The Radar team saw this in Shanghai earlier this week:
Oilapalooza: Cantonese star Leo Ku, brought to you by…Olive Oil. Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
A real slick move.
Someday, one could write a history of music branding in China that goes:
Step 1: Beer
Step 2: Olive Oil
Step 3: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Step 4: PROFIT!
Ladies and gents, we’re now in the scary new extra-virgin world of Step 3.
Music, of course, is no stranger to unusual sponsorships. Ever since the Rolling Stones made music history in the early 1980s by ushering in the era of the sponsored rock tour, we’ve seen plenty of distinctly un-rock-and-roll companies greasing their name on venues full of drunk, moshing kids.
This trend spilled over into China too, fueling tours in recent years sponsored by Darts makers, video-game companies and furniture makers.
Those were more innocent, refined times, when it was considered crude that car companies (Volkswagen), perfumers (Jovan) or breath mints (Altoids) would pay to be associated with, say, Soundgarden or the Chemical Brothers.
But this is the age of Olive Oil. Look at the relative size of that bottle to the actual musician:
The critical moment in the history of music tour branding, according to writer Naomi Klein, is said to have occurred in January 1999 — when Tommy Hilfiger launched the ad campaign for the Stones ‘No Security’ Tour. That was when the phrase “full brand-culture integration” entered popular parlance. Klein writes:
“In the ads, young, glowing Tommy models were pictured in full-page frame “watching” a Rolling Stones concert taking place on the opposite page. The photographs of the band members were a quarter of the size of those of the models. In some of the ads, the Stones were nowhere to be found and the Tommy models alone were seen posing with their own guitars.”
In 2015, a giganto-bottle of olive oil would photobomb a selfie by a Cantonese pop star, and nothing would make sense anymore.