A consumer culture with an advertising-supported media may be the perfect formula for a branded life. Consider this bit in which the Paid Content newsletter describes Coke’s Stageside.tv website as a “marketing ploy (that) promises (free) sharable (music) downloads of live performances, behind-the scenes and interviews.”

“It’s is all part of a new marketing campaign by Coca-Cola to reach out to millions of young males, who are notoriously difficult to target with traditional media,” according to Slyck.com the file-sharing site that Paid Content cited as its source.

Slyck speculates that advertisers may pay artists for music downloads in the future — compensating performers without fighting file-sharers. Slyck quotes Mitchell Reichgut of Jun Group, the production firm for Stageside.tv:

“We have always believed in that model. It may not happen overnight, but we’re very encouraged by the relationships we’ve developed with the (record) labels.”

Teen Machine MediaPost reports that Shawn Gold, senior vice president of marketing and content for MySpace.com, gave an industry marketing conference this insight into the culture of his site:

“Teens are brand networking on their pages–they are trend-setters and they want to be the first to know or to spread something … that’s the cultural currency of life on MySpace.”

Calling all sociologists. If we’re living in a branded world we may need to think about what that means. Here is a scholarly paper on the topic that I may come back to in the future. As long as I’m on this bent I should link to a previous posting on an advertising history archive at Duke University.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media