2010: The Year Scion XD Broke
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Depressingly on-point post-SxSW take from Advertising Age on indie’s long road to Automotive Brand Enhancement.
Basically, in the post-unit-sales, file-sharing era, indie music is ever more about marketing. The music, in fact, becomes marketing for an event (e.g., a concert) or merchandise (e.g., a T-shirt) and/or marketing for a third-party product (e.g., a Scion xD). Marketing isn’t just the driver of the indie business — in many cases it is the business.
When I asked Boughton to explain what “indie” meant to her as a music-industry executive, she offered a simple two-part definition: “Indie labels are about authenticity and efficiency. Running on little money — that’s the whole indie-label game.”
And here we come full circle: In the ’90s and ’00s, Corporate Media developed a crush on “indie” and lavished money on all manner of Next Big Things. But now that Corporate Media is seeing margins evaporate, the real appeal of indie — efficiency — functions as a sort of master class on survival. If you want to cheaply connect with audiences, pay attention to indies.
I drove a Scion XB down to Austin for SxSW. Which I think makes me this now.
Filed under: Get In The Scion indie rock selling culture South By Southwest 2010
When I was working in academic advising at Northern Kentucky University, the local Toyota dealer started a Scion franchise and wanted to advertise during orientation by parking a Scion xD on the plaza in front of the Student Union’s main entrance. But the funniest part about it was that we were explicitly told, over and over, that we WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT IT. We were told Scion was trying a “whisper campaign,” in which it would subtly associate itself with particular populations and activities, but only through its presence, not actual advertising, so we were instructed to avoid giving any kind of attention to it.