The Tanning of America (21 page)

But on the other hand, the whole vibe of “Parents Just Don't Understand” helped Will Smith reveal a persona that pushed tanning to a completely new level with his TV show,
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. Just like
The Cosby Show,
what it did was show an African-American family on the mainstream stage—which by itself was significant. The family was affluent but Will's character, a fish out of water, wasn't; and, in fact, he had the hip-hop point of view of someone who came from nothing, from the impoverished inner-city experience. And so, by some kind of alchemy, Will took the slice of hip-hop credibility he had earned and put it on this gigantic mother ship called NBC with his show and blew the doors off. Besides what it did for him as a brand, when the next wave of rappers-turned-actors started hitting TV shows and movies, they benefited as well. From there, Will has only gotten better at the tanning process with what he's done on film in a range of characters completely different from each other, all of whom he makes authentic and believable over and over and over again.

Just how powerful a global tanning effect Will Smith was providing—as far back as the late 1980s—was really brought home to me recently when I had a chance to talk to him about those early years with his longtime manager, James Lassiter.

When James first started working with Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince back in Philly, he had actually begun his management role after growing up as Jeff's best friend—although it was a vision of seeing the world as bigger than Philadelphia that he and Will truly shared. James recalled, “We wanted to see it
all
.” They never limited themselves, nor did they see rap as a short-lived niche phenomenon, as did most of the music industry. James explained that he and Will believed everyone would buy their records for the simple reason that Run-DMC had proven it was possible. They made up their minds that “we're not just selling records to people here, we're selling records everywhere.”

So was making records as popular as Run-DMC their goal? No, James said, “We were trying to make records that were as popular as Michael Jackson, asking how can we reach the same audience he reached.” That idea, he went on to say, was probably encouraged by Jive Records founder Clive Calder who kept telling them, “Don't make records only for America. Hip-hop is gonna break around the world.” Clive would edit their records, cutting them down to two minutes by taking out verses so that they could get radio play overseas. Will and James didn't know that until the first time they traveled internationally and heard the records on the air. But they were hitting the charts and beginning to build a mainstream international following, even before Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince had become top hitmakers in the United States.

The extent of their recording success and Will's worldwide appeal, however, didn't register until
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
began airing in places like Spain and it turned out to have a 50 percent market share there. Crazy! The Super Bowl here in America doesn't even have a domestic 50 percent market share. Even crazier was the experience that James and Will both described when they traveled to Spain in this era. As the story goes, when their plane landed, there was a huge crowd of excited fans holding up signs and lots of paparazzi waiting at the airport. Will and James assumed it had to be for some big star on the plane. “Wow,” one of them asked the other, “did you see anybody famous on the flight?” No, neither had seen anyone. Well, lo and behold, as they got closer to the signs that the fans were holding up, one word jumped out,
¡PRINCIPE!
That is “Prince!” in Spanish.

And that was a pivotal moment that made Will understand he had become a global star. It didn't stop there. That night fans stayed outside the hotel calling for him to come down and sign autographs. All of a sudden, they needed a police escort to get around because sightings of Will Smith were stopping traffic.

In spite of the worldwide recording success that Will had achieved with Top Ten hits and Grammy awards, even with the international stardom he had attained as a television star, when it was time to go and promote the movie
Bad Boys
overseas, the studio didn't want to spend the money to have Will go on a major international tour. Why? Because, the marketing experts hired by the studio insisted, African-American stars could only garner five million dollars in overseas box office receipts. No matter what James Lassiter did to try to convince the studio they were missing a great opportunity, they wouldn't move. That is until Will was invited to appear at an MTV event at Cannes and did so well in his interviews with the foreign press—these were then picked up all around the world—that the studio agreed to give him the chance to go promote the movie. The end result was that
Bad Boys
did 138 million dollars in worldwide box office receipts. So much for those experts who predicted a fraction of that.

Part of the cultural misread had to do with the generation gap. Those experts, after all, based their predictions on the track record of international stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were out of touch, no doubt, with their own kids, who were now seeing Will Smith as the earlier generation saw Sly Stallone. The experts were so disconnected from culture that they avoided not just traditional assumptions but hard-core statistics like Will's TV show share in Spain and the global fan base established from his recording career.

But once the entertainment industry caught on to the trajectory of Will Smith's journey and observed the worldwide tanning effect he had caused—because he reflected the hip-hop attitude—it altered the playing field for everyone else who followed. Again, this is why, when you look at key factors of tanning, you can't discount how far ahead of the game Will was and you can't underestimate everything he had done to drive global culture.

One other thing that I personally feel is significant about Will Smith is that the longer he holds a seat at the table at the highest levels of the entertainment industry and the more mainstream he has become, the more clear it is that always and forever he will never lose his blackness. Because of Will making it part of the conversation, unapologetically, the understanding that African-American culture is popular culture has become accepted. And because he understands his own proximity to culture, Will Smith has never tried to change himself because of trends—to put on the “gangsta” leather jacket to fit in.

Will fortunately saw very early how tanning was activating the public because he genuinely had the mental complexion of someone who was both urban and suburban in his sensibilities. He naturally appealed to those populations, who were being drawn together. He didn't try to appeal to them; that's who he is and what he is. If he had tried to become more thuggish, that would have been false and the trust in him and his brand would have been diminished. Instead he stayed in his own lane musically, and when things lightened up in hip-hop, in 1997, his time came again.

During his waiting-out period, Will's original label, Jive Records, offered him the option to get out of his contract, and I thought that was a mistake. But as the saying goes, Jive's loss was my gain. Not only did I know Will personally from my days working with Kid 'n Play but from the moment I arrived at Sony, I was hot to do more to build their soundtrack business. Besides the fact that you can sell them to multiple markets, soundtracks come with a ready-made marketing campaign, not to mention that the film company provides your budget. Plus, when I signed Will to the record label, he was in the successful throes of the soundtrack for
Bad Boys
and there was a sequel in the works.

I will say, however, that it was crazy when we finished recording with the song for
Men in Black,
and because of the gangsta mentality's dominance, many of the female hip-hop artists we tried to hire for the background voices on the song felt it would hurt their credibility. SWV got the gig and their lead artist, CoKo, didn't even want to be in the video—so as not to be seen with the clean-cut Will Smith. Hard to even believe in hindsight. But that was how hard-core the mentality was at that moment in music.

Frankly, I wasn't banking on Will selling a certain number of records with any given movie, but, staying positive, my instincts told me we could definitely build momentum with those soundtracks. None of this prepared me for how many CDs we would sell with
Men in Black
. Cresting at number one on the
Billboard
Top 200 chart and staying there for two weeks, it was quickly certified triple platinum for sales over three million copies and would go on to far surpass that in the years to follow. A soundtrack!

There was only one thing that happened throughout this fairy-tale story that made me stop and question possibilities for myself. How much better could it have been than to have an array of gifted artists on an album that was attached to a major Hollywood blockbuster spawn four single hits, win Grammys, and sell that many copies? Well, the one issue that caught my attention was how Ray-Bans and the program conceived by Alyse Kobin of Kobin Enterprises—where the idea for partnering the sunglasses with
Men in Black
was hatched—had made out from their product placement opportunity. Given the challenge of fading cool that the brand had been facing, instead of going with any of their more classic silhouettes, the Ray-Bans they chose to use to revive their image in the movie were the insanely cool, superpowered, streamlined wrap-style Predator II sunglasses. When Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones put them on after telling us that they were “the first and only line of defense” in ridding the planet of alien scum, and after repeating, 1) “We work in secret,” and 2) “We dress in black,” and Will adding the big one, pointing to his sunglasses and saying, “And I make these look good,” the Ray-Bans instantly took on the attributes of the movie heroes. In no time, the Predator IIs went on to become the top-selling Ray-Bans ever. And though the soundtrack sales represented close to a 100 percent improvement over the last big Columbia movie release, the movie's promotional program ultimately increased Ray-Ban sales 500 percent!

Retailers like Sunglass Hut, which had moved 13 percent of the Ray-Bans and saw a 19 percent jump in their stock price, had their economies instantly benefit from the movie. For Columbia Pictures, Ray-Ban's in-store advertising support was estimated to have been worth $20 million. In a win-win-win, Ray-Ban expanded its popularity with 25-to-39-year-olds into the previously untapped teen market.

This wasn't one of those moments when lightning struck and I decided to give up my day job and go in search of the Holy Grail for marketing. In all honesty, my thinking was still driven by CD sales and I made a mistake, a blunder that taught me a great lesson. If rap was that popular, I figured, and all it took was someone famous behind it, that was enough for me to go off and sign a superpowered icon—Kobe Bryant—and produce him rapping in a remix with Brian McKnight. What a rude awakening when we finished a couple songs on him and then made the first video, at which point the project stalled.

Though I had to learn that lesson, there was another insight from
Men in Black
that opened my eyes to opportunity like nothing else. When all was said and done, I couldn't help noticing that all the folks from Bausch & Lomb/Ray-Ban and their advertising and product placement people were having a private celebration. And they were having it at enough of an arm's length from show business that they didn't have to be immersed in it all the time. From my vantage point, it suddenly seemed very appealing not to have to deal with egos, coordinating logistics for all the heavyweights in the music business with their entourages and private planes and assistants and agents and managers and lawyers. It was just selling sunglasses. Hmmmm.

In the past, I had always seen a main-tent event in pop culture as the equivalent of a concert, where you're just selling tickets and posters directly related to the event. But now I saw that the main-tent event with something like a blockbuster film and a megastar could put the Midas touch on whatever else came into contact with it. Like sunglasses, for example.

How exactly it could do that, I wasn't so sure yet. But two years later when Bausch & Lomb sold their Ray-Ban division to an Italian company for $1.2 billion dollars, I was determined to find out.

One of the first things that I noticed in surveying the landscape where advertisers were looking to use the hip-hop Midas touch for their clients was how little most of them really understood about the consumer they were trying to reach.

From my take on it, consumers wanted to be able to invest the same trust and belief in their brands as they did in their heroes and favored celebrities. Where advertisers seemed to be missing the mark was with the formulaic approach that assumed if you put Hip-hop Star X together with Corporate Brand Y you were going to yield Power Z that would conquer the marketplace. In reality, there is no formula. What's essential is that there are shared values between that star and the product the star is being asked to put him- or herself on the line for.

The subsequent case of Dooney & Bourke provides one of those cautionary tales of a company that tried to chase after cool credentials without having any shared values between their brand and the celebrity they engaged. The maker of a beautiful, classic line of handbags, accessories, and apparel items, Dooney & Bourke had been launched in the mid-seventies and had done well for years in boutiques and fine department stores. Wanting to expand their customer base and online business, while engaging the forces of pop culture to attract the youth psychographic, they selected actress Lindsay Lohan as their standard-bearer. They trashed their brand in the process. Maybe with another, perhaps funkier or more unpredictable brand a Lindsay Lohan marketing strategy could have worked. But Dooney & Bourke, trying to be something that they weren't, confused and ran off their former customers, putting their brand at utter risk.