Mmm, Tastes Like Advertising

Chris Brown is a hip-hop singer who’s been scoring pop hits since late 2005, including a couple of Number Ones. His song “Forever” is one of the top songs in the country this week. (I’d never heard of it until today, but I have to admit I like it a little.) If you click over to YouTube to watch the video, pay attention to a couple of things: how Brown unwraps a stick of gum during the first few seconds, and how later, he sings the words “double your pleasure, double your fun.” It turns out that the song was actually commissioned by Wrigley’s, who paid the production costs. “Forever” is going to become the new Doublemint gum jingle in spots that will begin airing next month. Two other Wrigley’s brands will get the same treatment, with a new R&B version of Big Red’s “kiss a little longer” jingle and a country revamp of Juicy Fruit’s “the taste is gonna move you.”

“Forever” has been on the radio since April, but its true origin was unbeknownst to almost everybody until the Wall Street Journal revealed it today. And I suppose one might go all self-righteous about the further blurring of the lines between commerce and art, or about this product placement paradigm shift, or whether this is more or less egregious than John Mellencamp’s “Our Country” and other pop songs being appropriated (and in the case of the Mellencamp song, beaten to death) to sell stuff. But merely thinking in these terms marks a person as a fossil from a simpler time. Back when I was involved with radio sales people on a regular basis, we used to talk about how an advertisement isn’t an intrusion if it contains information people really want to have. “Forever” is merely another way to exploit that fact of life, albeit a more clever and subversive one. People who dig Chris Brown won’t mind the corporate origins of “Forever,” or the ulterior motive that caused it to be created in the first place. And the ship full of people complaining about pop songs being turned into advertising jingles sailed years ago.

Besides, “Forever” is not even the worst instance of product placement I’ve read about recently. That would be this one.

Last week at WNEW.com:
This Week in Rock History: The Crowd Goes Wild
Rock 101: Dylan Goes Electric
Founding Fathers: Ertegun, Chess, and Bihari

In the can already for this week: Another edition of Rock History to run on Wednesday, and a Rock 101 on John Lennon’s remark about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, to run on Thursday. Find all of my Rock History posts here and my Rock 101s here.