Exit Chihuahua: Doughty Explains Corporate Marketing
My limited experience of the corporate world is that it's ruled by the Peter Principle?that folks who are good at their jobs are promoted, and if they're good at that job, they get promoted again, and they will continue to be promoted until they finally arrive at a position for which they are unqualified and/or ineffective. And to some degree, people commenting in the media on the firing of the agency are aware of the essential clusterfuckness of the situation. "Somebody has to be blamed," commented Ron Paul, the president of Technomic, a "restaurant consulting company." "It's not shoot the messenger, it's shoot the agency."
The lesson for those of us not on the corporate inside is that visibility does not necessarily equal profit. For instance: Who's sold more records, Destiny's Child or Jennifer Lopez? The answer is Destiny's Child, by a million records. Despite Jennifer's iconic status and cultural omnipresence. When they write the book about the era, Jennifer Lopez will be the hood ornament on the zeitgeist. But that doesn't necessarily translate directly to bucks.
And so it is with our beloved Chihuahua, the dog that launched a thousand screensavers. The dog that caused thousands of gullible people seeking companionship to get their own Chihuahuas, only to discover that they were actually skittish, freaked-out, disagreeable animals who didn't really make pithy remarks in the style of a Latino Pepe Le Pew. The dog that caused J.J. Walker?perhaps the most embarrassing man in the history of television?to leave his seat on David Letterman and exhort repeatedly, apropos of nothing, "Drop the chalupa! Drop the chalupa, baby!" The dog that forced every Mexican fast-food eatery in the Western world to drop their advertising strategies and parody the Chihuahua instead. A friend of mine was once standing on a corner in Bushwick, watching the presidential motorcade pass by on its way to the airport. "Hey Beel Cleenton!" a guy shouted out. "Drop the chalupa!"
In my own world, music, it is increasingly likely that the actual musical product will become so easy to duplicate for free that trying to make a buck selling it will be impossible. And it's likely that making money from distributing a free product will hinge on the same thing that keeps this paper running?advertising. What's really depressing about this scenario is just how backward and ugly music advertising tends to be; television ads for records are usually a clip from the video and a b-grade voiceover guy going, "New record! Out now! Artist name! Record Title!" The videos themselves tend to be relatively unsophisticated affairs. MTV promos and bumpers, the general esthetic identity of MTV, tend to be a lot sleeker, prettier, more of the cultural moment and more interesting than the videos they frame. Which is a great thing to bring up to music industry people when they whine about how MTV doesn't play videos anymore. And when we speak of the music industry, we are of course talking about an industry that in its 40 most profitable years has yet to learn how to sell its products to people once they get out of college?i.e., when they start actually making money to spend on music.
The Chihuahua is the property of Tricon Global Restaurants, not the TBWA/Chiat/Day agency. Actually, a corporate spokeswoman told CNNfn that the Chihuahua "continues to be a part of our advertising." Chances are that they're not gonna completely drop a character that's been such a hit, even if he can't sell gorditas. But the people who wrote the stuff that everybody found so hilarious?"Here leezard leezard," etc.?have been dumped. I'd love to be able to write a good doomy column about how a crucial moment has passed, how the pendulum is beginning to swing back from better entertainment to blander, safer advertising. But I think the only people who this hasn't occurred to yet are the people like me, who don't buy the tacos, rather than the people trying to sell them.