A New Low: Fergie Paid To Incorporate Brand Names Into Songs
The 32-year-old Black Eyed Peas singer is the first global star to consent to product placement in her songs - agreeing to include the provocative clothing line Candie’s in her lyrics. While other artists routinely drop in name brands into their songs or even accept fees to show products in videos, the musician born Stacy Ann Ferguson, who once ripped it up as a child star on “Kids Incorporated,” is making history by blurring the lines between jingle and pop song. Under the deal with Candie’s, a skimpy, teen-oriented clothing line, Fergie will be appearing in TV advertisements and also allowing Candie’s “style advisers” to dress up fans at her shows. On the Candie’s Web site (where the Fergie agenda is endorsed, noting “It’s all about the flossy, flossy”), a video of the Californian singer appears prominently on what they call “C-Tube.” While Fergie was on tour last week, her advisers said such product placement marked the future of music.
Yes, America…welcome to the future of entertainment. Soon, you likely will be experiencing commercial free music and television- if only because advertising and entertainment will be so throughly intertwined that the two will be indistinuishable. Entertainment will be advertising, and advertising will be entertainment. You may not realize this- you may have willfully ignored- but marketing and product placement are already integral parts of the entertainment we consume on a daily basis.
The next time you watch a movie or television show, look at the products you see sprinkled throughout the production. How many times do you see a character drinking a Diet Coke as they tap away on the keyboard of their MacBook and prop their Nike shoes on their IKEA desk? Surely, you don’t believe that any of those things are conicidental?…because they most certainly aren’t. Many companies employ people whose jobs are to read television and movie scripts with an eye toward finding opportunities to insert their products into scenes. This is also turning into a significant revenue stream for companies that create and produce television and movie contect. As productions costs rise, this revenue stream will only continue to assume greater importance as companies look for ways to pad their margins.
There’s a very fine line between working product placement into scenes and actively weaving product endorsements into song lyrics, however. Until now, this line has been tacitly respected by artists, who for the most part seem to understand and respect the line dividing artistic expression from crass commercialism. Welcome to the Brave New World. With Fergie becoming the first musician of note to actually be paid significant sums of money to insert products into her songs, we are now one step closer to a time when music and marketing will be seamless and indistinguishable. Call it the death of artistic expression and integrity. If that seems like overkill to you, this certainly passes as the death of artistic credibility.
Yes, an artist needs to make a living. I get that. But do they need to compromise their integrity and their art in order to feed the bulldog?
