The Tanning of America Read online

  As he would tell me in later years, up until that moment Jimmy had heard hip-hop at various stages and just felt he didn’t understand it. The sound, to him, had always been interesting and well produced but he hadn’t felt the magic of follow-through that would give individual artists or the genre its punch. However, because Iovine paid attention to consumers, he had made sure Interscope’s early offerings benefited from hip-hop’s more danceable grooves by releasing records from Latin rapper Gerardo (“Rico Suave”) and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch (“Good Vibrations”). The sales success of those releases from commercial artists, one Hispanic and the other a white group, boded well for the multicultural mixing that was happening at retail. But the truth was that those groups didn’t represent Interscope’s focus on leading-edge music, nor had they improved Jimmy Iovine’s appreciation for rap.

  Now he was listening to Snoop and Dre through his speakers and everything changed for him. All of sudden Jimmy f**king got it. As soon as “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” finished, he blurted out, “Holy s**t!” He admitted that he had heard Snoop before but now he was coming at the sound with a clean slate, with Dr. Dre’s production, and after listening to the whole album it all came together so powerfully that he immediately said, “Let’s do this!”

  In his own personal tanning turning point, Jimmy finally had a cultural construct for what he was hearing. Describing the feeling to me, he later said, “It hit me then that I knew what it was.” He felt that it was what the Rolling Stones had been when they arrived on the scene, what Guns N’ Roses had been, what The Godfather and Goodfellas as movies had been when they hit a nerve with the public—“plus a little Shaft thrown in,” he said. From then on, he compared Snoop and Dre to Keith and Mick as well as to Axl and Slash. To Jimmy Iovine, who knew nothing about the history of hip-hop or the culture it had bred or even the Main Street economy it was already beginning to support, this was no different from the most raucous, rabble-rousing rock’n’ roll from past eras—guys (or gals) telling gangster stories.

  Everyone warned him against making a deal with Death Row Records. Besides the baggage from previous deals that would make it costly, besides the difficulty in getting The Chronic played on radio and MTV and favorably reviewed in spite of obscenity issues, besides the fact that Time Warner (then the parent company of Interscope) would withhold support, and besides everyone’s certainty that there was a ceiling on rap’s core (black) audience, they went ahead with the deal.

  All the predictions about the challenges that The Chronic would face did come true, and then some. That is, except for one thing. There was no ceiling. Or, if there had been one before, thanks to economic forces, that lid was about to be blown off for good. The core audience, as only time would tell, wasn’t black. It was tan.

  Got Cool?

  During the same time period when decisive meetings were happening at Interscope and at Trackmasters, it seemed that Madison Avenue, along with the rest of the advertising world and their counterparts in corporate boardrooms, finally got the memo that it was no longer the 1950s or ’60s—back in the day when modern mass marketing began. Many of the up-and-coming baby boomer executives being handed keys to power at those companies had grown up in the shifting era that would be explored in the cable TV series Mad Men, which debuted in 2007. As a time in which the monologue in commercials and print ads portrayed a lifestyle that was idealized, airbrushed normalcy—a picture that rarely matched up with anyone’s reality—in the fifties and much of the sixties you were led to conclude that your life would only live up to those ideals once you’d bought into the brands being marketed.

  One of the few commercials that commented on race relations and attempted to reflect the real social and political concerns of the day was a Wisk detergent spot in 1963 that, shockingly ahead of its time, had two kids, one black and the other white, playing baseball together. For the most part, however, the color barrier would remain as firmly in place in advertising as it had been in the days of Jim Crow. Since the 1940s, socially conscious brands, like Pepsi, had developed loyalty in the African-American community with the inception of niche marketing—ads directed at black or other minority consumers—to great success. Sometimes there was backlash, as, for example, in the sixties when some of Pepsi’s distributors complained the brand was too closely aligned to the consumer of color.

  By the early 1970s, efforts to integrate marketing messages that would appeal to a general consumer reflected the widespread, potent influence of pop culture—music, film, TV, and other media that had an increasingly diverse audience. So at most of the top ad agencies, where women account managers were sprinkled among the men, you might have one or two African-American executives or maybe another nonwhite manager working with accounts to reach Hispanic or Asian-American or other ethnic demographics. Ironically, even as women and minorities were slowly gaining a presence in the boardrooms, instead of the corporate thinking and direction becoming more inclusive, lines drawn between consumer types were more color-based than ever. That said, the exciting news was the extent to which the advertising field did embrace a much more creative mode of communication, with a keener eye to smart storytelling—through music, jingles, slogans, animation, and especially the artful use of code.

  In the 1970s, you also saw more enlightened attempts to speak to consumers in less patronizing ways. Possible causes for the change in approach were a reaction to the past and a need for analysis—literally—about the stark contrast between the way life was portrayed in happy TV world and the way it was actually turning out. With therapy becoming more commonplace and a boom in pop psychology bestsellers on the bookstands, self-help was a watchword. For advertisers that meant courting consumers in a way that respected them as the best authorities on their own needs and wants, as well as a more thoughtful portrayal of reality. Fittingly, “The Real Thing” (coined on the cusp of the 1970s) gave Coca-Cola a slogan and brand identity that would have lasting resonance.

  The 1980s made the term “branding” a marketplace verb. In an era of big and brash, the decade began with a famous brand battle in the form of the taste challenge Pepsi launched against Coke. After winning a series of highly publicized “blind” taste tests, Pepsi declared itself the victor. Consumers were given credit and embraced as part of the “Pepsi generation,” alongside pop culture icons used in their advertising, like Michael Jackson and Don Johnson of Miami Vice. All in all, Pepsi’s strategies were so successful that when everything was said and done, significant market share had been peeled away from Coke. Ironically, some of this had to do with the success of Coca-Cola’s own brand divisions, Diet Coke, Fanta, and Sprite. Nonetheless, the hammering from Pepsi hit home in 1983 when numbers came in showing that Coke, still number one, had fallen to a dismal low—below 24 percent of the market. But instead of embracing its greatest weapon and essence as the Real Thing and pushing back, Coca-Cola responded with what became one of the greatest, costliest marketing blunders ever: New Coke. The campaign yielded a case study for everything any marketer needs to know about what not to do to reinvigorate a brand.

  Let me start just with what I’ll call the A’s of marketing: authenticity and aspiration. After an alleged two years of top-secret research to improve the taste profile, Coca-Cola broke the cardinal rule of authenticity by changing the product so intrinsically—trying to be something they weren’t, in this case a rival to Pepsi in sweetness—that instead of welcoming it as new, the public received it as fake Coke. As for aspiration, Coca-Cola’s COO, Donald R. Keough, later admitted, “We didn’t understand the deep emotions of so many of our customers for Coca-Cola.” In trying to win back consumers who’d left them, no one thought about putting the most important question to existing and still loyal consumers—did they even want their product improved?

  Touching on what I value as the B’s and C’s of marketing, the campaign strategy added insult to injury by nearly killing belief in the lasting power of the brand, which in turn meant losing all credibility that
any claims of newness or nowness were valid. It’s worth remembering that in feeling threatened by Pepsi’s clear edge on the taste factor, Coca-Cola didn’t just offer a new brand of Coke that was sweeter or that tested as tastier. What they did was announce and hype a totally new-tasting, partially new-looking product that was designed to replace the original. In terms of making the argument for their reinvention credible, the biggest blunder of all was the decision to first have a public introduction of New Coke and a few days later officially halt all production of Original Coke. The message? Something had to be wrong with old Coke if it needed reinvention. Or, not so dramatically, the message turned out to be a desperate, tone-deaf marketing pitch that consumers didn’t believe. Worse, brand loyalists felt betrayed. Most of the public felt betrayed.

  Coca-Cola was more or less dumping one hundred years of its own history as one of the first flavored carbonated beverages ever introduced in these United States of America or anywhere else in the world. (Of the early soft drink brands still on the market today, only Dr Pepper, branded in 1885, had preceded Coke’s entrance in the marketplace by one year.) With New Coke, therefore, they were repudiating the heritage of authenticity and aspiration that millions had grown up enjoying and associating with their own individual and national identity. Indeed, Coca-Cola and its bottling plants and other subsidiaries often reminded employees that their product was more than a soft drink. Rather, it was as described in 1938 by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William Allen White as the “sublimated essence of all America stands for—a decent thing, honestly made, universally distributed, conscientiously improved with the years.”

  It took less than three months for the fiasco to be acknowledged as such. There were stories of frantic customers buying up truckloads of Original Coke and building basement warehouses to keep themselves stocked well into the future, and others hitting the streets to sell cases of the old brew for astronomical amounts. As Donald Keough later observed, they had been caught unawares by the passion for the original. “And that is the word for it,” he emphasized, “passion. It is a lovely American enigma, and you cannot measure it any more than you can measure love, pride or patriotism.”

  Obviously, it would have been suicide for almost any brand to have appeared to be dismissive of customer passion and to have failed miserably to live up to the drumroll of expectations raised by its own advance marketing and the media’s huge play of the remastered Coke. But with the resources to scrap everything, the company did just that, calling it Coke II, and keeping it around as a novelty for the few who preferred the sweeter taste. Then they regrouped and rebounded and went all in with a Classic Coke revival campaign, returning to their original taste, bringing back older-style labels, and ultimately restoring the brand to its former dominance. And then some. In fact, as time went on there were conspiracy theories suggesting that the company had intentionally developed New Coke to fail as a way of priming the market to rejoice at the return of Classic Coke. Such theories would be rejected by Coca-Cola executives. They would insist they weren’t that smart—or stupid!

  The big challenge for all marketers in the 1980s was how to interpret numerous old and new crosscurrents without misreading the cues—whether it was preppy Polo versus punk Madonna or women putting on their power suits, padded shoulders, and big hair versus the romantic understated elegance of Princess Di. In many ways, Madison Avenue in the Reagan years went back to old habits from the fifties and sixties of dictating brand worthiness to consumers and then portraying those values in over-the-top fantasy settings. With credit flowing like wine, as cheap and addictive as crack, the eighties’ most powerful consumer group—baby boomers, whom Tom Wolfe called the “splurge generation” and portrayed as such in The Bonfire of the Vanities—had no reason to go against the marketing grain.

  Fortunately, the advertising world’s regression back to earlier days did not include the racial attitudes of those eras. Marketers at certain brands now understood that at least some of their bread was being buttered in communities of color. Minority representation in ads rose as a result, as did the number of smaller agencies that had particular niche markets as their focus—mainly African-American- and Hispanic-owned and -run firms with counterparts in media outlets in those demographics.

  Coming into the 1990s, with new technologies and metrics for supposedly measuring who was buying what, the buzz was all about target marketing—with the dueling messages of the old-school experts on how to reach the masses versus the ideas from the younger players about how to use guerilla and precision methods for reaching targeted consumers. Neither had the secret. That is, until Sprite helped to identify it by hoisting the flag of cool.

  By the way, there was nothing new about the need for brands to up their stock in cool. After all, as we know, cool is timeless and evergreen. However, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as the hangover from overamped consumption began to wear off, consumers wanted to come back to purposeful, conscious spending. So cool had to encompass being smart, stylish, and distinctive. Sprite was on that page early. What’s more, Sprite perceived the potential marketability of the cool emanating from hip-hop culture around the same time that Adidas made a deal with Run-DMC. In the late eighties, not long after parent company Coca-Cola had gone so wrong with New Coke, Sprite went so right by creating the “I Love the Sprite in You” campaign. They designed directly for the urban youth market, making sure the sweetness in their taste profile was part of the design, and tapped everyone from Kurtis Blow to LL Cool J to Kid ’n Play. In this connection, as an artist’s manager I had my first glimpse behind the scenes of the marketing world from the celebrity’s perspective.

  Smart, stylish, and distinctive, the campaign targeting the young urban consumer did incredibly well. So much so that in 1994, when the Cadbury Schweppes–owned brand competitor to Sprite, 7-Up, began to up its market share, instead of reinventing the wheel, the decision makers at Sprite stayed in the cool, hip-hop groove. At the same time, they added new faces to the marketing lineup, including less commercial, more serious rappers—A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-One and MC Shan, Nas and AZ, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, among others—together with rising star athletes like Kobe Bryant and Grant Hill. Where before the focus had been an invitation to party, the new campaign adopted some of the unapologetic tone of hip-hop, along with a dose of playful sarcasm that made fun of traditional marketing. The commercials were anticommercial, shot with handheld video cameras and made with the look and feel of freestyling rap, soon becoming the most distinctive advertising on the air.

  Everything about the evolution of the campaign was visionary—with most of the credit for that going to Darryl Cobbin, whom I greatly admire for his marketing pedigree. Of course, Sprite knew what it was doing by having Cobbin, an African-American, as brand manager and backing his always innovative moves. Darryl Cobbin understood the core hip-hop consumer and why Grand Puba—not a mainstream artist—would be so much more meaningful than any of the better known hip-hop poets at the time. Grand Puba wasn’t out on the Billboard charts, hadn’t become MTV friendly, and never broke into the mainstream. But as a beloved figure in the underground of the culture, he was infinitely authentic and made you aspire to the cool Sprite lifestyle that his freestyling poetry embodied. In a spot Grand Puba did with his counterpart, Large Professor, all you saw was the green and yellow Sprite logo as the two rhymed back and forth while you heard the popping of the flip-top can and the sound of cold, refreshing carbonation being poured.

  Having fun with it, Grand Puba talked about how he was grabbing his Sprite in his left hand and giving “a pound to my man” (code for a fist-bump) with his right hand, and then tagged it with “First things first: Obey your thirst.” The tagline that Grand Puba may have well invented in the rehearsal for the commercial was so perfect, it carried Sprite for the rest of the decade and well into the next one. The point, made succinctly in the “Grant Hill Drinks Sprite” commercial that featured a kid trying to emulate a basketball hero spotted drink
ing Sprite, was that, no, drinking the brand wouldn’t improve your game. The advice given to become a great player was to practice. “But,” on the other hand, “if you want a refreshing drink, obey your thirst.”

  With all aspects of the “Obey Your Thirst” campaign a success that led to consistent improved market share year after year, Sprite and Darryl Cobbin had thrown down the gauntlet for other brands to get their cool on too. By designing into the market, speaking to loyal consumers in honest, humorous, imaginative ways—not just with commercials but also by later sponsoring hip-hop festivals and even creating a commemorative logo out of street graffiti—Sprite grew its consumer base within the target group, yet also outside of it. It was the fastest-growing brand in the soft drink industry for multiple years. This had been achieved by virtue of the core of the Sprite business being African-American and Latino youth dwelling in major U.S. cities. The reinvigorated domestic Sprite marketing strategy was then exported with similar success the world over. What? No one really saw that coming. It was tanning, once again, slyly at work.

  Not surprisingly in a field where imitation is the highest form of flattery, the nontraditional thrust of “Obey Your Thirst” set off a spree of campaigns modeled on its elements. The “Got Milk?” ad campaign, commissioned by the California Milk Processor Board and created by the San Francisco advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners was a prime example. Meanwhile, Sprite had gained the attention of a handful of savvy brand managers who were beginning to track the power of cool. Among them were executives at the Gap. They apparently understood very well that in marketing to the young urban consumer, their coolness would be authenticated, and then, thus supercharged, would draw in every possible demographic of the 1990s before going global. And that’s just what happened—but with a few twists along the way.