“Classic is dead! Classic is dead!” This is not the battle cry of heavy metal fans or techno kids but has been, for more than 10 years, an endlessly repeated diagnosis among advertising professionals. The term “classic” basically refers to all conventional advertising channels, i.e. mass media, such as television, radio and print media. As everybody knows, these channels have lost much of their power: special interests of target groups are becoming increasingly fragmented and, therefore, media segments are becoming smaller; the number of niche-blogs is exploding, and TV spectators are forced, by a multitude of boring programs, to zap continuously. That’s why a number of alternative advertising techniques have steadily gained ground over the past ten years. They are termed “below the line”, and those who can’t help but think of “below the waistline” when hearing it, are not all wrong. What is showcased as the spearhead of innovation in the marketing communication sector on closer inspection turns out to be a cabinet of horrors.
While product placement – commonly known as surreptitious advertising – in TV and cinema might be justifiable as a means of making movies and TV series more realistic, many public and customer-related events have never gotten beyond bouncy castle level. However, the least imaginative form is cultural sponsoring, the prime discipline of “me-too” marketers. In general, it follows the wash-my-neck-but-don’t-get-me-wet principle, accompanied, in some cases, by the sponsor’s exaggerated claim for control or, in others, by his complete lack of interest. In short, sponsoring companies either want to have it all their way or they let you know in a more or less subtle way: “Take the money and do with it whatever you want, as long as our company logo appears on TV.” In the high culture sector a third variant seems to become more and more popular: giving awards to artists in order to benefit from image transfers or to feign expertise (Liebs 2006).
The only advertising discipline which had its sparks of ingenuity now and then is guerrilla marketing. But as guerrilla activities today belong even to the standard repertoire of marketing freshmen, the concept, which benefits from being a rarely used and exceptional strategy, is prone to decline. When subversion becomes ubiquitous, the general audience will not only see through its mechanics but also raise their expectations: “Well then, go ahead, show me some nice subversions and surprise me…” When the “détournement screw has been turned once too often” (Edlinger 2006; see also Düllo/Liebl 2005; Class 2006) this is a challenge which can hardly be met.
If everyone does the same, then there will be no competitive advantage in the market. But who has got the courage to do things differently – or will even do different things? No matter where you look, currently there is not much to see. Even the latest marketing trends will hardly pass the sustainability test: Avatar-based Marketing, Eggvertising, Breker-style Advertising – the half-life period of nice but irrelevant ideas is constantly diminishing. What we are waiting for are genuine transgressions.
Throughout the history of advertising some companies have successfully made such transgressions. In Austria for example. In the 1970s, Humanic, a Graz-based shoe retailer, launched advertising campaigns that became milestones in the history of marketing: thirty-second TV commercials created and produced by artists like H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm, Axel Corti or Richard Kriesche. Radical avant-garde and conceptual art for the Austrians, supported by the pretentious claim: “Humanic paßt immer” (i.e., Humanic always fits). Art sponsoring in TV commercials – and that’s what it basically is – would be unthinkable in present times, although allegedly anything goes today. It’s because this grey area – i.e. the Bermuda triangle of advertising, art and sponsoring – wouldn’t survive the pre-tests made by desperate researchers and required by marketing controllers. Well, back then this courageous communication strategy of the self-proclaimed “Shoemanics” – and courageous it was because it both seemed absurd and transgressive – turned out to be a landslide success: thanks to the mobilizing campaign, which split the nation in two factions, the general awareness of the brand among Austrian consumers surpassed Coca-Cola’s for a while.
Tu, felix Austria, seem to have more of these maniacs. In the tradition of the Humanic campaign operates a contemporary follow-up project called “Outsides – A Red Bull Street Art Project”. Again its initiator regards the mobilization and polarization the campaign might have as an expected side-effect – admittedly not on a whole nation but, at least, on a metropolitan area. However, at second glance, “Outsides – A Red Bull Street Art Project” reveals an even bolder conceptual idea than the Humanic campaign. It is, in various respects, a radicalisation of the development and handling of grey zones.
It is not unusual for consumer goods manufacturers to hire street artists for “guerrilla advertising” in order to promote the company logo and increase the street credibility of the brand. These projects have recently been well documented (Lucas/Dorrian 2006). And there are many examples for the fact that exhibitions which feature works of street artists get support from commercial entities, e.g. the billboard project “La rue aux artistes”, which was sponsored by the media company Viacom (Garouste 2004). However, as far as I know, there is no precedent to a company paying a large number of street artists to get a whole city covered with their art overnight and without prior notice. When doing this, they operated in grey zones and ambivalent areas: hence, a differentiated analysis is called for. To me the following three considerations seem to be the most important ones:
– There is no doubt in that we are dealing with a legal grey zone here. The mere fact that some people consider street art to be nothing but worthless smearings on the wall and wilful damage to property while others call it a legitimate form of “Avantgarde 2006/2007” (Düllo 2006) sustains this position. Apart from this, a number of innovative artists, such as Zevs, use concepts like “Inverse Graffiti” or “Proper Graffiti” that cleverly test the boundaries of legality. They create artworks which result from selectively removing dirt from the wall with cleaning devices, instead of applying paint to it. The ambivalent nature of the topic became most apparent in the statement of the newly designated head of the Wuppertal department of culture. She used metaphors which relate to the infamous Cargo cult – in which the line between blessings and curses was also very thin.
– Yet also the artists have ventured into an aesthetic grey zone of their genre, which has given rise to much controversy. Never has street art been closer to “conventional art” than in “Outsides – A Red Bull Street Art Project”. While former street art exhibitions presented little more than a “Street Art Style” within domesticated art spaces, such as Billboards or White Cubes, some artists suddenly sensed the opportunity for more ambitious projects, when confronted with the budgets offered. Thus, the boundaries of street art were stretched to an extent that made it hardly recognizable as street art anymore. “Art in the wilds” would probably be a more appropriate term for what comes along as street art here.
– And last but not least, we are dealing with a conceptual grey zone with respect to marketing as such and the instruments applied. “Outsides – A Red Bull Street Art Project” turns out to be a category killer because it cannot be properly framed by using conventional marketing categories. It represents neither genuine sponsoring nor a guerrilla advertising campaign or typical event. And it is, by no means, a tribal marketing campaign – a couple of additional (Red Bull) cans sold to the sprayer community and its sympathizers wouldn’t have much of an impact on the company’s sales.
But what is it all about then? Maybe the key for an answer to this question is that “Outsides – A Red Bull Street Art Project” is not at all about marketing but rather fundamentally about organisational development. In a time when graffiti (and along with it street art) is well on its way to be recoded from an “aesthetics of resistance” into simple “street art style” a sponsor wouldn’t gain much authenticity by just superficially referring to such styles, for that’s something even Deutsche Bank has come to do. So in order to stand out from everybody else one has to do something the others wouldn’t risk doing. In his book “Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing”, which is about advanced forms of brand management, Alex Wipperfürth (2005, pp. 57 f.) writes about Red Bull: “But unless you have dedicated buy-in from your employees […], the vibe will never cross over to your consumers. Employees serve as credible role models, aligning the internal values of the company with the external values and principles of the brand. You need to move your own people before you can touch a removed audience. […] Red Bull employs a fully committed team hired primarily for its passion about the product and non-conformism.” When a company gets up the nerve to do such a thing and admit responsibility for it the effect will be an increased sense of corporate identity within the organisation and an increased level of identification with the brand among consumers. That’s because consumers will perceive a credible concordance between the brand’s claimed values and the brand’s and company’s image: in this case “non-conformism” is meant to be the company’s central value, Wipperfürth says. Initiating, implementing and admitting the responsibility for “Outsides – The Red Bull Street Art Project” very much corresponds to such a motive; street style as such would, however, be perceived as an opportunistic and outdated move and therefore fail to produce credibility.
All things considered, we are – and again the title of Alex Wipperfürth’s book hits the point – confronted with an example of Marketing Without Marketing. Admittedly, marketing and communication people who are shaped by the classic marketing school might consider this a grey zone that is hard to swallow, but luckily enough we know better: „Classic is dead!“.