The Vice Guide To: Branding — Part 1
How a crusty, counter-cultural Montreal street press got valued at $4 Billion and landed major funding from Murdoch and Disney.
As a recent graduate, I’ve quickly realised the life of a Journalist today is starkly different to the image I had when starting my degree. With Fairfax recently making up to 25 per cent of their staff redundant, Journalists now have to become content creators, social media and brand experts, and news orgs are having to re-think their position in the biz. This is a series profiling some industry success stories — this month, I’m focusing on Vice Media over a 4-part, weekly post. Comment below with thoughts, feelings, opinions.
In an industry landscape where news and magazine readership is a dying culture, Vice media is opening offices as fast as traditional-media organisations are closing them.
In 2011, Vice was valued at two hundred million dollars, in 2013 Forbes speculated that the company might someday be worth as much as a billion dollars, and now in 2017 the company has raised $970M over 5 rounds of funding and is valued at $4 billion. So what is the secret to their insane rate of success?
Ubiquitously identified by their signature brand of gonzo journalism, Vice combines investigative reporting with a sensibility that is adolescent, male, and proudly bad-mannered. On their main website, Vice places serious content “Heart of Bleakness: Lives in the Congo” alongside pieces like “The Vice Guide to: Farts”, yet its biggest novelty is not its rowdy journalistic techniques but its ability to make money from journalism in the internet age.
It seems what differentiates Vice from other, less-successful media companies is its ability to incorporate corporate advertising into their signature bad-boy brand while retaining authenticity with its young audience. It is these attributes that have made it an object of industry fascination (and ire), representing a way to bridge the gap between old and new media.
The Anti-Branding Brand
Traditional notions of the passive consumer sitting wide-eyed and slack-jawed in front of the TV have given way to a modern anti-branding movement which is fast becoming a dominant chromosome in the DNA of America’s counterculture.
Nowadays, standing in opposition to brands is no longer merely an antiestablishment badge for millennials; it’s a fully- fledged social movement. In reading Vice, this much is clear: there is a pervasive sense of self-congratulation and a cooler-than-thou attitude that the publication promises to bestow upon its readers by virtue of them consuming their content.
Authenticity is Key
The suggestion that its audiences are smarter than everyone else for choosing the Vice brand plays into the image of the independent, discerning consumer which is a major characteristic of Vice audiences, many of which associate themselves as the hipster ‘other’. So how has Vice moved the sub-culture into the mainstream (they’ve got funding from corporates like Fox, Dell, Schweppes) while still keeping this hipster bad-boy brand?
Authenticity is key. As Douglas Holt observes,
“To be authentic, brands must be disinterested; they must be perceived as invented and disseminated by parties without an instrumental economic agenda,”
and this has to be done by people motivated not by appearances but by their content’s inherent value.
Vice started out as just this: a crusty Montreal punk-rock magazine funded by a welfare-to-work scheme, the antithesis of corporate economic agenda, and the epitome of authenticity.
Marketing to Millennials: You’re Doing it Wrong
The last decade has seen some truly cringeworthy fails come out of corporate attempts to market to Millennials — almost always it’s because they lack street cred. Vice’s creators Surosh Alvi and Gaven McInnes pointed out they wanted to earn this cred from the beginning. In interviews they’ve said,
“We were going to cruise around with drug dealers while they were doing their rounds. Instead of writing about a prostitute, we were going to get prostitutes to write for us.”
By pursuing this kind of crusty, unvarnished authenticity, Vice presents to its core Millenial audience the middle-finger to the mainstream that’s so crucial to the cool-hunting process. It’s something many brands try — and fail (Pepsi, anyone?)— to achieve.
Vice has gained this hard-earned trust by building a brand around the counter-culture and the notion that ‘Vice understands me, Vice is one of us.’ Vice, in all its unrefined and provocative glory, presents their counter-culture readership with what they crave: rebellion against slick commercialism (takes notes, Obamacare).
By adopting a hands-on, spontaneous approach to their content, Vice appears legitimate, unscripted and authentic: everything conventional advertising is not.
Brands are now capitalising on Vice’s hard-earned authenticity to penetrate regions of the counter-culture landscape where corporations aren’t welcome.
Still, the question remains: how does a company that’s sponsored by Schweppes, Intel, 21st Century Fox and Disney, and that creates clearly branded sponsored content, maintain cred with their hip, counter-culture audience? I’ll be looking at that in Part 2 next week. Watch this space.
