| Bullshit With Base Notes Of "Amber" And "Musk" |
[Jul. 19th, 2005|07:30 pm] |
The thing is that the particulars of the Calvin/Fabien/sitting in a tree thing has been so consistently awesome that there's no reason for this to be dreadful. Kate and Marky, and the thing in 1999 where you would email the models and get crazy email content, and the kiddie porn thing (kind of a misstep) -- the brand lost a lot of its cache at the crest of the original cK campaign, when those damn sweatshirts started appearing, but hey.
It was good marketing for a good product, got to the heart of the midlate-nineties ennui really well, invented heroin chic, invented unisex as a viable selling point. Fabien invented Madonna's Sex book, and all kinds of things. He's awesome.
But we're heading back into midtown, now. Times Square is the opposite of how it was back then: emphasis on the second word, rather than the first.
America is angry at models, angry at celebrities, angry at New York-centered marketing, angry at the very suggestion of aspiration.
Half of all high-level campaigns now hinge on the irony of being sold the right to be "individual." This half-assed "be one of the tribe, but do your own thing too" just comes off as watered-down and vague, while doing nothing to get us away from the actual problem.
Plus, the "cK one" brand itself is worn out. I know they've tweaked the fragrance, and I know the anniversary edition is spelled with a lower-case "k," and I know it's being launched in conjunction with "ck summer," and I know that CK itself needs a nice updraft after selling out all Donna Karan style, but this ... it smells of revisiting former glory, it smells of pandering, it smells of creating demand for a supplied lifestyle that nobody actually wants.
Everybody that wants to wear dirty jeans and sweat on the F Train and live the ecstatic life of the new bohemian ... is already doing so. And you know where they're doing it? Several fucking train stops away from Times Square, let me tell you.
The gentry doesn't want hipsters, and hipsters don't want transparent, needy "I'm hip too!" advertising.
The kind of people who are going to see this crap are the kind of people that are in Times Square on a Tuesday: other ad execs, other design people, tourists, and the homeless. There's nothing viral about that.
"Come join the 24-hour party! All you have to do is wear the same cologne you wore ten years ago! When your life was probably vastly suckier!"
Not to mention the fact that any brand with more than five knockoffs is not going to be aspirational for anybody.
Not to mention that iPod is still doing this particular campaign a hundred times better, and has the upshot of selling a product that's actually customizable.
Because I guarantee you that's the bottom line here: the iPod campaign worked selling "be an individualist, but wear the white earbuds and be cool and hip and affluent" because A) there's no comparable product on the market, B) Apple is about design, C) you can put anything you like in your iPod, D) their commercials are kick-ass, new-looking, vibrant, color-coordinated, feature newish "Float On"/"Hey Ya"-type songs that everyone can like without feeling like a herd beast, at least for a while, and E) aren't based on a product that's been available, and slowly declining in popularity for ten years.
So somebody takes a look at that, decides to apply the technique to a worn-out branded-to-the-hilt fragrance, fails to complete the thought, sends out a billion adspeak press releases ("sexy!" "fresh!" "new slogan!" "same models but more interesting and unique!" "this fresh, sexy new fragrance is completely different from the same shit you've been buying for ten years, only it's actually the same!") and stage an event that literally nobody cares about.
Advertising is not about updates. Don't rest your narrative on continuity, because the entire point of being "sexy" and "fresh" and "new" is about discontinuity.
Nobody wants to be reminded that ten years have passed since we were young enough to feel hip and cool wearing a unisex fragrance.
Nobody wants to be reminded that we, collectively, sicced Kate Moss on our daughters like a doe-eyed Elm Street Freddie, and they're still paying the price for that.
Advertising is not about the qualified new. It's about the actual new.
Which is what Fabien (and Klein) used to be able to do without even thinking hard.
Fuck it. I'm done. |
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