In today’s creative economy, the tail increasingly wags the dog. Marketing is driving culture as promotional campaigns overshadow the offerings they seek to elevate — in fashion, music, art and film. With fashion weeks taking place around the world and awards season well underway, the hype machine is operating at full throttle. But few products, if any, can compete with such fanfare. On the runway, the red carpet and beyond, culture is at risk of being subsumed by the sound and the fury, the hype and the buzz, of its own promotion.
Fashion houses seemingly no longer hire creative directors for their design skills or aesthetic vision but for their marketing prowess. “The marketing guys frankly have invaded the companies,” Sidney Toledano, the former chief executive of Dior, said recently. This explains why there is less creativity on the runway and the most high-profile appointment in fashion last year was the rapper and music producer Pharrell Williams. In June, Mr. Williams presented his first men’s wear collection for Louis Vuitton, which, while confident and commercial, lacked “any new shapes, or ways of addressing the body, or thinking about luxury,” as the fashion critic Cathy Horyn put it. For Louis Vuitton, however, the show was an unqualified success: The star-studded spectacle attracted over a billion online views.
Marketing is nothing new, whether it’s deployed to promote consumer goods or creative works. First came the product, then the persuasion. But now the hype often precedes and overwhelms the product, to the point that the product seems almost irrelevant to its own success. “We have long moved beyond fabricating and selling products,” said Louis Vuitton’s chief executive, Pietro Beccari, contending that “fashion is becoming music, becoming pop culture, becoming a spectacle itself.”
“Barbie,” the top-grossing film of 2023, with nearly $1.5 billion in ticket revenues, was a sensation even before it opened in theaters. Its ubiquitous marketing campaign cost an estimated $150 million, more than its $145 million production budget. (In comparison, marketing across sectors averaged 10.6 percent of company budgets in 2023, according to a major industry survey.) Somewhere along the way, Barbiemania took on a life of its own, spawning countless social media memes and hundreds of items of bright pink merchandise. “It stopped becoming a marketing campaign and took on the quality of a movement,” said the Warner Bros. president of global marketing, Josh Goldstine.
Mr. Goldstine’s comment points to a new and expanded promotional terrain. Marketing campaigns provide the spark, but the news media kindles the conversation. By publishing articles about buzzy cultural offerings, the media responds to public interest, but also its own incentives: More clicks, views and engagement for sites and platforms. Performance metrics have laid bare the advantages of covering popular content. Social media works in tandem with these other promotional channels to reinforce the scale and scope of the phenomenon. Consider “Saltburn,” which, despite its lukewarm critical reception, has become “the most talked-about film of awards season” thanks to TikTok, where “Saltburn”–related videos have netted almost four billion views.
As the chatter builds online and off, a self-perpetuating cycle takes hold: The campaign provides an occasion for press coverage; news articles fuel social media activity; viral excitement leads to more news and more posts, snowballing into a giddy and unstoppable “movement.” The chatter coalesces into an autonomous phenomenon, a meta-subject that is itself dissected and discussed, making the publicists of stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé famous in their own right.
In the 1990s, before the explosion of the internet, consumers had grown jaded about marketing and its methods, which they found manipulative. To influence this media-literate group, campaigns had to become subtler and cleverer. The internet gave advertisers even more opportunity to make ads that didn’t look like ads. But the rise of social media has taken this one step further: Consumers have become active participants in the marketing of culture, posting and sharing content that is effectively promotional, even if not intended as such. (The “Saltburn”-inspired reaction memes, dance videos, cocktail recipes and scented candles that went viral on TikTok before getting picked up by the press are cases in point.) Rather than cajole or badger, campaigns now invite consumers to join the conversation. They’ve recognized that anyone can amplify their message, whether through social media, traditional media or brand partnerships. It’s the ultimate soft sell.
Promotional movements have become as impressive as the products themselves, perhaps even more so. “Just as perfection only exists as an ideal never quite made flesh,” Whizy Kim wrote of “Barbie” for Vox, “Greta Gerwig’s desperately anticipated film based on the blonde plastic doll will necessarily disappoint some when the fantasy of its stunning promotion gives way to the reality of seeing the actual movie.” There have always been runaway hits, such as “Titanic” and “Gangnam Style,” but the product now seems strangely more like the beneficiary than the source of its promotional allure.
A video ad for the Christie’s 2017 “Salvator Mundi” auction might be an allegory for our time. Titled “The Last da Vinci: The World Is Watching,” the video never shows the actual painting but rather the misty-eyed, mouth-agape reactions of viewers, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Patti Smith. While the work had been dogged by questions about its condition and attribution, it overcame the issues raised by critics to become the most expensive artwork ever sold, fetching $450.3 million — a result that was deemed “a triumph for the dark art of marketing.” “Why Would Anyone Pay $450 Million for the ‘Salvator Mundi’?” an Artnet News headline asked, and answered: “Because They’re Not Buying the Painting.”
More cultural industries are prioritizing promotion over product as their traditional businesses arrive at impasses and breaking points. Some industries have faced declining profits, including music and film, where digital distribution has undermined long established revenue streams. Others have reached record heights, as in the case of luxury fashion, where megabrands have grown so large that a slowdown feels inevitable. Whether victims of changing business models or of their own success, these industries have come to view their core products with a degree of pessimism: Can they continue to deliver?
Marketing, on the other hand, confronts none of these inherent limits. In the best-case scenario, promotional efforts strike gold and trigger a popular craze, a mass movement. Today’s cultural phenomena, from “Barbie” to Taylor Swift, have approached a kind of sublime, with earnings that defy comprehension and fans so rapturous their cheers have caused seismic activity. But it is not just the cultural industries that benefit. For audiences, too, promotion adds value. Just as the crowd at the “Salvator Mundi” auction “gasped and whooped” at the artwork’s winning bid, we applaud the spectacle of success. It becomes a sufficient reason in itself to consume culture.
This stands in stark contrast with the ’90s, when consumers viewed marketing with suspicion and rebuked artists for going mainstream. The idea of selling out spoke to us because we encountered art in private. Discovering that something which had resonated with us so deeply was in fact a product of mass appeal brought with it a sense of betrayal. But today we venerate what is popular. We recognize that we are one in an army of consumers, and this knowledge conditions our experience of culture. In commercially successful art we find a sense of belonging. We take part in something larger than ourselves. We join the conversation. We become culturally conversant and delight in shared references. We like and comment and win public approbation. If art is a means to an end for others, why not for us, too?
Natasha Degen is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the author of “Merchants of Style: Art and Fashion After Warhol.”
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