Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

Conclusion: The Politics of Ambivalence

|| 211 CONCLUSION THE POLITICS OF AMBIVALENCE One of the reasons I became so interested in brand culture is because of a personal investment. A few years ago, my then eight-year-old daughter and her friend posted a silly video of themselves on YouTube. My initial shock and dismay at having an image of my daughter displayed on a global video site soon transmuted into another sort of shock. Each day for several weeks, my daughter came home from school and immediately checked on “how many hits” she had. After watching my daughter’s newfound compulsion, I began thinking deeper about the connections between visibility, consumer participation (such as making and then posting a video of oneself), and brands (such as YouTube). While my work has often focused on the media economy of visibility, this need for personal visibility felt different, and it inspired me to delve deeper into amateur videos posted on YouTube. Certainly YouTube is a media site that fosters creative production, but it also cannot be separated from a general media economy of visibility and recognition. The gendered politics of this economy, where, as I argued in chapter 2, the stakes for girls and young 212 || the Politics oF AmBivAlence women to “put themselves out there” are differently organized than for men, especially troubled me in this personal context. It also became clear that the media economy of visibility is intimately tied to the discourses of “everyone is creative” and “everyone is an entrepreneur” that are crucial to the formation of brand cultures. The professional lifecasters I discuss in this book, such as iJustine, occupy a completely different part of the online video economy than young girls singing into their hairbrushes, joyously dancing in their bedrooms. Yet the two kinds of videos look the same—both are posted on YouTube, both have a similarly formatted URL, both have comments evaluating the performances. They feel as if they are part of the same system. And it is this structure of feeling that needs to be considered when examining the wide and varied ambivalences and assemblages of brand cultures. There are thousands of videos of young girls dancing , and only a few spaces for career iJustines. But both are mobilized and authorized by a discourse of “everyone is creative.” The world of branding is both more obvious and more complex than I initially thought. Brand cultures are more than cultural practices and artifacts. They are made, and remade, by both brand intermediaries and consumers. For instance, one of the first interviews I conducted while researching this book was with Rob Stone, cofounder of the New York–based marketing firm Cornerstone, which focuses on hip, urban, “under-the-radar” marketing. Eager to hear what industry professionals had to say about how to sell new trends, I approached this interview with what I considered a healthy dose of cynicism about the contemporary political economy. Yet, Stone’s account of how he felt branding should work was unexpected. He related an interesting history of “engagement” marketing: he began his career in the traditional music industry during the 1990s, when the industry was booming, and, as he said, “everyone was making money.” Stone and his partner, Jon Cohen, were successful in giving individual bands a marketing signature and decided to expand their efforts into brands. From the beginning, Cornerstone branded under-the-radar music—indie bands, emerging hip-hop artists. In a prescient move, the marketing firm focused on the Internet, which in the 1990s was not yet recognized as a productive place for branding. By utilizing digital media, Cornerstone found a way to put brands in spaces not yet discovered by its competitors. It also relied on more traditional media and conventional strategies, such as creating CD compilations featuring new bands and sending the CDs to DJs, who played them in underground clubs in urban cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Using both conventional and nonconventional marketing strategies, Cornerstone was developing not only its own brand but also an effective brand strategy and logic. the Politics oF AmBivAlence || 213 Of course, we can read this narrative as a sophisticated spin on everencroaching capitalist markets, and indeed, Stone was unapologetic about his commitment to the development of more complex and engaged marketing strategies. He felt strongly about what these strategies should look like, arguing that the basis for contemporary branding is transparency and authenticity, that marketers should “never try...