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Though you all might be interested in Nike's latest bit of marketing
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>>From: Maquila Solidarity Network <[log in to unmask]>
>>Subject: [nike-international] Nike not welcome in Toronto's Kensington
Market
Dear Friends,
Below is a Maquila Solidarity Network report on a Nike protest that took
place on July 18 in Toronto . We've also including an article on the
people who came out to protest Nike's stealth-marketing venture in the
Kensington Market exceeded our expectations.
Presto Chango: Nike not welcome in Toronto's Kensington Market
Nike Campaign Update
Maquila Solidarity Network
July 19, 2002
When Nike moved into Toronto's Kensington Market, a vibrant neighbourhood
of alternative youth culture, they should have known they would have a
fight on their hands. Shortly after the Nike "Presto showroom" opened,
local graffiti artists let Nike know it wasn't welcome by tagging
buildings and mailboxes with messages like, "Nike = sweatshops = get
lost." Earlier this week, a pair of sneakers, dripping with red paint,
appeared overnight hanging from the Presto sign.
The battle culminated last night when local youth, together with the
Maquila Solidarity Network and UNITE, organized an anti-Nike street party
and counter-concert to protest the company's sweatshop labour practices
and infiltration of the Kensington Market. Staged on a balcony three
doors down from Presto, the concert opened with the local break-dancing
crew SheBang! B-Girls. Before a crowd of over 300 people, electronic
artists mixed beats between speeches by MSN, UNITE, local author Jim
Munroe and the Toronto Public Space Committee. The street was shut down
for two hours as youth danced, partied and chanted "Nike go home!"
Presto comes to Kensington
It was an unfortunate choice when someone at Nike decided to market their
new "Presto" sneakers to an alternative, "indie youth" crowd. To reach
the target market, Nike opened a music venue called Presto in the
Kensington Market in June. They hired a youth marketing firm to book
local alternative bands who were encouraged to wear Nike's new Presto
sneakers during their shows. "Wardrobe Guidelines" in the bands'
contracts explicitly forbade the wearing of any logos of Nike's
competitors. Bar staff were issued Nike shoes and apparel, and a display
of Presto gear went up on the wall. It was a marketer's dream come true.
Surprisingly the familiar Nike swoosh was nowhere to be seen on the
club. Many residents had no idea it was a Nike marketing project until
they walked through the door and saw the sneaker display on the wall and
all the staff wearing Nikes. But it didn't take long for opposition to
grow against this attempt to infiltrate the local indie arts community.
OPPRESTO the counter-concert
Members of Future Rhetoric, a collective of local electronic artists and
DJs, had been invited to play at Presto. When they learned they were
being used to market Presto sneakers, they immediately pulled out and
decided to organize a counter-concert and street party called Oppresto,
with the help of MSN.
Market residents also approached their local city councillor to complain
about Presto's high noise levels in a residential neighbourhood. By-law
inspectors were sent to Presto one night and found the club was running
without a permit, with noise levels exceeding allowable limits.
On July 18, the night of the counter-concert, Nike decided to pull the
plug on music at their venue and simply use the space as a Presto display
room until August 17. At that point the marketing project ends and Nike
will pull out of the Market. They are not expected back any time soon.
Stealth swoosh
A new club/gallery in Toronto's Kensington Market turns
out to be a front for a Nike campaign, CARL WILSON writes.
And that has some on the scene taking to the streets
By CARL WILSON
Saturday, July 20, 2002 Print Edition, Page R4, The Globe and Mail
TORONTO -- Nike brand managers in Toronto are giddy over their summer
promotional brainstorm, a gay men's bathhouse on Jarvis Street called Just
Did It. "The synergies are perfect," says a consultant from marketing
agency Set Gaydar on Stun. "Gym-bound hulks steeped in sweat, faces
contorted in ecstasy -- just like a Nike commercial, except this is a
'reality' ad starring you!"
No, that's not right. Let's try again.
Nike plans a champagne breakfast on Monday to celebrate its latest
stealth-marketing triumph: With local demographic experts P.O.V.erty, the
sportswear giant has recruited a "street-person team" among Toronto's
homeless. Beggars tattoo their necks with the Nike swoosh and extend
Nike-branded baseball caps to ask for change, in return for swoosh-marked
rain slickers and (unmarked) mickeys of rye.
"The homeless, like gang members, are 'innovators,' " explains a
P.O.V.erty VP. "Their ingenious survival fashions are soon taken up by
'early adaptors,' and eventually make their way down to the mall." The
experiment will climax in a group re-enactment of the notorious 1996 Nike
ad featuring an athlete vomiting all over his shoes.
All right, that's not true either. But many Torontonians were just about
as gobsmacked this summer to hear that Presto -- the new, all-ages
punk-rock and hip-hop club and gallery in Kensington Market -- was really
a front for a Nike promotional campaign. Mike Farrell of Youthography, the
Toronto market-research firm that helped Nike create the club, has called
it an "interactive billboard" that lets "unconventional consumers" stroll
straight into Nike's hip universe.
Kidding again? We wish, said the 350 or so musicians, artists, activists
and sundry Market denizens who staged an "Oppresto" street protest in
front of the Augusta Avenue club Thursday night. Presto is actually a
brightly coloured line of slip-on sneakers that made Nike a mint last
year. Now, to introduce the matching shirts and accessories, and
encouraged by its success with a Manhattan gallery show in May, the
company has leased a former electronics store south of College Street --
in the traditional haunt of fishmongers, Jamaican patty joints and
tattooed teenaged anarchists.
There, it would make marketing history by hanging the sort of art normally
seen at small spaces on Queen Street West, and showcasing hip-hop DJs and
rock bands such as the Gruesomes, the Salads and the Two-Minute Miracles,
each weekend until Aug. 17 -- when it would pack up its wares and, presto,
disappear.
Or that was the plan. A setback was announced from the impromptu
"Oppresto" stage on an apartment balcony a few doors south of the club on
Thursday. City councillor Olivia Chow, who objects to Nike's labour
practices in China and Indonesia, said proudly that she had loosed the
city's hounds with noise and zoning bylaws to shut Presto down.
Nike Canada marketing director Randy Weyersberg was hiding out inside the
Presto showroom, and confirmed that the club will stop hosting music after
this weekend. (The gallery will remain.) He tried to make the best of it
-- the product had just launched, so "the promotion was moving into a new
phase anyway."
Minutes before demonstrators began pelting the building with rotten fruit,
Weyersberg and Nike public-affairs manager Michelle Noble assured me
Presto was a smash hit. It gets bouquets from neighbours (Weyersberg read
me a card) and thousands of people pass through its doors. Weyersberg
admitted the backlash was predictable, but folded it into his sales pitch:
Nike had chosen Kensington Market for its diversity, so "free expression"
was what the campaign was about.
What he didn't say was that protests could also help circulate the brand
name -- even if the adventurous electronic music, Nike-mocking posters and
break-dancing squads did make Presto look like a toupée-topped old lounge
lizard by comparison. "These are our own ideas and culture," Ian Thomson
of the anti-sweatshop Maquiladora Solidarity Network told the crowd, "and
Nike tries to steal them and sell them back to us."
The battle of the bylaws isn't Presto's only loss. The "street teams" who
spent June roaming the area blaring dance music have since made themselves
scarce. In early July, a graffiti artist decided Presto's minimalist sign
wasn't complete without the famous swoosh, and neatly sprayed one in. (It
has since been removed.)
The protesters speculated that Nike knew the swoosh would be stigmatized
in the Market and had to play it down. "This company lost before it even
started in this neighbourhood," Thomson said.
Maybe. But Weyersberg and Noble said they hadn't tried to fool anyone. And
it's not exactly stealth marketing when Presto merchandise hangs in plain
sight on the club walls, alongside a "Prestifesto" that spells out the
concept. It is written in that chatty tone corporations use when they want
to imitate kids, but end up sounding like guidance counsellors: "Why is
Nike doing this, and what are we doing, anyway? Well, obviously this is a
promotion, but we hope it's a different kind of promotion. . . ."
In part, the protesters rehashed charges of Third World exploitation. But
as local novelist and former Adbusters magazine editor Jim Munroe put it,
a kind of "countercultural ennui" has settled over anticorporate issues
that have moved into the mainstream. Most of the indie-culture devotees
here weren't the slogan-chanting type. What makes them queasy about Presto
is more elusive.
Dave Meslin of the Toronto Public Space Committee got one angle with his
theory of "advertisation." He described how Toronto trash cans, bus
shelters and even suicide barriers on bridges have been taken over by
private companies and used as advertising space. As taxes have been cut,
he said, promotions budgets have soared, so marketers end up supplying the
infrastructure. "But in the advertising transaction," he said, "your
attention is what the city is selling to these companies. . . . Likewise,
when you walk into Presto, the product is you."
Nike might defend the club as postmodern patronage, a paradoxical case of
a market titan sponsoring culture the market itself can't support, a
grassroots version of Mercedes or American Express subsidizing museums and
ballets. Visual artist Matt Crookshank and others who have participated
argue that Nike's providing a venue when condominium development and
rising rents have driven out other galleries and bars, not to mention
evicting residents.
Of course, at nearby defunct music clubs like Ted's or the El Mocambo, no
band was ever asked to refrain from wearing competitors' logos, as the
Presto contract specifies. Still, musicians who cheered Chow's zoning
action may not be so chuffed if other clubs in the area get kiboshed with
the same bylaw. Presto wasn't staying anyway.
Maybe that's the problem -- the poach-and-move-on, focus-group mentality
that one protesting couple sneered at with homemade T-shirts reading "Cool
Hunter" and "Culture Machine," as they danced to beats and beeps of
Blameshifter and I Am Robot and Proud.
Such accusations jolted Weyersberg off-script. "We're not culture
crashers," he insisted. "We want to be part of it, enrich the culture,
connect artists to the community." He compared Presto earnestly to Nike's
work with school-yard basketball leagues: "This is about movement and
expression, like sports" -- an analogy that probably wouldn't have warmed
many skinny-art-geek hearts outside.
They see Nike as an interloper, projecting ulterior motives on a creative
underground they love purely for its own sake. But that's not so new --
the indie scene has long been selling beer and cigarettes, fame and other
dreams, even if its main customer was itself.
Presto's deeper transgression is location, location, location. The Market
once seemed as immune and inappropriate to mass-marketing as homelessness
and anonymous anal sex would be. It is losing the fight to stay that way.
Thanks to the condo-dwellers, the Market is changing with or without Nike.
Immigrant-run fruit stands and chicken-parts butcheries slowly give way to
cocktail bistros and chic boutiques hawking "ironic" vintage alarm clocks.
No one splatters melons over their storefronts, but they're the greater
threat to the ragtag antimaterialism that still thrives in a few small
blocks of Canada's advertisation capital.
Beneath the protests lies a plea: Why can't we have one safe zone for
those who disagree with the general social drift, a kind of human-nature
preserve? Kensington Market is the habitat of a subculture that fears it
may go extinct, and Presto picked a bad time to show up in a pith helmet
and camouflage gear.
******************************************************
Maquila Solidarity Network / Ethical Trading Action Group
606 Shaw Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6G 3L6
416-532-8584 (phone) 416-532-7688 (fax)
www.maquilasolidarity.org
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