lane, senior vice president of ad agency GSD&M in Austin, Texas, ad pop it is a mutually beneficial relationship. “It’s a marriage of two brands. It’s the client’s brand, be it AT&T or iPod, as well as the brand of the band itself,” Lane said.
“Part of the deal is, you’re never going to make everyone happy. And there’s no such thing as bad press. Even if fans are upset, it might not affect sales of what’s being advertised — it might increase sales.”
As the respected musician Tom Waits says “By turning a great song into a jingle, advertisers have achieved the ultimate: a meaningless product has now been injected with your meaningful memory of a song,” he said. “The songs and the artists who have created them have power and cultural value, that’s why advertisers pay out millions for them. Once you have taken the cash, you, your song and your audience are forever married to the product.”
Wilco song in Volkswagen commercial
Of Montreal song “Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games” re-recorded with the words changed to “Let’s go Outback tonight” for Outback Steakhouse
In this month’s newsletter, I talk about jingles - those little tunes composed specifically to sell products on TV. Jingles are all but are dead now, you hardly ever hear one. This article examines why. Was there a selling power that jingles had that today’s commercials lack?
Excerpt…
There was a time when TV advertisers packaged their marketing messages within the lyrics and melodies of songs written specifically for ad campaigns. The songs came to be known as jingles because they were catchy, singable tunes. Today, this form of advertising has essentially disappeared from American commercials.
Advertisers now are more sophisticated. The jingle is seen as a corny, throwback to a time when viewers would accept a sing-songy tune written about a product.
These days advertisers seek to position their product within the “lifestyle” of their target market. The task is to create an ad campaign that reflects this lifestyle. Commercials today often don’t even mention the product, you just see happy people using it, hopefully dressed the way you do. The implication is; they use it - you should use it too.
Andrew Keen, democracy, democratization of content, democratization of information, democratization of media, film studios, intellectual property issues, internet tools, media business, myspace, The Cult Of The Amateur, tv networks, web technology, wikipedia, youtube 
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