The Flip Flop Girl

(Tylenol Packaging from Yesteryear)

Random Asprin
I'm not saying this is doing anyone any harm. I just gravitated to the word "random"--and so has marketing. Ask yourself, if you're young, healthy, and active, do you really need asprin in your life? Do you ever think about asprin? Well, Tylenol would like to get your attention if you're in the much-coveted 18-35 year-old demographic. So, the marketing gurus decided to mix in some "extreme sport" mentality along with an "underground" vibe to make Tylenol hip and cool. They hired "pain partners" to infiltrate hipster hangouts and they funded a skateboard park in Brooklyn without calling attention to themselves except for word-of-mouth or tiny branding placed on promotional swag. This sort of covert marketing is featured in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

But I can go further for you. I'll take a few steps back and show you the real source of this cute little story: These are "the marketing gurus" that I'm referring to. Call them what you will. I think they provide a service to some extent but, in the end, they are also playing with deception and manipulation. Of course, they would say otherwise. They would say they're the "good marketers." Well, whatever. You can decide that one for yourself. Never heard of Faith Popcorn? Now, you have.

And here's the story by Fortune magazine, Sept. 7, 2004, that explains it all quite well. I start in where some hipster wannabe yells out something like, "It's so random!" The full story is here for your reading pleasure.

"Wow, totally random and supercool," says a nose-ringed twentysomething, picking up a white box emblazoned with "Great pain leads to great art" as she walks out of the New York Underground Film Festival's audio-visual event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She sifts through an ironic goody bag for artsy kids: a mini Etch A Sketch, an aromatherapy candle, a CD with soothing music, and a sketchbook--all emblazoned with "Ouch!" The small red "Tylenol" on the corner of the box is the only hint that the brand is sponsoring the music videos projected on a makeshift screen in the dank nightclub.
Outside, Tobin Yelland, an urban photojournalist with a digital videocamera, interviews smoking hipsters. Responding to his call for "pain stories," they gruesomely recount Rollerblading accidents, split fingernails from art projects, and head-splitting all-nighters. Yelland doesn't volunteer that he's a Tylenol pain partner.
Over in East Los Angeles, at the ninth annual "B-Boy Summit," Tylenol is also quietly hanging out. Pain partner Asia One, a muscular 32-year-old in camouflage pants and a blue skin-tight tank, is a B-Girl (breakdancer to you squares), a key player in this hip-hop subculture offshoot. She is known for a head-spinning move that has earned her a quarter-sized bald spot. She emcees the breakdancing contests in a parking lot. Members of the multiethnic crowd shoot pictures of the dancers against a graffiti-covered canvas. They're using disposable cameras emblazoned with "Ouch!" that the company is handing out at a little table off to the side.
In New York City's first indoor skateboarding area in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Tylenol downshifts to a no-key approach. There's not a single "Ouch!" in the unheated, crumbling brick industrial space that holds an amoeba-shaped skateboard bowl Tylenol helped fund. (You'd think the company would worry about lawsuits for backing a locale reached only by going down a dark alley, over broken bottles, and under an unmarked, half-open garage door.) Swishing around the undulating sanded wood are Buddy Nichols and Rick Charnowski, pro skateboarders cum indie filmmakers, who shoot 8mm movies of the underground skateboard scene and are Tylenol pain partners. "Awesome," says Nichols to the bowl's creator and gate-keeper, Dave Mims, another pain partner who owns a skateboard shop in Manhattan's grungy East Village. He charges about 20 of his insider friends a fee for a key to the space but always welcomes hard-core out-of-town skateboarders. He doesn't advertise that Tylenol pitched in.
Yet the three unshaven thirtysomethings refer to the raw space as the Tylenol Bowl. It doesn't make sense. There's no sign of the company, nor was there any formal announcement or press release indicating a connection. Charnowski reports that the brand's unannounced affiliation is paying off. Skateboard magazines have made a number of unsolicited references to the Tylenol Bowl and skateboarders in Seattle and Denver have asked Nichols and Charnowski about the Tylenol Bowl without knowing that they are pain partners.
It's implausible, but Tylenol's calculating whisper has been heard. It's in a song by rocker Ben Kweller, which went on sale this summer in Apple's online music store. Called "Tylenol," it begins:
I need some Tylenol Give me some Tylenol To kill that headache you gave me.
And earlier this year, Saturday Night Live did a 60-second fake ad for an imaginary product for X-Games addicts: Tylenol Extreme, designed to "relieve testicular trauma." Classic SNL mockery, rife with raunchy humor, the spot was twice as long as a commercial and mentioned the product seven times. That kind of exposure is priceless: It can't be TiVoed out.
FEEDBACK jboorstin@fortunemail.com

Labels: corporate deception, futurism, madison advenue, marketing, pain, pop culture, skateboarding, tipping point, trends, Tylenol, Tylenol Bowl