I promised myself that in 2008 I would post more Media Studies paper ideas for students, done up in Click Opera style. Consider this an early delivery.


This is a little section of my book that deals with self-branding. I end with the street teams stuff because that's where my thinking is at these days. I wish Jay Smooth would take this topic on, because I know it would be an instant favorite with my students...


Brand or Die

In spite of their differences, Web micro-celebrities share something important with mainstream media stars: both must brand or die. During the period of actor Brad Pitt's infidelities, young women started declaring themselves (sometimes only half-jokingly) to be members of "Team Aniston" or "Team Jolie." Similarly, viewers who respond to Ana Voog's performance art images might not care for Amanda's All American Girl persona, though they might be intrigued by my Academic Camgirl schtick. As ever, identification says more about the viewer than the viewed.



In his research of user profiles on MySpace, Hugo Liu found that the interests people listed tended to cluster in "rich motifs like irony, alienation, utopia, and satire." Liu pointed out that rather than factual declaration of interests, profile listings were better understood as 'taste performances'--or what I have been calling brands. Branding wasn't always related to consumer identity issues in this way. Until the 1950's, advertisers tended to build brands either by extolling the luxury they promised (e.g., automobile and alcohol ads) or by communicating quasi-scientific data, as in the famous American chewing gum commercial that boasted that "Four out five dentists surveyed recommend Trident sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum."


In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank demonstrates how identity-oriented branding techniques emerged in the 1960s, when students frustrated with the Vietnam War began to take jobs with advertising agencies. The students-turned-employees quickly realized that consumers coming into adulthood post-Vietnam perceived most advertisements as both dull and 'part of the problem'--inconsistent, that is, with their countercultural ideals. In response, advertisers began creating campaigns with putatively anti-establishment messages like "7UP: The Uncola" and Volkswagen's classic: "How often do you buy a new car? That's too often."

Douglas Holt uses the term “postmodern brand” to describe advertising marked by its use of irony and its association with subcultural identity, among other things. The "modern" Trident gum featured dentists in its ads. Today, a trip to Tridentgum.com features "Little Mouth," a set of animated wind-up dentures that fetches products with names like Tropical Twist and Green Apple Fusion. How Trident was talked into using dentures as a mascot is anyone's guess.

It is important to realize that postmodern branding engages in the appearance of countercultural critique, rather than its enactment. It doesn’t much matter that our Macs help us "think different" if our actions don’t reflect those thoughts. Likewise, consuming the anti-establishment aesthetic of a site like The Suicide Girls (which bills itself as 'naked, punk, indie, emo and goth') is not the same as participating in those subcultures—although it might arguably lead to participation at some point down the road.



Ten years ago, I might have forwarded the URL for Trident's Small Mouth to some friends. Now I wonder if only children are supposed to be looking at the Trident site. Part of our fatigue as consumers has to do with the rise of digital production and distribution tools over the last decade. Software like Photoshop, GarageBand and iMovie now make it possible for talented amateurs to create photographs, musical tracks and videos that are on par with those made by professionals, while Web-based delivery systems like iTunes and YouTube make it possible to distribute one’s work to the masses.

Douglas Holt argues that purveyors of postmodern brands today find themselves in the same situation as their modern brand predecessors: consumers now perceive them as dated, and don’t feel compatible with the ideologies behind them. At least as an aesthetic, counterculture is waning, irony is old, and verite (in real or faux form) is corporate. Everyone knows real amateurs are busy polishing their productions, not scuffing them up. Consumers, no longer bothered about the presence of advertising in their lives, now willingly volunteer (or are paid low wages) to engage in labor that was once the domain of the advertiser. Many of my students in East London have already been conscripted into ‘street teams’ and charged with ‘virusing’ promotional objectives for companies like Sony and Nike.
When I ask these students whether they see such work as exploiting, for instance, subcultural practices within hip hop, I get two answers. The first is that on good days, they see themselves as ambassadors representing the buying concerns of their peers. The second is that someone is going to get paid to do it--why not them? I get similar answers when I ask students how they feel about the fact that Microsoft has bought the right to data mine their Facebook profiles. They are not uncritical about capitalist expansion into their data space, but they believe that it is inevitable, and that it is a waste of their time to fight it. Interestingly, many of students perk right up when they discover that they might stand to profit by using things like Google Adsense on their own blogs. Rather than dismissing this response as shallow or greedy, I find it interesting to re-frame it against a desire to gain back some of their lost agency in a networked age.