Worldwide Coverage of Your Non-Event? Priceless
9/23/04 (#41)
If you haven't heard about the latest cross-pollination of corporate product placement that took place on the season premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show, then I envy your lifestyle. I have been inundated with stories about the event, and I don't even watch the news.
In case you missed it, Oprah wanted to open her season with a bang; General Motors was aching to promote its new Pontiac G6, whether in a movie, on TV, or (I'm sure they'd have agreed) as the latest container for an extended stay by so-called illusionist David Blaine. (To Blaine's credit, he sure did make his Warhol-predicted 15 minutes of fame disappear without a trace.)
The solution to Oprah's and GM's dilemma was a public relations team's fantasy brought to life: Oprah's staff convinced Pontiac to supply 276 new G6 cars (at GM's expense, valued at $7 million), one of which was given to each member of Oprah's studio audience.
This was clearly a bold-faced publicity stunt. GM wanted to get people to notice their new car, and they succeeded by getting Oprah to extol the virtues of the product for much of the hour during one of the highest rated daytime TV shows in America. (Enthusiastic endorsements also accompany links on Oprah's web home page.) Oprah got to play the role of benevolent benefactor, despite spending none of her own show's money to secure the giveaway.* Then the coverage began to roll in: Every paper in the nation covered the story, as did foreign papers as far away as The Seoul Times and The Times of India; Outlets as diverse as CNN, Good Morning America, and The Daily Show with John Stewart all gave lip service to the promotion, helping to boost web visits to Pontiac's site by 322% and to Oprah's site by an astounding 551%.** (Surely many of those visitors were looking for tickets for next year's 20th season premiere. Rumor has it she'll be giving away babies.)
Bill Mahar gave it 90 seconds of coverage, knocking it all as ridiculous and emphasizing that this whole thing was no cost to Oprah. But he was more concerned with the reaction of the studio audience: ecstatic, almost spastic elation, tears of "joy" that rivaled those of any self-respecting Miss America winner, all because they had won a compact car? (And as guest P.J. O'Rourke observed incredulously, "And for a Pontiac?")
So it seems the stunt worked. It was designed to get people to talk about it, and that's exactly what it did. But isn't this basically the folks at Oprah's show saying, "Let's tell the media to talk about the show by letting GM pay for a $7 million, hour-long advertisement", and the media dutifully announcing to a billion consumers, "This was nothing more than a $7 million dollar, hour-long advertisement for Pontiac"?
Haven't we learned anything from 2-Live-Crew? (Well, let me clarify--- I am fairly certain that the only thing anyone learned from 2-Live-Crew is that the F-word can be used as a verb and an adjective and an adverb and an exclamation and an interrogative---what I mean is, haven't we learned anything from their publicity stunts?)Here was a band with little-to-no musical talent who cussed their way through 4 minute segments of generic beats whilst celebrating the female anatomy with a misogyny that would make a porn star blush; left to their own devices they would have been the house band at a low-rent strip club in Miami where patrons would yell "Turn that sh*t down, I'm trying to check out the p*ssy!" But rather than letting this juvenilia enjoy the obscurity it deserved, the album was hauled before Congress by the PMRC to protest its lewd and profane content, and suddenly sales of As Nasty as We Want to Be thing that anyone has ever learned from that band is that in certain cases, a single word can be used as a noun skyrocketed. (Amazingly, there exists a 2-live-crew "Greatest Hits" album. That cover art should be in the dictionary under "oxymoron".)
These publicity stunts seem so contrived, yet the media gobbles them up with no concern for the obvious motives. Let's go back to David Blaine---a man sitting in a box, this is an event? This requires daily coverage? ("Ladies and gentleman, we have breaking news! Blaine has just made a daring move from the left side of the box to the right, where he promptly went back to sleep. We'll have film at 11.") (I imagine a homeless man living in a corrugated box in Detroit enduring his own involuntary hunger strike wondering, "Damn, how can I get his kind of coverage?!") There are more people trying to make a living in the media than there are stories to cover, so irrelevancies are promoted to urgencies in hopes that just one more person will tune in to watch the latest PepsiTM commercial.
I'm not going to tell you about any more of the crass publicity stunts that have annoyed me recently, because I don't want anyone to know about them. I want them to remain as obscure as they possibly can be in this over-televised culture. I feel dirty enough talking about Pontiac for 9 paragraphs.
©2004 wpreagan
* I am not knocking on Oprah. Her staff chose viewers who they felt would most benefit from the cars, and if I had the clout to convince Honda to give 276 cars to readers of OSF, I'd gladly retitle my column "Torrential Civics" in return. But let's not pretend she's being altruistic. As Rosanne Barr once said, "Heck, I have more money than God. But not as much as Oprah."
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