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Polarpalooza 1995
Molson USA requests that the general public refrain from any attempts to crash the party. We share in your enthusiasm for the event, but a personal journey to the Canadian Arctic would be unwise. It is indeed difficult it [sic] not impossible, to get to, and unfortunately, due to the lack of space in the small community of Tuktoyaktuk, Molson will not be able to accommodate anyone without a party invitation. You will have to win to get in.
Crashing a party has never seemed so hazardous. Trekking thousands of miles across the frozen tundra is clearly a dangerous endeavor, yet the above warning suggests that the American branch of the Canadian brewery Molson Inc. somehow felt it necessary—playfully or not[2]—to highlight this point when promoting its Polar Beach Party in 1995 (<http://www.molsonice.com>).
As was the case with Bass’s Titanic promotion, Molson’s Polar Beach Party—a rock concert featuring contemporary hard rock groups Hole, Metallica, Moist, and Veruca Salt—offered a unique spatial environment for the lucky winners of Molson’s beer-cap and scratch-and-win contestants: three days on the Arctic Ocean in Tuktoyaktuk, Canada, some 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.The above warning is framed in the language of other music festivals. The request to ‘‘refrain from any attempts to crash the party,’’ for example, sounds remarkably similar to the language used by promoters of Woodstock 1994 to avoid the gate crashing of the first Woodstock festival twenty-five years earlier. Similarly, the intimacy of a seemingly personalized ‘‘invitation’’ attempts to locate the event within the domesticity and distinct demographics of (largely male) North American teenage and college life. However, while the Arctic beach party was referred to in the musical and mainstream press as ‘‘Polarpalooza’’ (a reference to the multicity ‘‘alternative’’ or ‘‘modern rock’’ festival Lollapalooza), its location differentiated it from its contemporaries and predecessors. For example, the widespread consensus over the cultural and sociospatial meanings of the Woodstock concerts is that they were ‘‘outside’’ of or on the margins of mainstream American culture (as both a space and an event) and were heavily polluting events whose promoters publicly embraced an environmental preservationist philosophy.Beyond questions of territory and space, comparing the multiple corporate sponsorship of Woodstock 1994 (its 1969 predecessor was originally planned to promote a music recording studio planned for Woodstock, New York) with the single or exclusive sponsorship of the polar concert by Molson is difficult. Likewise, Bass’s Titanic contest offers a useful case study of event marketing as a joint promotional venture that heightened product awareness, solicited demographics for GIC’s marketing archives, and mediated the harsh, remote landscape and seascape, but the example of Molson’s Polar Beach Party raises distinct symbolic and economic differences. Molson’s decision to promote and produce the Polar Beach Party exclusively, for example, was a costly one, totaling some $10 million or twice the cost of the entire Titanic expedition. But the resulting unity of decision making and coordination of the event’s overall production allowed Molson to exercise exclusive control over rights to the reproduction and broadcast of the event. Event participants differed also: the Bass event included scientific and celebrity participants, whereas the Molson Polar Beach Party invoked an authentic national landscape (the Canadian North, a frigid and potentially hazardous ‘‘extreme’’ Arctic environment) and an authentic human dimension (the Inuit people).
As Albert Nerenberg (1995) notes in his critical video of the event, entitled Invasion of the Beer People, the beach party was originally intended solely for Molson’s American market but was later extended to Canada when the brewery realized the popularity of the promotion. That Canadian contestants were outnumbered by their American counterparts (approximately three to one), however, did not go unnoticed. In response to complaints in the Canadian press about ‘‘inviting more Yanks than Canadians,’’ the Boston Globe clearly affirmed Molson’s mythological campaign within the American psyche, reiterating Molson’s promotional materials almost word for word: ‘‘There are more U.S. residents [participating in the event] because we’re a larger country and a fertile market for Molson Ice, a style of nearly taste-free beer with a carefully developed image of being pure and strong.’’ The Globe also quoted a Molson USA executive explaining that ‘‘Molson Ice became big in the United States because of the image that it was the beer from the land where ice was born’’ (Saunders 1995, 25). However, in spite of the Canadian national clichs (of wilderness, purity, ice, and snow) that seem to be etched in the American mind, the campaign’s success also reaffirmed Canadians’ own mythical thinking toward their environment, indigenous peoples of the North, and, in spite of the increased globalization of markets, Molson’s loyalty to Canada’s employment, economic, and cultural policy objectives.[2]Although there were no reports of such lengthy expeditions, a documentary of the event, Invasion of the Beer People (directed by Albert Nerenberg and produced by George Hargrave for CBC Newsworld), recorded interviews with a number of party crashers who did make their way by various means to the site of the concert.
