Chapter 5: Deploying Profiles in Promotional Events - Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

Chapter 5: Deploying Profiles in Promotional Events

Overview

On almost every day of the year, New York City’s Grand Central Station bustles with office workers and tourists who pass strategically positioned street signs, maps, cafs, newspaper stands, and wall-to-wall advertisements of every shape, size, and color. Increasingly ubiquitous iconic signs or corporate logos (such as Nike’s ‘‘check mark’’ logo or Pepsi’s red, white, and blue circle) likewise seem to meld into every facet of our lives, littering the eye-level horizon of our everyday ‘‘time-space paths’’ (Harvey 1989). But the fragmentation or interruption of such commercial placements and messages has also become increasingly commonplace. During a typical rush hour in Grand Central Station, for instance, the top-selling tequila in the United States, Jos Cuervo, sponsored Octuba Fest 1993, a concert of over a hundred tubas. In an interview with the trade journal Brandweek, a Jos Cuervo vice president posed this question: ‘‘Consumers can either flip through a magazine looking at ads, or they can be dancing to tequila songs played on a tuba. . . . Which do you think they’d rather do?’’ (Warner 1994, 18).

London-based Virgin likewise attempted to mirror the successful concert promotions of Scotland’s Tennent Caledonian Breweries by hosting the V96 Festival (held in Chelmsford, England). Both Virgin and Tennent used the concerts as promotional devices to reach a particular market segment by associating their products with top British acts and the concert experience itself (Marsh & Lee 1996, 10).

While such large-scale promotions complicate the conventions of traditional media advertising (print, radio, and television) and, spatially, the rhythms of everyday life, their marketing goals are not always limited to heightened product visibility or to niche- market association. Denmark’s Fris Vodka, for example, is one of many brands that are attempting to chip away at the dominance of Sweden’s Absolut Vodka in the American market. It has promoted a number of ‘‘mini-events’’ such as gallery openings or charity events. At each event, the Fris ‘‘Style Demo Team’’ distributes free vodka and solicits demographic information from partygoers in return for redeemable Fris Vodka ‘‘checks.’’ The initial campaign provided Fris with a fifteen-hundred-name consumer database (Warner 1994, 19). For companies such as Fris, then, event marketing and sponsorships provide an opportunity to target, solicit (research), and advertise to a specific market.

The Jos Cuervo Octuba Fest, Virgin’s V96 Festival, and the Fris mini-events are examples of how the advertising industry routinely addresses the limitations of print advertisements, billboards, television commercials, and other recall-based advertising campaigns. The relative demise of recall-based advertising is not an entirely new phenomenon, however. As early as 1980, for example, the advertising industry began phasing out mnemonic jingles in advertising campaigns, even though the jingle had long been used for consumer recall (Goldman & Parson 1994, 24). In its place, the industry began to develop the promotion of events—or ‘‘event marketing’’—by large corporations as an essential element of promotional campaigns. According to Brandweek, by the mid-1980s, event marketing was an $800 million business in the United States, and ten years later, it had grown into a $4.5 billion industry. Because marketing executives like to reduce their varied techniques to simple catch words such as ‘‘linkage advertising’’ and ‘‘micromarketing,’’ they tend to include a wide array of marketing campaigns under the heading of ‘‘event marketing.’’ Not surprisingly, sports, music, fairs, ‘‘causes,’’ and ‘‘arts’’ top the list of events that corporations tend to favor. The top sponsors of event marketing in the United States are Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, General Motors, IBM, RJR Nabisco, PepsiCo, and AT&T (Warner 1994, 24).

Although the marketing industry typically differentiates campaigns by event and cost, the sponsoring company also needs to organize the event and integrate market research techniques into the event. For example, a single sponsor does not organize telecasts of the popular Monday Night Football on ABC in the United States, even though the game relies heavily on its many sponsors: sponsors come and go, but the game goes on. Events such as the V96 Festival, conversely, are exclusively organized by a single corporation (in this instance, Virgin). Such exclusivity has costs and benefits. What happens to the sales and image of a brand, for example, if the event turns out to be a disaster? On a more positive side, exclusive event-marketing promotions offer complete control of imagery and potential tie-ins with promotional campaigns and consumer research.

Whatever the variation, such events have become a common anchor in a larger sales, marketing, advertising, and distribution (‘‘just-in-time’’) loop that is increasingly driven by the search for consumer profiles (a set of psychographic and demographic characteristics that suggest a ‘‘probable’’ consumer). Examples of event marketing thus offer a crystalized case study on integrating consumer variables (psychographics and demographics) into marketing decisions, events, broadcasts, and advertisements. As is shown in the two marketing events discussed in this chapter (Bass Ale’s Titanic-related sweepstakes and Molson’s ‘‘Polar Beach Party’’), consumers not only are solicited for personal information but actually become part of the promotional enterprise itself. Sweepstakes winners participate in an event that is filmed and later incorporated into print, television, and online advertising and promotional materials.

In addition to offering a cybernetic perspective on the reproduction of consumer markets, this chapter also highlights the topographical implications of consumer profiling and event marketing. Instead of simply relying on static advertisements to convey commercial messages, event-marketing and profiling campaigns increasingly collect consumer ‘‘intelligence’’ (data on consumer behavior) that helps advertisers refine their commercial appeals and find advantageous spaces of promotion. By learning more about their probable consumers, corporations now routinely attempt to track and geographically map their markets. As previously noted, such geodemographic technologies suggest advantageous sites to sell products and collect more data on consumers.

As is evident in the example of Molson’s Polar Beach Party, such events also disrupt the routinized codes (narratives, sizes, shapes, time, and sites) of everyday advertising. And as corporations increasingly compete for the attention (and data profiles) of consumers, event marketing has begun to mirror trends in the tourist industry (ecotourism, for example) by situating marketing events in unusual, out-of-the way, exotic, and extreme spaces and places— those geographically marginalized places that are rarely, if ever, widely associated with capital and consumption. In addition to the broad environmental questions that such events raise, their relatively homogeneous consumer profiles also raise questions about racial discrimination and profiling. What happens to those individuals, groups, communities, and nations that don’t ‘‘fit the profile’’ for such events, contests, and products? The promotional endeavors of Molson highlight this question of identifying consumers on the basis of national identity as Molson has consistently associated itself with Canadian history, geography, politics, culture, and identity.^[1] Before moving to questions of space, territory, and nationality, let us first examine the multimediated nature of consumer profiling and event marketing.

^[1]See Aniko Bodroughkozy’s (2001) discussion of Molson’s ‘‘Joe Canada’’ campaign.