Pepsi and niche marketing agency RPM have announced a campaign in which club and radio djs will promote Pepsi. The three-month summer campaign sounds really smart and is “expected to include New York’s DJ Enuff and L.A.’s Eric Cubiche. They will serve as ‘soda ambassadors,’ touting the soda via on-air mentions, club events, photo shoots, block parties, Pepsi-sponsored mix tapes and cross-promotions with brands such as Launch and T-Mobile.”
The use of mixtapes is especially interesting given that mixtapes are crossing over from an underground marketing technique to a mainstream approach, with releases from major artists being touted as mixtapes and artists’ backstories including mixtapes as a base for career building, as in the case of 50 Cent. RPM is headed by Rene McLean who previously worked for Elektra and Interscope. They’re responsible for the Mixshow Power Summit that gathers major players in hip hop, most recently in San Juan, Puerto Rico where Lyor Cohen gave the keynote.
The Mixshow Summit press release describes the RPM Group as an “innovator in the field of urban lifestyle, marketing, radio promotions, product placement, event planning and creative services for companies targeting the urban market.” They also have serious connections with the artists which is key to succeeding in the use of hip hop for marketing purposes. However, they need to consider search engine optimization cause I gave up on finding their site after searching and discovering multiple marketing groups with RPM in the title, none of them connected with Rene McLean, and a company called the RPM Group that’s focused on auto parts. Very weak online strategy but surprisingly commonplace.
Pepsi didn’t do so well with the Ludacris/O’Reilly incident, a major misstep in which they dropped Ludacris and picked up Ozzy Osbourne, whose drug addled behavior on “reality” television show somehow made him a better candidate, and then were pressured into a big payout for the non-profit Ludacris Foundation. But they certainly weren’t scared off from the use of hip hop to market their still no. 2 product and ran a P. Diddy Superbowl spot that tied for popularity with a cat killer ad among 14 to 24 year olds. Note that the ad was for Diet Pepsi at a time when both Coke and Pepsi are focusing more on diet drinks, i.e. hip hop is being featured in a Pepsi campaign that is crucial to their future.
Not everyone grasps what’s up with hip hop and marketing. Adrants, one of my favorite business blogs, made fun of the upcoming Pepsi dj campaign using a parody of African-American slang and speech patterns that will only anger me if I discuss it more fully. Let’s just say I’ve seen it many times by people that just can’t believe that hip hop has crossed over to the mainstream and don’t seem to be able to keep up with such developments, though that’s not necessarily the situation with Adrants. In any case, I’m trying to learn to not share my anger so freely. That’s right, you’ll have to pay for pure expressions of my righteous anger from now on!
In related hip hop marketing news, Reebok’s UK ad featuring 50 Cent taking an unapologetic stance for his past has been attacked for glorifying violence. It’s difficult to argue with such concerns at a time when those of us who feel a part of hip hop culture beyond simple consumption of merchandise are debating the same issues. However, Chairman Bill Brown of the Disarm Trust “described the campaign as ‘irresponsible and despicable’ and added: ‘It is preying on young impressionable black males.’” Not being familiar with UK hip hop demographics, I can only say that, in the U.S., young impressionable white males might be a big concern as well, given that there are so many of the young critters and they buy so much hip hop merch. I won’t even get into the fact that it’s a condescending statement about young black males.
The 50 Cent spot is one of many in Reebok’s huge I Am What I Am Campaign that launched in February and, though Popeye was unavailable, features multiple stars including Jay-Z, Allen Iverson, Yao Ming and Lucy Liu. Adrants links to an online video of 50′s spot and, though I am deeply concerned about violence in hip hop, I think it’s a great ad. Of course, I’m concerned about violence in general, yet I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood and tv shows like Deadwood, so go figure.
Oddly enough, as I listened to the string of numbers indicating the number of times 50 Cent was shot, I flashed on the Rodney King incident and a Senator, I think, counting off numbers using pencil taps to illustrate how many times King was hit by those cops with their batons. I’m not saying this spot is great art, but it’s certainly both provocative and evocative and that’s what I look for in art and advertising.
I’m currently working on a piece that expands on my previous posts related to 50 Cent and recent news, Hip Hop Shooting: Follow the Money, Not the Macho and a Part 2. So I’m finding a lot of great stuff on 50 Cent the businessman as well as his comments on media obsession with the fact that he was shot 9 times, an obsession that initially went far beyond his own use of the past as marketing fodder.
He states:
“As an artist, you write about where you come from and who you are . . . The fact that I was shot nine times almost overshadowed the fact that I could make a hit record. I said to them over and over that the hardest thing to deal with was not being shot, but having to deal with what I was going to do with my life after I was shot.”
