Читать книгу Street Knowledge - King ADZ - Страница 11

So I may be a bit biased (as I used to be an art director, hence the ADZ in my name) but advertising has had a massive influence on street culture and vice versa. In terms of audio/visual culture, adverts are not only massively influenced by street shit (usually they are always playing catch-up to what is really happening on the street), they also, once in a while, influence it. Okay, so right now the advertising industry is in a bit of a strange place as the Internet came along and changed everything. The web is a showcase of original ideas, created by everyone and anyone — it totally changed the way ad agencies worked, who were no longer an exclusive source of creative genius anymore.

Back inna day a full-scale ad campaign to launch a new product consisted of a couple of press ads, some outdoor and — the king of ads — a TV spot or two. Now all that has changed but some of advertising’s most respected players — and my personal heroes (Tony Kaye, Oliviero Toscaniro) — have made their names in advertising before moving on to bigger and better things. Take for instance the legendary Dunlop-Tested For The Unexpected TV ad from 1993, an advert that totally changed the face of how TV ads were made and watched. The most amazing visuals (an S&M mask-clad man, a grand piano on wheels driving across a bridge, black ball bearings), cut to a Velvet Underground song, it blew the genre apart. It showed that elements of street culture (the ad was drenched in pure street style and attitude) could be harnessed and used in the mainstream media without having to use the obvious images of things like break dancing youths. This ad was light years ahead of the game, and in turn influenced music videos, film which in turn had a direct influence on street culture.

‘The Dunlop TV ad was an incident where the stars all came together at the same point. I was working with a creative team from an ad agency Tom Carty and Walter Campbell — and they trusted me completely. I’d just come off making a terrible British Airways commercial which really went completely wrong, so I said to them, and their client — “If you want me to do this for you then you have to back off and let me do my thing otherwise I won’t be able to give you what you really want.” And they all did. Originally that script was “Open on a big frying pan with a car driving round the frying pan and it’s got these tyres.” That was what their idea was. And we completely changed it and got something out on TV that if it ran next week, it would be as radical as it was then.’

Tony Kaye

Advertising has now become an integral part of the street culture, as a lot of the new campaigns are what’s called ‘guerrilla’ — stuff that actually happens in the street, events that people can interact with and not merely watch. Advertising has become harder and harder to spot within the urban environment. Brands are hosting events, exhibitions, star-maker competitions, websites, publishing magazines, all of which appear to be non-branded, but are actually just vehicles for an energy drink, sneakers, or a pair of jeans, often using imagery, techniques and other ideas lifted directly from the sub-culture of the street. Sony executed a campaign where they used street artists in Berlin to advertise their PSP, much to the scorn of the Berlin public who worked out what was going on (they were being sold to by a huge corporation) immediately as the ‘street art’ went up. It didn’t matter how good the street art was, it was dismissed as it was just advertising.

But that said, advertising is part of the day-to-day whether we like it or not. There are direct lines of influence between street culture and advertising, but more recently it has been a one-way street with street culture (including its online presence) being absorbed, regurgitated and then spat out as advertising. This will change as society is always hungry for the ‘new’ and in the not-too-distant future it will be the turn of advertising to carry this torch.