Marketing Co-opts Street Culture

Stencilling is a new kind of street art that has risen to prominence in only the last couple years. Like graffiti, it involves placing artworks on public walls and pavements. Unlike graffiti, a huge part of stencilling has been political comment.
Wellington has a healthy tradition of stencil street-art. It’s been going on here for some time – I remember stencilling starting up before I left NZ, so 2002 at the latest.
Today, walking down Willis St in central Wellington, I stepped on some pavement stencil art. It’s actually quite uncommon to have stencil work underfoot, so I noticed, but I didn’t slow down. Then, brain kicking in, I backtracked and forced the lunchtime worker bees to route around me as I examined it. My brain had not lied to me – this wasn’t urban art, it was advertising, an ad for Listerine of all things.
Not that this is surprising. This is how marketing works, after all, and I’m sure there have been other instances of stencil-marketing before. But this was the first time I’d seen it, and it’s a turning point for me – a new urban medium of the 2Ks, one of which I am fond, has finally been co-opted before my eyes.
Maybe I should be glad it took so long?

10 thoughts on “Marketing Co-opts Street Culture”

  1. There is something ethically wrong there, huh. It seems right for artists and protestors to use sidewalks and buildings as a free medium for a message….. but commercial advertisers? I hope they paid for that use of public domain and I feel awful that they tricked you like that. It takes away from that romantic idea of them going out at 3am armed with stencil and spray-paint, aiming to make their own personal statement.
    You sure it wasn’t just some artist’s attempt at some kind of …. irony? That’d be better…

  2. It was completely genuine advertisement for Listerine. I doubt it was done by a random stencil artist with ironic intent. No, money changed hands on that.
    Actually, given that it’s a stencil, there must be other iterations of it around the town. Hmm.
    It was only after I made the post that I started reflecting on the misuse of public property for advertising purposes, as you note. I hope they didn’t pay for it – because if they did, then it shows our city council is happy to sell off the very ground beneath our feet for advertising space. Can you imagine if every piece of pavement in the city was branded? It’s bad enough as it is.
    BTW, don’t feel awful. They didn’t trick me – the reason I went back to examine was because my initial glimpse had set alarms buzzing in my head.
    (And reading over that bit of the post, ‘worker bees’ seems a bit insulting to our city’s fine 9-to-5ers. Not meant to be! Bees are cool.)

  3. This is something I’ve been kind of thinking about over the passt few days. It’s kind of connected to something I was reading about sociall engineering and how if the Government has a policy designed to change people’s behaviour in any way it’s often criticised on grounds of it being ‘social engineering’. Yet, when companies use public spaces, public property and other tools (both subtle and explicit) to change our behaviour they are not criticised for ‘social engineering’. Marketing is seen as a legitimate way of changing people’s perceptions of their wants and needs (and hence their behaviours) using a varierty of means – including what is now known as viral marketing. And whenever awesome, active citizens find a new way/method of communicating messages, marketing hijacks them and use them to continue to engineer our behvaouurs to meet the needs and wants of companies. I don’t think we realise how socially engineered we are. Who should counter it? The Government? But that would be social engineering!

  4. As with any and all new forms of media or cultural endeavour, it’s only a matter of time before some media type in an air-condition ad agency in [insert name of city here] decides that it’s the latest thing in marketing and charges their clients vast sums of money to try out this new and ‘edgy’ form of advertising campaign.
    However, Listerine does seem something of an odd choice for such media. I could have imagined Nike or Coke or some other brand obsessed with getting it’s hooks further into ‘youth’ culture to be sponsoring these efforts.
    I’ll be looking more carefully at stencil stuff round Edinburgh from now on.
    Cheers
    Malc

  5. Maybe Listerine is trying to create a trend amongst the edgy kids to make fresh breath ‘in’?
    (Actually, I wouldn’t have a problem with that trend.)

  6. Hi Morgue!
    This is totally off topic, but I’ve lost your e-mail addess on hotmail and I’m in Ireland at the moment so I thought this easier.
    – A friend of mine is off to to teach in Palestine and wander around the middle east and I thought it might be really useful if I could give her your e-mail to ask a few questions etc. Would that be cool? If it is can you e-mail me so I can send her your address? 🙂

  7. If it makes you feel any better (no, hang on, this’ll make you feel worse), I remember the logo on the cover of 50hz’s “Carbon” album being stencilled on footpaths all over town when that album was released (ie before you went overseas). Maybe it wasn’t done by Loop as a marketing exercise, but the timing was immaculate, and entirely consistent with Loop’s marketing ethos.

  8. Hmmm… Loop using stencils to market their stuff does not bother me at all. Is there a genuine difference between Loop and Pfizer, or is this just evidence of my personal flavour of bias?
    (Interesting, though, to hear that that happened way back when – I either never noticed, or it didn’t impact on me.)

  9. Promotional stencils have existed for a while in the local scene. The earliest ones I recall were for the New Jazz Transplant, if anyone even remembers the venue. (The stencils survived much longer.) Lots of bands have used stencils for guerrilla marketing over the years. And there were a couple of web-based somethings sprayed on the footpath a few years back that I never checked out.
    But yeah. Co-option is a fact. I remember postering for gigs, DIY styles to avoid the Phantom monopoly. We took over walls that had never been postered. We got creative, with a handful of monstrous poster installations. And a month later, most if not all of those spaces had Phantom billboard borders and were co-opted by the big boys, pushing the underground even further out.
    (Oddly, I got an email today from graffitti watchers bemoaning the drop off in stencilling over the past few months. Part of me wonders if it is the police catching up with the more prolific artists. They build dossiers and then pounce…)
    A little observed fact is (yet oddly noted in an aside in my novel :P), whatever means of ours they co-opt, we can also co-opt theirs. They have more money, which grants a certain power, however, we can learn effective techniques. It then becomes a question of will to apply them… and knowing what to apply them on.

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