[lbo-talk] This Piece of Crap Song Brought To You By....

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Jun 15 22:31:03 PDT 2004



>The, I suppose, irony of this article is that since most pop
>performers today are nothing more than walking billboards for
>corporations anyway, calling their songs "ads" isn't really off the
>mark.
>
>-- Sunil
>_________________________________________________
>
>Paid 'ads' for song plays revive payola memories
>By JEFF LEEDS
>Los Angeles Times; June 11, 2004
>http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2621567
>_________________________________________________
>
>During a single week in May, Canadian pop rocker Avril Lavigne's new
>song Don't Tell Me aired no fewer than 109 times on Nashville radio
>station WQZQ-FM.
>
>The heaviest rotation came between midnight and 6 a.m., an on-air no
>man's land visited largely by insomniacs, truckers and graveyard
>shift workers. On one Sunday morning, the three-minute, 24-second
>song aired 18 times, sometimes as little as 11 minutes apart.
>
>Those plays, or "spins," helped Don't Tell Me vault into the elite
>top 10 on Billboard magazine's national pop radio chart, which
>radio program directors across the country use to spot hot new
>tunes.
>
>But what many chart watchers may not know is that the predawn
>saturation in Nashville - and elsewhere - occurred largely because
>Arista Records paid the station to play the song as an
>advertisement. In all, sources said, WQZQ aired Don't Tell Me as an
>ad at least 40 times the week ending May 23, accounting for more
>than one-third of the song's airplay on the station.

* 27 October, 2001 Bulgari's novel ploy By Sally Patten

A NOVEL about a woman who was jailed for trying to run over the new wife of her ex-husband has turned the literary world on its head. The Bulgari Connection was commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewellers, who demanded that its author, Fay Weldon, mention the company name at least 12 times in a positive light.

The literati are aghast that the last sacred barrier between art and commercialism has been smashed, while Weldon, who managed to get the jewellers name into the book 30 times, has been accused of compromising her artistic integrity and of being morally corrupt.

For the world's third biggest jewellers, however, the book's publication in Britain last month has been an altogether more pleasant affair. The Bulgari Connection represents a step-change in the company's advertising campaign and has clearly stolen a march on the group's rivals. The number of newspaper column inches devoted to critiques of the book and its launch at the Dorchester have probably surpassed the undisclosed - though presumably enormous - sum forwarded to Weldon. The novel was the brainchild of Francesco Trapani, Bulgari's chief executive and member of the founding family.

For Trapani, simply placing the family jewels in Hollywood movies was becoming old hat in marketing terms. Clearly he needed something else. "It was my idea. If you want to shorten the distance between yourselves and the largest company you have to be more creative. You have to find a different way of communication."

So Trapani embarked on a hunt for a writer who was famous and preferably English - ideally, the novel's launch was to coincide with the opening of a store in Sloane Street in London.

"We started talking to Fay and she was intrigued with the idea," says Trapani. That Weldon, who justified her acceptance of the offer and the cash pile on the ground that she is never going to land a Booker Prize anyway, decided to use the Bulgari name in the title was a bonus. If the novel is made into a movie, that will be a bonus to end all bonuses, although that is out of Bulgari's control. But has Trapani read it? Well, no. But he does know the plot. . . .

New Straits Times-Life & Times 2* Oct 27, 2001 Wordwise <http://adtimes.nstp.com.my/archive/2001/oct27a.htm>

* An excerpt from Fay Weldon, The Bulgari Connection: <http://print.google.com/print/doc?isbn=0871137968> -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



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