Coke, Campbells and Content DNA
In 1979, Coke aired a commercial where a tiny, young, Caucasian boy approached an enormous, African American football player to congratulate him on a great game. After initially rebuffing the kid somewhat gruffly, the player — Mean Joe Green — swigs a Coke that the boy hands him in a long series of gulps, and then, made friendly (one assumes by the tingly, sweet concoction), calls the kid back and throws him his jersey. The kid shouts, "Thanks, Mean Joe!" and they share a nice moment. All courtesy of Coke.
Somewhat standard American advertising fare, sure. But it struck a nerve in the American public’s mind at the time, for whatever reason. Maybe it was the contrast in size between the two — the kid couldn’t have weighed 60 lbs. soaking wet. Maybe it was that the sugar water "melted" Mean Joe’s heart (I’d been told by Mr. Frost, my 7th grade Social Studies teacher that Coke could dissolve rust off a bicycle chain, so I suppose that melting an NFL player’s heart is no big deal). Maybe it was a nice moment in race relations. Maybe it was a combination of all of these, or just a really well written and well shot ad.
Whatever the reason, the commercial proved so popular, that it was turned into a made-for-tv-movie, "The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid."
I am not kidding. They made a movie based on a TV commercial. That’s why I included the IMDB link in the preceeding paragraph. To prove it to you. When I have this conversation live, I often get the, "No freakin’ way," response. Here in cyberspace, I can put my hyperlink where my mouth is.
I use this event to date the beginning of the wonderful weirdness of modern genetic content mutation.
Yes, I know. Books were made into movies and plays and musicals long before 1981. Same for songs. In fact, I’m tempted to go back and revise my date to 1976, and to the making of the movie, "Ode to Billy Joe," based on the 1967 Bobbie Gentry song of the same title. I’m tempted… but I’m not going to. "Ode to Billy Joe," is weird, yes. But songs have had stories in them, well… forever. The leap of creative evolution to take one and turn it into a movie doesn’t quite do it for me in terms of calling it "mutation."
Turning a commercial into a movie though… yeah, baby… that’s a mutant love child.
Was the TV movie "The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid" a good film? Hellll no. That’s not the point. The point is that, as Forest Gump’s mama might say, "Content is as content does."
If you create something that causes an effect… it can live in other media. It can mutate and change and have a effect elsewhere, if you know how to take out the pieces of the DNA that can live in another environment. Or, as I like to ask my students, "How can you put that on a T-shirt?"
I don’t mean that statement literally, of course. Usually.
Andy Warhol saw pop and commercial culture as art. Ba-da-bing. Before that, pop and commercial culture had borrowed from the world of fine art, but had rarely been seen as art per se. Why not? Because the worlds of "art" and "business" were kept apart by people who stood to gain from doing so in most cases, either monetarily, psychologically or culturally. I don’t mean this as harsh criticism, though it comes out as such. It’s an anthropological fact, and not a judgement — people look at the segments of the society they are given and are hard-pressed to de-segment them. Church = religion. School = education. Home = family. Art = culture. Business = economics. You play on the playground, you drive on the freeway. The white zone is for the loading and unloading of passengers only.
The problem for artists, writers, marketers and other creators, is… this kind of thinking is linear and predictable. It leads to the same place it started, often with the same results. And the same results are… well… boring. And boring is the enemy of creativity.
Mean Joe Green and Andy Warhol. Keep them in mind when you try to think of new ways to put your stuff on a T-shirt.
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Andy ~ Yes, but what about soap operas?
I’m not nearly as up on my advertising/ marketing history as your esteemed self, but from what I can remember the modern soap originated from a series of dramatic sketches aired as commercials to lure viewers into buying… soap.
I think that precedent makes the leap of the Joe Green/ Coke story a little less, well, bizarre.
Mind you, I am saying “a little less”.
A question for the tinker, then — does scattershot and less than fully realized content (cheesy made-for-tv movies about hallmark moments starring NFL quarterbacks, brand name soda, and ah-evoking young boys, for instance) wind up diluting the overall impact of creativity and art, itself?
“What about soap operas?” Good question. But you’ve got it kinda sdrawkcab.
Soap operas were invented (and originally even written, produced and aired) by advertising agencies in order to have some (any) radio content available to air that would appeal to the demographics that their advertisers were trying to hit. At that time, there was little/no radio content that appealed to the (then) modern American housewife. Just news and sports and some early adventure serials.
So… you got soap advertisers who want to appeal to women, but no shows for women. Whaddya gonna do? Invent shows for women. The shows themselves didn’t have the products in them (in-show product placements don’t show up until much later in the history of ads), but the early shows were always “sponsored” by one major advertiser, and the first shows were sponsored by soap companies (Soapolio, Borax, Ajax being early examples). So the term “soap opera” stuck.
The content of the shows, though, wasn’t jumping from the ads. It was pure melodrama, geared to bring people back, day after day. And it worked, and still does, to a lesser extent.
But your last question brings up a good point I’ll address in a new post about content funding, rather than back here in comment land…
Don’t you think it’s more a case of “whatever is well-known will immediately be transmuted into as many permutations as we can squeeze a buck out of?” (What a hash of a sentence, but I’m too lazy to fix it.)News story, life story, book, commercial — who cares? If it has any fame at all, let’s exploit it. Until finally you end up with the phenomenon of “being well known for being well known.” I can’t wait for my Hurricane Katrina lunchbox.
I agree with you Mark… but (and I’ll hash your sentence and raise you a can of Spam), if you can agree “up to a point,” I want to agreee up to your point, and then push past it even further.
Yup. People have, for a very long time, taken that which is famous and tried, as you say, to transmute and permutate it into as many bastard offspring as the market will allow. We’ve seen movies and plays and books cross their various lines for as long as there have been movies, plays and books. But as content has ratcheted up on the value scale, my perception has been that the ability of (perceived) quality material to “jump” the lines of media has gone up.
I think that the aggregate importance of content in our lives also supports this argument. As entertainment, law, sports, education, communication, games — all various forms of modern content — become more prevalent and sought after, and take on an ever-growing role in our lives, they will “creep” more and more often.
Take band names, for example. We are seeing more and more names for bands that make other “content” references; Foo Fighters, The Scott Farkus Affair, The Dead Kennedys, The Reganomics, The Talking Heads… these are all cultural references that have content knowledge requirements. If you don’t “get” the content, you won’t get the band names.
So… while we did have 8 or 10 or 200 books on any given “fad” subject in the 1950s, and similar levels of TV repetition in the 70s-90’s, we haven’t (until recently) seen media jumping on the level that’s been happening as of late. I don’t think. And I think we’ll see more of it.
I’ll try to come up with more examples and blog on them. Because I think this is important to the discussion of creativity in general; the difference between doing “the same thing differently” and doing “the same thing in different ways.” Subtly different, perhaps; but subtle is important.
Yes, I agree. As I wrote on my own blog, I get all my best marketing insights while thinking or reading or immersing myself in something else. I think you are definitely on to something. Cross pollination…crossed wires….gladly the cross I bear. Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.
But on further thought….is it the quality or value of the material that causes the jump, or simply the all-pervasiveness of a media that makes EVERYTHING famous, and therefore makes everything fair game for as many commercial applications as our bad taste will allow — and that’s a lot? Can you only make the Mean Joe Green movie if we have all seen the commercial, or is it better if we haven’t?