16 year old Canadian Justin Bieber wears a dog tag because it’s apparently cool
I don’t know who Justin Bieber is, I wouldn’t know him if I ran into him at a Gamestop store, and it doesn’t really matter. Bieber fits perfectly into the David Cassidy pop circuit. There’s nothing wrong with that. The only reason I’m writing about Justin Bieber is because the title of his latest album reminds me of everything wrong with corporate marketing.
Bieber’s debut album was titled My World. What clever title did the brilliant marketers come up with for his second album release only one year after his debut? The answer: My World 2.0. They pulled this straight from the marketing jargon bin. Damn you marketing nonsense! Can we kill this trend once and for all? They might as well have called the album iBeiber, but I’m sure Apple would have sued them.
2.0 is the jargon that won’t go away. It cranked into high gear with the idea of Web 2.0. Now it seems like when every marketing department of ad agency runs out of ideas they trot out a 2.0 at the end of the product. There’s Classroom 2.0, Business 2.0, Gas 2.0, Green 2.0, Domino’s Pizza 2.0, Marketing 2.0… the list goes on and on and on. How about Originality 2.0? Instead of just beating a term to death why not come up with a new idea? Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the seemingly endless reboots of movies.
Movie reboots used to mean “remakes.” This kind of made sense. A movie made in 1938 could be remade because the audience wasn’t familiar with the story. A more cynical person might even argue that the modern audience isn’t even aware that the 1938 version of the film is far superior than the pale imitation. Unfortunately, it’s becoming common place to “remake”, or reboot, movies less than a decade old.
The last Spiderman movie came out in 2007, and there’s already a plan to “reboot” the franchise. I guess this kind of makes sense if the franchise is terrible (see: Batman and Robin), but the three recent Spiderman movies were very well received. Large corporations suffer from the same fate as all large bureaucracies. They’re unable to innovate, they’re stuck in the past, and they’re reluctant to change.
The main reason this type of marketing bothers me is because it’s lazy. Coming up with new ideas is difficult. Many times it’s just easy to slap on a My World 2.0 sticker and call it a day. It didn’t matter what Justin Bieber called his second album; it was always going to be a success. The title suggests that type of thinking is exactly behind the uninspired name.
Recent Comments