Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Ad-vanced

I found a rather interesting article about advertising on a PR website. Unsurprisingly, the writer doesn't believe that musicians who appear in advertisements are doing anything shameful. I believe that, too, of course, because once you've mad any money as musician and especially if you get signed, you've already sold out. He points out that almost everything they do is an advertisement for someone--amplifier companies, guitar makers, radio stations, magazines, and so on--so it's pretty silly for them to claim that they don't do advertising. This paragraph caught my eye:

Ads and entertainment go hand-in-wallet in many other ways, some pretty strange. In music alone, we have all wondered about Bob Dylan's "Love Sick" in Victoria's Secret commercials (not to mention Mr. D himself smirking between shots of the lovely bodies wearing the lingerie). But don't overlook Keith Richards in the "Cover Girl" ad while "Honky Tonk Women" plays, or Willie Nelson's "Red Headed Stranger" in the Herbal Essence spot, or Iggy Pop's liquor/drug/sex-soaked "Lust for Life" blasting throughout the Royal Caribbean commercials. (Love to work with the Account Executive who was able to sell that concept!)
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There's a lot of advancement in that paragraph. And I, too, have always wondered how they sold "Lust for Life" as a cruise-ship theme song. Assuming he's getting the royalties, Iggy Pop must laugh everytime he gets one of those checks.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you seen the Viagra ad with "We Are the Champions"? I don't know how they sold the voice of an AIDS victim as pro-sex, but maybe the sports associations outweighed that factor.
--Egret

Anonymous said...

My favorite of all these is the Target ad from some years ago that used Devo's "Beautiful World," a song which is all about how absolutely horrible the world is... but you have to listen closely, all the way through, to tell that. And maybe you have to watch the video.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, it was a new note-for-note rerecording of the song, most likely done to funnel as much of the money into Mutato Musika's coffers and not Warner Bros.