Brand Hollywood

Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age

Paul Grainge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415354042
• eBook ISBN: 9781134258963
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

From the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise, branding has become central to the modern blockbuster economy. In a wide-ranging analysis focusing on companies such as Disney, Dolby, Paramount, New Line and, in particular, Warner Bros., Brand Hollywood provides the first sustained examination of the will-to-brand in the contemporary movie business. Outlining changes in the marketing and media environment during the 1990s and 2000s, Paul Grainge explores how the logic of branding has propelled specific kinds of approach to the status and selling of film. Analyzing the practice of branding, the poetics of corporate logos, and the industrial politics surrounding the development of branded texts, properties and spaces - including franchises ranging from Looney Tunes to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to The Matrix - Grainge considers the relation of branding to the emergent principle of 'total entertainment'.

Employing an interdisciplinary method drawn from film studies, cultural studies and advertising and media studies, Brand Hollywood demonstrates the complexities of selling entertainment in the global media moment, providing a fresh and engaging perspective on branding's significance for commercial film and the industrial culture from which it is produced.

Part I

Brand culture

Chapter 1

The cultural economy of branding

In April 2001, US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, announced the appointment of Charlotte Beers to the State Department. As undersecretary of public diplomacy, her remit was to bring the knowledge of marketing to America’s wider public relations strategy. As a veteran ad-agency executive, and former Chairman of the J. Walter Thompson Co., Beers was suitably placed to realize Powell’s goal of ‘branding the department, marketing the department, marketing American values to the world, and not just putting out pamphlets’ (cited in Teinowitz 2001: 8).¹ The idea that a nation could be sold through the rationale and apparatus of consumer goods marketing was not specific to the United States. In its vision of renewal for the United Kingdom, brand promotion became an unabashed feature of public sector discourse under New Labour (itself an exercise of political re-branding), the rejuvenation of British national identity linked to the work of ‘new cultural entrepreneurs’ who could help establish and secure the country’s status as a ‘trademark’ or ‘PLC’ (Leadbetter and Oakley 1999). As in the United States, branding offered itself as a distinct cultural strategy, if not solution, to uncertainties facing the nation state in a period of fraught global geopolitics and borderless capital flow.

More interesting than the values or monikers ascribed to British and American culture at this time was the sublimation of branding into the discourse of national identity. By the end of the 1990s, branding was not simply a concept for the marketing of goods and services; it had taken on a promiscuous existence in ranging discussions about the management of identity, and not only those of sneakers and coffee, but of cities, countries, corporations, civic authorities, public institutions and personal life itself. ‘Brand thyself’ became a clarion call in a period defined by narratives of the marketplace; the rationale of branding was applied not simply to manufacturing and service industries but to museums, universities, charities, government agencies and a myriad of non-commercial bodies anxious to fortify or revitalize their consumer appeal. If, as Andrew Wernick suggests, contemporary culture is defined by the ‘extension of promotion through all the circuits of social life’, the rhetorical profligacy of branding came to suffuse communicative processes beyond the traditional domain of commercial selling (Wernick 1991). Within critical accounts, the dispersal of branding into everyday sites, activities, locations and media was at once suggestive of the expansion of marketing into non-commercial provinces and of a new dynamic of consumption affecting both the shape of markets and the sociology of everyday life. Before analysing the specific implications of branding in and between the marketing and movie business, it is worth situating in general terms the way that branding has been discussed theoretically.

Concentrating on the ‘regime of signification’ that branding encapsulates, Wernick relates the evident growth in promotional forms to large-scale transformations in the nature of capitalism, signalling ‘not simply a shift to a new mode of producing and circulating signs (cultural commodification), but an alteration in the very relation between culture and economy’ (Wernick 1991: 185). This is linked, more specifically, to the promulgation of ‘sign value’ within the processes of capitalist reproduction. Critically, this picks up a key theme within postmodern social theory. According to Jean Baudrillard, the meaning of goods in postmodern culture is no longer related to practical utility but to the inscribed value of the ‘commodity sign’ (Baudrillard 1988). To use the example of Nike, the focus of commodity fetishism shifts from the materiality of the sneaker to the fecundity of the Swoosh. In Baudrillard’s formulation the apparent disconnection of signs from any material referent has profound implications for concepts of meaning and the real. In a different theorization of the contemporary ‘economies of signs and space’, Scott Lash and John Urry relate the growth in prominence of cultural industries and cultural goods to a capitalist system where objects are similarly ‘dematerialized’, but where the velocity of signs generates new forms of social structure and identity (Lash and Urry 1994). Despite differences in theoretical inflection, contemporary life is understood in each case through frameworks of transition and discontinuity; postmodern social theory has furnished a concept of epochal transformation based on the ‘breakdown or implosion of difference between representation and reality, sign and material good, culture and economy’ (Slater 1997: 174–209).

Liz McFall suggests that underlying such accounts is a view that ‘in contemporary industrialized economies, formerly autonomous cultural systems have given way to advertising and other forms of promotion, as the instruments of the economic system, to determine meaning and ultimately culture’ (McFall 2002: 152). If signifying practices have become central to contemporary economic life, branding has been linked in critical discourse to the conjoining of aesthetic and commercial practices, and to the more fundamental ‘de-differentiation’ of cultural and economic domains. As Lash and Urry put it, ‘the economy is increasingly culturally inflected and culture is more and more economically inflected. Thus the boundaries between the two become more and more blurred and the economy and culture no longer function in regard to one another as system and environment’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 64). In accounting for our current ‘promotional culture’, branding is often linked to the inexorable rise of marketing and design industries in the 1980s and 1990s, but also, symptomatically, to a new social formation based on the vertiginous expansion of signs.

In itself, branding cannot be defined neatly in ‘cultural’ or ‘economic’ terms; it consists inescapably of both elements and has done so from advertising’s earliest history. In the late nineteenth century, branding emerged as a practice for differentiating goods. With the rise of mass production, advertising became a means of creating difference between standardized manufactured products. By establishing a brand identity around a given product or service, consumers were made less susceptible to appeal from competitors. Advertising enabled firms in oligopolistic markets to protect market share from attack without threatening overall market revenue through competitive price-cutting (Stole 2001). From its origins in the 1880s, branding has maintained a deliberate economic function easing the flow of goods into the market. This has been achieved by investing commodities with meaning through symbolic processes. Branding is an integral feature of modern consumer capitalism, a specific form of economic and cultural activity that has shaped the structure of market relations.²

Branding is hardly new. However, its function has arguably changed by the way that regimes of capital knit the relation between production and consumption in historically specific ways. In line with the transformational thrust of social theory, critical accounts of advertising have routinely linked changes in style and institutional practice to the ‘logic’ of commodity capitalism. Liz McFall goes on to suggest that ‘the over-arching tendency in socio-cultural analyses understands advertisements to have attained their current form as a function of gradual, incremental, evolutionary processes unfolding throughout the century’. More specifically, she suggests that changes ‘are regarded as the outcome of an ongoing process of evolution in which advertising becomes increasingly persuasive, pervasive and culturally/economically hybridised’ (McFall 2004: 90). Seen as a tool of capitalist commodity production, an axiomatic theme is the move from instrumental to emotional advertising, the ubiquity and significance of promotional communication based not on what consumers know about a product but on how they are made to feel and identify as consuming subjects.

This has been examined more specifically in production-led accounts that analyse the status of ‘commodity aesthetics’, concentrating on the way that changes in advertising style have been shaped by institutional developments in advertising’s use of media, research techniques, and other working practices (Haug 1986; Leiss et al. 1986). If advertising campaigns were largely product-centred before the 1950s, pitching rational buying arguments to undifferentiated audiences in ways that sought to discipline consumers and educate their tastes and desires, it is commonly argued that use-centred messaging came to the fore in the postwar period. This was a result of the new emphasis on targeting, motivational research, product management and sales communication emanating from the ‘marketing revolution’ of the 1950s and its focus on managing consumer behaviour (Dawson 2003). Adam Arvidsson explains that the marketing techniques which developed in response to new and diversified patterns of consumption in the fifties, figured around the middle-class and booming youth culture of the period, focused centrally upon ideas of the brand. He writes:

The concept of ‘the brand’ itself has a long history within marketing thought and practice. Now, however, there was a notable shift in emphasis. Originally brands had referred to producers. They had generally served as a trademark or a ‘marker’s mark’ that worked to guarantee quality or to give the potentially anonymous mass-produced commodity an identity by linking it to an identifiable (if often entirely fictional) producer or inventor or a particular physical place. Now the brand, or the ‘brand image’, began to refer instead to the significance that commodities acquired in the minds of consumers.

(Arvidsson 2005: 244)

It is this transformation in marketing’s ‘disciplinary paradigm’ that informs the history of branding within the second half of the twentieth century. Herein, ‘the brand refers not primarily to the product but to the context of consumption. It stands for a specific way of using the object, a propertied form of life to be realized in consumption’ (ibid.).

In formal terms, the genealogy of branding is linked to important transitions in advertising approach and production context. Technological changes alone have produced new possibilities for promotional communication, as have key shifts in the profile of consumers and the use of information about their behaviour (Schudson 1986). In particular, the global restructuring of capitalism, specifically the impact of information and communication technologies in the 1980s and 1990s, has led to a striking acceleration in the flow of cultural imagery and, with it, brand signification. However, this promotional conjuncture should not be recouped within teleological schemes or totalized in terms of its social and political significance. Indeed, recent studies of advertising have drawn back from grand portraits of social transformation, recognizing the conceptual limitations of theories that oppose ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ to dramatize some epochal convergence between the two.³ The idea that advertising has become increasingly persuasive, pervasive and hybrid is endemic to theories that witness the colonizing reach of commercial speech in contemporary life. As Liz McFall suggests, however, ‘persuasiveness is a contingent experience’ (McFall 2002: 149). It is in this respect that we must understand the vicissitudes of advertising and marketing as a practice, including the multiple processes at work in producing concepts and objects such as ‘the brand’ (du Gay and Pryke 2002; Lury 2004).

Rather than relate branding to a socially transformative shift in the culture/economy dynamic, typical of accounts that witness the insuperable rise of marketing, I want to examine branding as a discourse in this chapter. From this perspective, branding is less significant for what it might reveal about the ‘condition’ of a given social moment, than for how organizations of meaning coalesce in particular ways, and how this may in turn animate specific kinds of industrial and textual practice. By concentrating on regimes of knowledge that develop within and across industrial sectors one can locate more precisely dynamics of change, as well as continuity, within specific industries, accounting, for my purpose, on the terms by which the advertising and film industries have been drawn closer together within formations of talk, sense and behaviour. Together, both this chapter and the next consider the ‘articulation’ of branding and entertainment in the 1990s and 2000s; they examine, respectively, the circumstances in which consumer branding has assumed the pose of entertainment in our current historical moment, and how popular entertainment has increasingly assumed the function and status of brand. Taking stock of the contemporary marketing and media environment – and what Henry Jenkins calls the ‘affective economics’ of our promotional world (Jenkins 2006)⁴ – I establish in Part I a context for analysing the place and status of cinematic entertainment at the turn of the twenty-first century, suffused as it has become with the beguilement of the brand.

This chapter will first examine how marketing practitioners took up the idea of the brand in the 1990s. Responding to the perception of change within the advertising industry, to uncertainties about the fragmentation of the mass audience, and to the fear of ‘clutter’ generated by the pluralization of media channels, branding developed as a strategic means of stabilizing markets, establishing a more proximate relationship with consumers thought to be more ‘active’ than ever before (Moor 2003). The currency of the term was also defined, however, by accounting systems designed to measure the corporate value of non-tangible assets, and through juridical infrastructures expanding the legal protection given to intellectual property (Hart and Murphy 1998). Establishing broad transitions in the contemporary marketing environment, I go on to examine the relation between consumer goods marketing and the film industry. Although Hollywood has a long history of engagement with commercial culture, business and critical literature has spoken of a seated ‘convergence’ between the two; Hollywood has become a focal site for developments inferred in the merging of cultural and economic realms. While this has renewed arguments about the commercialization of popular film, my consideration of consumer branding and filmed entertainment treats the precise, and frequently uncertain, institutional relationship between ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Madison Avenue’. To this end, and as a means of focusing on the impetus given to marketing goods through experiential means, I consider the recent history of product placement and ‘branded entertainment’, studying examples such as BMW’s film series The Hire (2001) and the blockbusting ‘ad movie’ Chanel No.5: The Film (2004).

Total marketing and the idea of the brand

Concerned with the ‘disposability’ of feeling in modern cultural life caused by what he calls ‘intensifying media onrush’, Todd Gitlin describes the necessity of personal coping strategies. Positing an admixture of navigational modes that seek to manage the torrential clamouring of media signals, Gitlin also describes the need for ‘stratagems of inattention’. He writes: ‘An unavoidable consequence of all the flashes and shouts for attention … is clutter and cacophony. As a result, when we pay attention to any particular signal, we must pay inattention elsewhere. Coping, in other words, demands a willed myopia. Everyone learns not only to see but not to see – to tune out and turn away’ (Gitlin 2002: 118). If metaphors of saturation have long been used to characterize the world of massproduced media images, sounds and symbols in which we live, the escalation of ‘clutter’ became a renewed source of anxiety for advertising executives in the 1990s, fearful that advertising’s capacity to penetrate and be heard had become increasingly difficult in a multimedia environment rich with (commercial) information, and where the abundance of advertising had intensified consumer scepticism towards its most obvious forms. As the CEO of the J. Walter Thompson Co., Chris Jones, remarked in 1999:

From the consumers’ experience, the worlds of entertainment, sports, the Internet, marketing and media are snowballing, building critical mass, overwhelming people with messages that intensify daily life. To reach the consumer, advertising is having to develop new business models that call for lightning fast ways to pierce the galaxy of messages. What we thought was ‘clutter’ on the TV screen is already looking like cause for nostalgia.

(‘21st century chat room’, Advertising Age 1999: 76)

It was in response to this sense of transition within business models that branding formed the core of a new marketing orthodoxy in the 1990s; the cultivation of ‘brand relationships’ figured centrally in attempts to reach out to what marketing literature would call the ‘soul of the new consumer’ (Lewis and Bridger 2001).

In trade discussion, branding was no longer a matter of transmitting the meaning of goods. Instead, it meant identifying the ‘core values’ of a product or service and managing these as an issue of communicable vision. While the concept of brand management originated with Procter & Gamble in the 1950s, based around the breakdown of stand-alone products and their managed differentiation through mass advertising, this was no longer seen to meet the needs of a complex promotional culture. In presenting a compelling vision of the commodity in global and local markets, evangelical ‘brand shepherds’ (Winkler 1999) were required to make the values of a company resonate more intimately with particular social experiences, lifestyle values and civic aspirations (Willmott 2001). Rather than connect an image to a product through conventional media advertising, branding sought in purpose to elicit new modes of consumer engagement, turning disposable and potentially distracted feelings into emotional and fully exploitable commercial commitments.⁵

Before outlining these strategies in more detail it is necessary to consider the significance accorded to ‘branding’ by the contemporary advertising industry. Mica Nava suggests that ‘in order to understand the relationship of advertising imagery and campaigns to commodity production and political economy we must have some sense of the assumptions and operations of advertising and publicity as cultural industry’ (Nava 1997: 39). Nava suggests that what emerges from industrial accounts of advertising during the 1990s, apparent in both trade magazines and interviews with workers, is a picture of an industry defined by ‘far more extensive demoralisation, fragmentation and suspension of disbelief’ than is often acknowledged in academic criticism (ibid.: 40). This is to ignore neither the surge in global advertising spending from the mid-1990s nor the enormous consolidation of power that occurred within and across advertising agencies in the period. As in other industrial sectors, advertising was defined by a series of mergers and acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s, creating an oligopolistic structure dominated by a handful of global advertising conglomerates. The expansion of mega-agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi, the Omnicom Group, Young & Rubican, and Ogilvy & Mather saw the globalization of major US and European agencies. These transnational advertising conglomerates would swiftly dominate the industry, leveraging the benefits of integrated networks and vast capital and research resources to allocate brand-building globally (Kim 1995; Aaker and Joachimsthaler 1999).

Despite this concentration of industrial power, a profound level of uncertainty distinguished the advertising industry in the 1990s, created not least by the recession of the early nineties, repeated a decade later, that led to widespread questioning of agencies by advertising clients. Obliged to think how best to spend corporate marketing budgets and seeking greater accountability, the commercial value of television and press advertising came under intense scrutiny, conventional advertising methods seen as an unpredictable means of reaching consumers (Nixon 2002). This perception was linked both to renewed doubts about what audiences do with advertisements and, more significantly, to the fragmentation of audiences resulting from the proliferation of media channels. The emergence of new media technologies and delivery systems in the 1990s, specifically the penetration of cable and digital technology, produced a very different marketing and media environment to that of previous decades. Notably, network television advertising became increasingly unsettled in a burgeoning multichannel world (Shergill 1993). This was matched by significant shifts in advertising expenditure moving towards emergent technologies such as the Internet. At stake in these developments was the logic of the cultural niche, generating questions not only about the identification of market segments but of finding the appropriate mix of promotion to capture audience attention.

Of course, advertisers do not simply identify or uncover sections of the markets but actively work to produce them. As Anne Cronin suggests, ‘markets are a product of the imaginative practices of executives in advertising agencies’. She continues: ‘the knowledges generated by the agencies are oriented towards self-promotion, because agencies are forced to compete in order to present themselves to potential clients as experts in knowledge about the consumer’ (Cronin 2000: 41). It is in this respect that advertising and marketing occupations function in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Brand culture
• Part II Brand logos
• Part III Brand spectacle
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index