the brand image and me

It all started with a Splenda ad.  Ok, well there was also the Nutrasweet ad and the Diet Pepsi one and, well, I couldn’t do without the Crystal Light original (featuring Linda Evans!).  My book hit a new snag this past week….securing permissions for “brand images” is, well, pretty much impossible.  I played the proverbial canary in the coal mine, heading out with my trusty research assistant, press-provided Excel “permissions log” in hands.  I started at the top.  My request was a simplified version of my true desire: “I’d like permission to reprint that splendid Splenda ad, the one with the white woman looking on the verge of orgasm, swinging back and forth across a landscape of lollipops with bunnies (bunnies! you see why I need this ad)…for my pathbreaking new history of artificial sweeteners!” Answer: no.  Reason: “brand image” protection.

Diet Pepsi quickly followed suit.

I was flummoxed. How can they possibly make this argument?  They need to protect their brand image?  When I pass a huge sign for diet coke on a billboard, is the brand aware of whether or not I’m yelling at my daughter, making her cry.  Using this logic, they should be because if I am, and she happens to be looking at that icy can of Coke while tears escape her eyes, that’s doing some serious damage to brand image.  How about the web page pop ups?  Does Diet Pepsi have any idea what I’m looking at on that other side of the split screen?  Of course not, and they don’t care–as long as I’m thinking about the brand, period, it’s all good in modern marketing.

In fact marketing companies have gone to great lengths to stop protecting their brand image–that’s the whole point of viral and grassroots marketing campaigns: put the product in the hands of human message vectors & let them take it from there.  These techniques have made advertisements as ubiquitous as the ether, and a lot of money for companies to boot.  We’re the ones who need protection, not brands.

If we are, as Liz Cohen suggests, “consumer citizens,” then it’s time to add a new one to the bill of rights: to do whatever we want, whenever we want, with any brand image we should encounter.