McMarketing 101

Seagram’s Gin. Verizon. HBO. Pepsi. Crown Royal. Budweiser. McDonald’s.

How many commercials do you hear on the radio for these companies? How many do you hear without realizing it?

There is a new trend, particularly in hip-hop, that is beginning to change the way companies market themselves. In March, McDonalds announced that, as part of a new marketing campaign, it was offering money to rappers who mentioned their Big Mac sandwich in their song lyrics. The amount the artist would be paid would be contingent on the amount of radio play it received; in essence, the bigger the hit, the bigger the check. One report puts the price tag at $1-$5 per play.

To accomplish this, McDonald’s turned to Maven Strategies, a marketing firm in Maryland that specializes in teaming up the rappers and the companies they represent. Their emphasis is non-traditional market placement; it was Maven Strategies that was responsible for Seagram’s hooking up with rapper Petey Pablo for the mention in “Freak-A-Leek.” In the song, Pablo says “Now I’ve gotta give a shout out to Seagram’s Gin, ‘cause I drink it and they payin’ me for it.” “Freak-A-Leek” was the number two hip-hop song of 2004, according to Billboard, racking up more than 350,000 radio spins. And “Freak-A-Leek was only one of five songs in which Maven got Seagram’s mentions.

The Maven philosophy is a simple one: rappers have been mentioning products in their lyrics for years. “Lookin’ at my Gucci it’s about that time.” In 1986, Run-DMC had a chart-topping hit with “My Adidas.” But historically, rappers have not been compensated for the advertising they have been doing for the companies. In the top 20 songs last year, brand names appeared almost 1,000 times. Cadillac, for example, garnered 70 mentions. Hennessy picked up 69. In ninety percent of these, the artists were paid nothing. Most of the remaining ten percent involved clients of Maven Strategies.

Tony Rome, Maven’s founder and president, recently told the Washington Post, “Hip-hop is the only music genre that embraces brands in their songs and because they are doing it, I think the hip-hop artists should be paid for it.” He says that if the remaining 90 percent were paid mentions, the cost to the mentioned businesses could have been upward of $1 billion.

Among watchdog groups, though, word apparently travels slowly. On Monday, Advertising Age magazine reported that a watchdog group, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), has spoken out against McDonald’s and the fast food chain’s efforts to use hip-hop to target preteens. The organization, as the name suggests, is a “national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children,” according to the group’s website. The CCFC argues that the campaign only counters the struggle to reduce childhood obesity rates. They call the plan a “new and deceitful way of targeting children,” saying that “these ‘adversongs’ are inherently deceptive.”

Soon, we may be seeing stickers on CDs reading, “Parental Advisory: Fast Food Lyrics.”

-From Pulse
September 29, 2005