Recently, several large businesses, including Nike, Axe Deodorant, Nokia, and most notably, Sony, have incorporated graffiti art into advertising campaigns in the interest of getting through to jaded demographics that are used to ignoring most conventional sales pitches.
Sony's Playstation Portable marketing gambit has entailed hiring graffiti artists to spray paint huge murals of wide-eyed children enjoying the PSP in high traffic areas of major cities like San Francisco and New York. Sony spokesmen have said that the goal of the campaign is to attract the attention of the modern on-the-go urban consumer who's seen it all and needs to be blown away by something that appears off-the-cuff in order to become interested.
Graffiti can theoretically serve as an ideal medium for this sort of advertising. The art form is vibrant, edgy, original, and authentic. However, for these very same reasons, use of graffiti in corporate advertising can draw ire from the streets. In San Francisco, many of Sony's murals were vandalized with such slogans as "Fony" and "Get out of my city."
Clearly, if big business is going to "bite" graffiti culture in order to promote consumerism, big business will have to be prepared for street culture to bite back.
The main problem with the PSP campaign and Axe Deodorant's campaign, which has received similar flak, lies in the not-so-strategic decision to make the graffiti murals appear to be naturally occurring street art, rather than overt advertising. There's nothing the modern media cynic hates more than being tricked into thinking that he or she is not being targeted.
However, where big corporations are faltering, small business may be able to profit hugely. The benefits of using graffiti art in advertising and company design are very real, just so long as the business that uses it is keeping it real. When properly applied, graffiti art will promote the business it represents as slick, in touch, and unique. Effective application of this form of advertising simply entails using it to generate complicity with your demographic, as opposed to alienation and hostility arising from an attempt to masquerade marketing as genuine street art.
Graffiti is not simply paint on public spaces, but a whole form of artistic expression in itself with an increasing presence in graphic design and mainstream culture ranging from gallery showings to clothing lines. Without covering city walls with barely-disguised sales pitches, small business can use graffiti-style lettering and graphics as a signal to consumers that they are tapped in to the flow of modern urban life. This demonstrates an awareness and community-based connectivity that appeals to urbanites and suburbanites alike.
Using graffiti art in company design can be especially effective online. The form transfers easily to the web, bringing its counter-cultural credibility along with it without any of the implied guerilla authenticity of art that's actually ON the streets. Grace your company website with a few creative characters, or some of the mysteriously intricate lettering that leaves passers-by staring at an image for hours, and you may be on your way to succeeding where all the big guns failed.
Although consumers don't seem to appreciate street culture being applied to the promotion of an already massively powerful and influential corporation, small business can effectively take advantage of the pre-existing power and influence of graffiti culture to give itself a boost over competitors. Especially when it comes to online business, an advertising-savvy crowd will naturally appreciate the originality and aesthetic appeal of graffiti art brought out of the gritty city streets and into the slick, smooth byways of the web.
