------------------------------------------------------- This week: Peace, love, and Linux? By Robert Luhn, executive editor, CNET Online -------------------------------------------------------
Now there's a slogan to inspire the masses, hmmm? Forget that Peace-Love-Dope stuff, or even Peace-Love (which sounds like a bad '70s boy band). No, in today's e-world, imagine there's no bastardization--I wonder if you can?
IBM can't, takin' it to the streets in a new campaign to promote its Linux operating system. In a little stunt that raised the hackles of mayors already fighting amateur graffiti, IBM came along and hired some pros to stencil (using spray paint), the symbols for peace (that Mercedes-hood-ornament-looking thing), love (a heart), and the final member of that holy trinity, a Linux penguin, on curbs in various cities.
Chicago and San Francisco were not amused, threatening fines and felony charges to force Big Blue to scrub the graffiti off the sidewalks. (For more, see "IBM must curb sidewalk ads," http://two.digital.cnet.com/cgi-bin2/flo?y=eBmv03QWD010b4j0AC )
Icons for sale But what really annoys me is the appropriation of antiestablishment/anticorporate symbols to sell products. Of course, this has been going on for years. IBM used Charlie Chaplin to promote the first PC back in the early '80s. Apple has used everyone from Einstein to Eleanor Roosevelt to imply that, gosh, if these great thinkers had lived long enough, they would have bought an overpriced Mac, just like you and me. Verizon's annoying theft of the peace sign (two fingers making a V, knuckles in) to tout its wireless service is yet another example. The most galling: a recent Alcatel TV ad using Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech to promote its communications services.
Maybe, in this cynical era, using an icon that represents love or freedom from slavery to hawk an operating system or a router is really an ironic statement, like eating ice cream while wearing a beret. I don't know. But must Madison Avenue's crypt robbers turn everyone into a product pitchman?
To the Americans who fought the Nazis or protested the Vietnam War, certain symbols have meaning and personal associations. To someone fresh out of Marketing 101, they're just images to exploit.
Maybe it's not malice, just cluelessness. I remember one NT training company that illustrated its "Rocket your network performance!" ad with a German V-2 zooming across the page. (The V-2 was a little something the Germans used in the final years of World War II to terrorize Britons, killing more than 2,500 people.) That kind of cluelessness should give anyone chills.
What's next? Excedrin ads using the Zapruder film? I won't go there, but you can be sure that corporations desperate for cachet, legitimacy, or ideas probably will.
--Robert Luhn, executive editor, CNET Online
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