POLAROID / LADY GAGA, CREATIVE DIRECTOR
8 January 2010
A few thoughts on the news that Polaroid have named pop megastar Lady Gaga as their 'Creative Director'
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Here's the announcement:
'PLR IP Holdings, LLC, owners of the Polaroid™ brand,
today announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Lady Gaga, who will
serve as creative director for a specialty line of Polaroid Imaging products.
The partnership brings together one of the world's most iconic brands
with today's fastest rising musical artist and cultural trend setter.'
Brand collaborations of this nature normally follow the Absolut model, which if you'll excuse our language can be summarised as 'same sh*t, different colour'. Bottles covered with sequins, with studs (with Aussie glam rock band Wolfmother), with pop art...but all the same bottle.
As a result, it would be easy to assume that Polaroid's association with Lady Gaga will result in nothing more than an ubiquitous marketing campaign for a Polaroid camera covered with white leather and black studs - token, temporary and ultimately pointless.
In an age of vapid socialites and reality TV stars, Lady Gaga, or her management, has realised that in order to maintain global stardom one must not only demonstrate a talent of some kind, but also provide continual eye candy. Whilst her music - passable, thumping electro, more brash than original - just about justifies her place in the pop charts, it is her approach to fashion that keeps her in the public eye. She is a shape-shifter, her sartorial lunacy a constant feast for the eyes, as committedly chameleonic as Madonna before her. As the domination of the singles charts by artists either competing in or performing on TV talent show the X Factor demonstrates, just churning out the music is not enough. It is the latter half of this equation - the style, not the substance - that sells records.
Promos for her singles recall the late 90s, before the bottom really fell out of the music industry. Not since the sheeny, heavily stylised epics for Jennifer Lopez, Britney, Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson featuring several sets, special effects and costume changes, have we seen such lavish visual support for a single release. Part of this steely approach to commercial success involves cultivating relationships with not one but several brands. Lady Gaga's latest video, Bad Romance, featured a grand total of eight brands, from Philippe Starck furniture to an HP 'Envy' Laptop, taking in Nintendo's Wii and clothes from McQueen and Burberry along the way.
On the sliding scale of style and substance, then, Gaga and Polaroid are a perfect match. A Polaroid is not a perfect image - it is a transient moment captured in tangible form. It is satisfyingly retro, yet still possessed of an entrancing post-digital mechanism to delight Gaga's young, sociable audience. Like her music, it is not perfect, but like her image, it's so much fun we don't care. We hope, therefore, that this brand partnership yields more than a camera flash in the pan.
A brief aside. As an example of post-reality celebrity, Lady Gaga is hard to beat. Her dealings with the press flirt with the necessary confessionals - for example, admitting to taking drugs, normally brand Kryptonite - yet she is never apologetic or ashamed. She is frequently derided in the tabloids for parading her particular variant of extreme fashion, yet has never been snapped falling drunk out of a nightclub, that most banal of 21st century embarrassments. She's fiercely musically talented (click here for a performance as her pre-Gaga self, Stefani Germanotta) yet has decided to avoid the cliché of 'letting her music speak for itself' and take a more direct route to mega stardom.
For all the comparisons to Madonna and even Marilyn Manson (another artist who leans heavily on themes of obsession and death to create shock value), we think the most interesting parallel here is with David Bowie and his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. How long before Germanotta gets bored and kills Gaga off?
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COMMENTS /
George Nimeh
Instead of paying the celebrity du jour a wad of cash to endorse a product, why doesn't Polaroid invest some cash and create an SX-70 for the 21st century?
So what if Lady Gaga has an interesting sense of fashion and does drugs. Why is this important to Polaroid, and what does it say about the brand? Gaga and her agents are living the dream at the moment, hauling in as much cash as possible from wherever they can get it. This is about the money, not the creative direction. One must look no further than the fact that there are 8 brands being flogged in her Bad Romance video.
This is a classic example of a company with sub-par products and no real story to tell. As such, one has to be invented, bought or manufactured. Enter celebrity endorsement.
Personally, I feel bad for Polaroid, as they once held icon status in terms of their brand and products. Alas, this is no more.
@iboy
Jess
...because like this they get to reach a new, reasonably cash rich, and utterly enormous audience.
What's wrong with audiences being manufactured? Isn't that true of any product launch?
And - yeah, they had status back in the day. But we know what happens to companies that fail to evolve. How many people who though Polaroid was iconic have bought a Polaroid camera in the last two years? Despite being iconic, the brand needed resetting. This is a clichéd but probably highly effective way of going about it.
Vivienne Tam’s HP netbooks are a neat example. The series of ‘digital clutches’ - the first with a flower, the second generation butterfly adorned - boast identical specs to the HP Mini 100 line, yet claim a gigi cachet that the mere chrome and black versions do not. Tam’s involvement - sketch flower, photoshop Butterfly, send down catwalk - can be best described as minimal, but HP’s commitment to a second iteration would suggest the success of the venture.
http://gizmodo.com/5358284/second-gen-hp-vivienne-tam-netbook-loses-its-flower-just-as-girly
George Nimeh
Jess, what's the point of reaching "a new, reasonably cash rich, and utterly enormous audience" if your product is shite?
The product has to come first, then you can do whatever you want to the delight or dismay of however large or small audience you want.
The brand needs resetting, yes, but not before there is a product of the brand.
Polaroid cameras are an afterthought in the market at the moment, because they're neither competitive, innovative not interesting. All the marketing and hype won't make them any better, and Gaga is there to distract people from that fact. That is not a long-term strategy, nor is it a way to reset a business.
And as for Vivienne Tam’s HP netbooks, at least the kit looks like good tech. But I'd love to see the sales figures, because first one cost $699 which was $300 higher than the plain ones ... and I bet more people put stickers on 'em than bought a $999 netbook.
@iboy
Jess
Where does it say the product is bad? The press release said nothing about it. Who's to say they're not developing something awesome now and this partnership is the first, most obviously PR-friendly step towards a massive turnaround. It might not be, but you don't know that. You can't criticise a product you don't know exists....
(and also - we work in advertising. If a quality product was all you needed to get ahead, we'd be out of a job...)
@sbd
The new product might be awesome - I doubt technically it will be anything of the sort - surely they cannot invest in product development to the level of other manufacturers right now?
What we all love about Polaroid is it's unpredictability and that it takes time and effort to master the format to get anything of beauty. The fact that it's hard to source makes it even more desirable to it's slender audience. I'm sure most of Gaga's audience are only aware of Polaroid through the slew of copycat digital effects available.
Gaga's role of creative director will be dressing the product to make it squeal to her audience - it'll be a successful spike for Polaroid and an interesting project for Gaga's team, but I can't see how it'll actually be an innovative product that will change behavior in the audience? It'll be something to flirt with - as you say - so fun we won't care - and it'll raise awareness of the Polaroid brand, but unless Polaroid work on something genuinely innovative it will be ephemeral.
Lily
@George Nimeh the Impossible Project team IS developing a modern SX-70 camera, or at least a camera in the spirit of the SX-70. Of course because they're not idiots like the current Polaroid crew they're taking their time to develop a proper prototype. They're even working with one of the original SX-70 prototype guys.
@jess that press release sucked ass. Polaroid's new PR agency took great pains to hide the fact that they're not the ones who saved and recreated instant film. It was also riddled with factual errors but Polaroid doesn't care, they're just happy the drooling minions are paying attention to them again!
Glynn
@LadyGaga"I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer" cheapens our whole profession.
If you were to draw a house would you call yourself an architect?
Chuck
Great point Jess. Since when did marketing a great product matter? That helps, but it isn't always necessary to create a hit.