Advertising Costs So Much…and We Give it Away for FREE
Black music is ad after product placement after ad — why we like that?
I talk about it so much I was shocked to find that I never wrote about it.
The closest I came was making that Future meme up above for my IG that included a quick Nielsen quote. But outside of that, all my writings on the subject have been confined to my WhatsApp group convos.
No doubt, adjectives make sentences more meaningful. My red shoe, paints a more clear picture than my shoe. My red tennis shoe, even clearer. Yeezy 2 Red October, crystal clear. So no doubt, I get it.
Rap has always been about name checking but now…now we done gone overboard. We’re like unpaid brand spokesman and women. So you know…we gotta talk about it, it’s what we do.
You wanna talk about a magic moment.
Being in the audience, Run screaming, “put your Adidas in the air,” and 80% of the people doing just that.
I don’t know what tour it was, I’m sure I have the ticket stub somewhere (it was my first concert), but it was an act repeated all over the country, most famously at Madison Square Garden where Lyor Cohen had arranged for the marketing director of Adidas to be there.
Of course, this is what landed Run-DMC a million dollar endorsement deal and more importantly for us, their own line of clothing.
While people were going to Dapper Dan to get clothes customized for them, Run-DMC had the German shoe line making their gear.
And it wasn’t no cheap stuff either. They had top of the line leather jackets, suits, sweatshirts, and the shoes…yo, the shoes had an elastic strap on the tongue so that if you chose to rock em without strings, they stayed snug on your feet.
It was still new for athletes to have a custom line and here was a rap group from Queens, barely on the scene for four years before they had one.
That’s how it’s done.
Talk about a product, show how influential you mentioning said product is, get paid for said talk.
And there are artists doing it, no question: Kanye, Drizzy Drake, Big Sean, Pusha T, Lil’ Wayne, Tyler the Creator, Wiz Khalifa to name a few. But that’s exactly what it is…a few. So let’s look at the masses.
“Lee on my legs, adidas on my feet, D by my side and Jay with the beat.”
“Never ever no never…never wearing no Levis, battle me why try…”
“P.E. a group, a crew, not singular, we wear black Wranglers…”
Like I said, Rappers have been name checking brands for as long as I can remember. You listen to old party jam tapes and you’ll hear Caz or Melle Mel or Rodney C scream out “Sergio Valente…”
Rap wasn’t big business then. At the most, a company like Lee would see that they had strong sales in the Northeast Region, particularly in the Tri-State area. But that was about it. Rap was still predicted to be a fad and at the most it was a quick cash cow for the small labels that popped up and took over the industry.
By the turn of the century though, Rap had exploded out of the imposed ghettos and was fast on its way to becoming mainstream culture. As we discussed in Video Birthed the Rap Star, the Music Video played a large role in disseminating the street culture of cities across America and that culture began to spill into the suburbs and Middle America.
This is around the time that the myth of whites buying more Rap originated (which is another topic for another day). What that really meant though is, now, because white people were buying rap and becoming under the influence of Rappers, not only were companies able to see a change in profits, they realized that it was something that they needed to pay attention to.
Even at 25, I thought it was corny.
You mean to tell me that people are buying a vehicle…a big ass vehicle because it was deemed cool by Rappers and athletes. Why the hell else would anyone ever buy a Hummer?
The Hummer, if you don’t remember, was a military vehicle, refitted for the urban streets. Rappers started climbing up in them and tossing out the AM General Corp brand name in the mid 90s. Mike Tyson is reported to have owned six. And in a recent auction, Tupac’s 1996 Hummer hauled in $337,144.
That was still under the radar.
But the uptick in purchases of the Escalade couldn’t be ignored.
Again, we’re talking about a big ass vehicle. It seats eight. We’re talking a 31 gallon tank. We’re talking at least $108 dollars to fill that jawn up. But here were single rappers, in their 20s no less, buying this big beast of a vehicle.
Sure, Cadillac expected the vehicle to sell. But when car makers design and put out a vehicle it’s for a certain demographic. Based on that demographic, projections are made. Those projections determine how many vehicles they can produce and still turn a decent project.
Sale after sale, Cadillac dealers were astonished by the demographic that was actually purchasing the full-size SUV. Sure, the large families and older buyers were still showing up, but time after time, young Black men and women were rolling off the lot in the brand’s premier truck.
Of course, we ain’t roll around with it the same way we bought it. Of course not. We put ground effect kits and 31s on em. We tinted em out. We funked and tricked the Escalade out. We tricked that beast out. And then we showcased them in our videos and in magazines and on MTV Cribs.
After a year or so of this, Cadillac had to speak on it.
It is OK for rappers and athletes to call us cool, but the moment we start calling us cool, we are done. You can’t buy this kind of buzz. Susan Doherty, Escalade Brand Manager
On the strength of Rappers and athletes, sales for the Escalade didn’t do like those of most vehicles that decrease after being out a year, instead they increased by 22%.
Nonetheless, as we talked about here, the rap vehicle of choice was still within reach of the working man and woman with a decent enough job. All of the custom items, most prominently the wheels and rims, are what drove up the price. Damn near every ad, we’re talking 30+ pages, in the Source, Vibe, and XXL from that era was a custom jeweler…or rim shop.
That was fifteen years ago.
Now — we don’t hail cabs, we jump in Ubers. If we do our own driving, we don’t just drive a car we drive the $400gs Wraith (well, we’ll see — Rick Ross will tell us what we’re driving when Rather You Than Me drops).
A few years back when I made the cover meme above, Future rapped/sang/whatever he does about how he defiled my woman in a pair of Gucci flip flops and WHOMPF I saw them everywhere. This was in 2015. And while their publicist would never attribute it to an Atlanta Rapper, Gucci sales increased by 4.6% for the first time in two years. Did Future receive anything for that bit of advertising? Doubt it.
I never knew what Balmain were before I heard Rappers and singers waxing poetic about them. It’s to the point where GQ Magazine has done stats on brand names and how many times they’ve been mentioned in rap songs. And what do the Rappers get? Squat.
In the early aughts, companies at least gave artists clothes for free. Now. Shit. You’re lucky if you even receive a nod.
Yet advertising, and the power of it, is driving the value of companies.
Just recently, Snapchat, the company that has lost billions and continues to lose more, was valued at $24 billion dollars.
For a little perspective, Under Armour Enterprises, the company that employs 13,900 people, has 9 corporate offices in the US, and 9 overseas, 241 retail stores, all of that, and Under Armour, as of this writing, is valued at $8.35 billion.
Why is Snapchat valued at so much? It’s simple — Snapchat has 158 million plus users on their app daily. As a result, Snap is predicted to clear $935 million cool ones in ad revenue by years end.
So yes, you read that right. Snapchat is valued at almost 3 times the amount of Under Armour which has over 300 pieces of Real Estate all over the world because Snapchat has a large audience that ads can be flashed before. (That is also why Snap’s valuation puts it above: American Airlines, Campbell’s, Viacom…Viacom, yo, Best Buy, Motorola, Harley Davidson, & Macy’s) Online ads grew to $60 billion last year just to show you advertising is a HUGE thing.
Still we are content to do it for absolutely nothing. Sadly, poverty more than anything has us placing our self-worth in the material things that we own. The bigger, more expensive, the better. We pride ourselves on doing things that most people would consider frivolous. (Remember Mayweather burning them hundreds?)
Centuries of systematic oppression don’t disappear just because our bank accounts get fatter either. For the greater part of our history, as so-called free people, we were denied access to the majority of these brands that we cherish now. I can still remember a time when Black folk were afraid to go into places like Bergdorf Goodman or even Neiman Marcus. Our comfortability with luxury brands is barely 30 years old.
Being able to finally shop wherever we want and buy whatever we want is often taken like a victory. Even in the sight of rude customer service, you’ll hear us brag, “yeah, when I whipped out x-amount of dollars and bought that insert product here, they couldn’t believe it.”
In a classic case of do what I say not what I do, Kanye said this:
Back in the days, if slaves had they own money they could buy they own freedom. We all slaves, we slaves to Nike, we slaves to Benz, we slaves to public perception. . . . I made music that made money. But at the end of the day, Lucian Grainge still cut my music checks. As powerful as my voice is, Lucian still runs fifty percent of the music industry. Francois Pinaud owns Balenciaga, Puma, Saint-Laurent, Stella McCartney. [Bernard] Arnaud owns Louis Vuitton, Celine, Givenchy. Renzo Rosso owns Margiela, Diesel, Marni, Viktor and Rolf. These guys got factories. These guys have factories. They run that.
As Brian Michael Murphy pointed out, Kanye was talking less about consumerism and more about the power structure that controls it. But we don’t have to keep feeding it. Between all of these athletes and entertainers, there’s enough money circulating to pay the multitude of Black talent working for these companies to start our own. We’re the driving force behind much of their inspiration anyways. Time that we get paid to do so.
Unless we want to continue to be walking talking billboards…I certainly hope not.
