Coolness

 Corporate sponsors working on digital platforms have a new complaint: the strategy of bankrolling "influencers" to promote their products is starting to backfire. People have become cynical about influencers with paid promotions. They might tune into a YouTube channel looking for some original content, but they will quickly x-out of the window again at the first whiff of sponsored content. 

In this regard, corporations are just experiencing all over again what advertisers already went through in the 1990s, when they confronted a youth audience inured to claims of "coolness" and frankly jaded about any company's appeal to what's "hip" with the "young people." As chronicled in accounts of the time, such as Douglas Rushkoff's 2001 documentary for PBS Frontline, Merchants of Cool, marketers responded to this phenomenon with meta-textual recursions as a way to try to out-cynical the cynical youth (such as creating advertisements with paid celebrity promotions that themselves mocked the idea of paid celebrity promotions). 

The problem with this, of course, is that it is impossible to stay one step ahead of the cynics. Anyone can see that an ad is still an ad, even if it is making fun of itself for being an ad. If what people really object to is the idea of bring duped by some Madison Avenue suit who thinks their heads can be spun so easily by an appeal to the ethos and iconography of youthful rebellion and sarcasm, then trying to trick them even harder by burying the ad beneath layers of irony will only alienate them all the more. 

What digital marketers are experiencing now, therefore, is not a new phenomenon—it's just a version of what TV marketers went through twenty years ago or more. The question, though, is: why does this keep happening? Is advertising in itself really so intrinsically evil that people will resent any appearance of it? Do people really hate mattresses and website developers so much that they will oppose any possible frank advertisement for their services? Or is there some more precise reason why people hate it when corporations try to pose as "cool" and cash in on "influencers" for the sake of marketing products? 

Douglas Holt's book on cultural branding, which I've been talking about a lot lately on this blog (clearly, it made a big impression) helps us explain the inner mechanism of why this dynamic keeps occurring. Genuine "coolness," Holt observes, is always rooted in a particular "populist world." A populist world is defined in turn as one in which people appear to gather together in order to spend their time on activities they find intrinsically meaningful and enjoyable, not on those they pursue for some extrinsic end, such as money or status. Think early surf culture, snowboarders, ski bums, the early grunge scene, and so on. 

This too is what makes people drawn to certain "influencers" on YouTube or other platforms. They embody a populist world. They aren't making expensive entertainment products geared to a mass market. They are doing something they found fun and therefore worthwhile for its own sake—ranting about movies they hated, say, or debating the finer points of pop culture analysis, or making poorly-designed robots that malfunction in some amusing way. They are popular because they appear to live in a world where money isn't a factor, and they just do things for the sheer joy of it. 

The reality, though—of course—is that every populist world is always a myth. The people behind the webcam actually have to eat and pay the rent, just like the rest of us. They don't have the option of simply skipping out on the global economy. And so, once they start to build an actual following and become popular, then they seek to translate their popularity into a revenue stream. They start booking corporate sponsorship deals. (Much as skateboarders did in the '90s, and '00s, even though skateboarding became cool in that era—as Holt points out—precisely because it was seen as different from the professionalized and corporatized world of other sports). 

And the terrible irony, of course, is that—as soon as the influencers try to cash in on their popularity, they destroy their own populist world. Once they are seen making paid promotions, then the whole underlying charm of their channel and persona vanishes. We were there because we thought they were different—we thought they didn't need to eat and pay the rent like the rest of us. We thought they did things only for the joy and intrinsic value of it. And here they are visibly doing something that can only be extrinsically-motivated: hunting for corporate dollars; seeking money and status. 

Any by this same dynamic, corporations persist in destroying the very thing they are trying to enlist in their service. They find an influencer because the latter is "cool." They want to break into that populist world; they want a piece of the "it" factor. Yet, by attaching themselves to the influencer, they destroy the latter's ability to influence. They wreck the populist world as soon as they enter it. They are like the ultimate party-crashers. They arrive on the scene and see everyone else starting to gather up their coats and belongings and wonder why their timing at these parties is always so off, and they always seem to show up just as the music is turned off—because it couldn't possibly be something about them—could it? 

And so coolness turns out to be a factor something like love or friendship or happiness—if you seek it too directly, you will never find it. It can only emerge indirectly as a mysterious byproduct of some other life pursuit. The Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace famously wrote that he could not love so well, loved he not honor more. So it is with cool: you cannot be cool, unless you are more motivated by something other than seeming cool. It is only when you are indifferent to your coolness quotient among others, and simply doing something you find fun, not something you think will enhance your status and reputation, that you can actually be cool. 

D.H. Lawrence likewise opined: "Those that go searching for love/only make manifest their own lovelessness[.]" Again, so it is with cool. The corporations that go searching for it just reveal that they never understood what makes coolness cool to begin with. Coolness is indifference to the search for cool. Coolness is not caring about status because you have found something more interesting and worthwhile. 

Corporations can only ever be motivated by extrinsic and instrumental ends, however—rather by definition—so they will always be fatal to cool. And so they will continue to colonize and destroy populist worlds wherever they find them, bleed them dry parasitically, and then move on like a bloated tick to feast on the next victim.