Critical Studies in Media Commercialism
Through this essay I would attempt to explain the meaning of stardom in our culture and how stars are getting advantage of their fame to earn money through commodifying themselves, the fact that they are involving to make themselves into commodities. How their fame becomes labour and how they manage to do it. I will also mention how somebody becomes a star and the work that has to be done to actually transform someone from an ordinary person into a 'shiny, glamorous star'.
Stars today are everywhere, in sports, business, politics, media, and of course in arts, such as music. Stars have been valorised and promoted as Greek gods and goddesses possessing 'classical' beauty something untouchable and unreachable. Stars image must be embodied; they workout, they look after themselves, they learn how to act like stars. What I mean by that is that they learn how to walk when they are in public places, how to pose in front of the photographers and even how to smile to them. We are dealing with the stars in terms of their signification, not with them as real people. Stars are moving in a different level, which is far away from the reality that we know. We never know them directly as real people, only as they are presented in media. Everything on star can be used in the world of advertisement and marketing, their face, their body; their voices are some of the 'selling products' on a star which can be advertised and sold. Stars have a great lifestyle, large houses, they always go everywhere in limousines, they wear high couture clothes and of course they have huge bank accounts.
Their publicity is a fundamental stage in a star's career and life. A massive team of people are working really hard to archive that. This team consists of stylists, gymnasts, public relation executives, photographers, journalists. Celebrities are presented as images fabricated by the media and this team are responsible to present the celebrity's best image. Stars are invested in by record companies and then present an important investment in their first work. Enormous amount of money, time and energy are spent by the industry on building up star images through publicity, promo, and fan clubs. According to Thomas Harris “the basic mechanisms for promoting the stars are publicity build up starting months or even years before (rumours, scandals, and photos). Also the studios assign a unit man to plant items about the personality in the places as well as national magazines.1” Record companies and studios are creating stars to make profit out of them; stars are becoming an asset to the studios or the company who controls them. They are “part of the labour that produces film as a commodity that can be sold for profit in the market place2”.
A star is an effective means for the commodification of the self, where the star is the embodiment of the potential of an accessible culture. Stars participate openly as marketable commodity serves as a powerful type of legitimating of the political economic model of exchange and value. The process of commodification describes the way capitalism carries out its objective of accumulating capital or realizing value through the transformation of use values into exchange values. Commodification is the process of transforming use values into exchange values. What I mean by saying exchange values is that if you have a very expensive car and piece of cake, you can't compare them. But you can exchange the piece of cake for a ride with the expensive car. This is how the star system works Capitalism literally appears as an immense collection of commodities.
Image, labour and capital are closely linked in stardom. Star images can be deployed in marketing campaigns to attract audiences by promoting themselves to attract people, an example is Britney Spears in the Pepsi commercial therefore stars, produce a marketable form of individuality that is fundamental to the star's status as capital. Celebrities learn to exploit and use their stardom to make additional earnings. Each celebrity/star is unique as an individual, a monopoly as we call them today, to own and control that monopoly is organized through the contracting of star labour. Because of that a war begins of is going to 'own' this star and this is when the stars starts to sign contracts with companies agreeing to the terms under which they will provide their monopoly grand. Contracts are therefore very important to the operation of stardom as a system because that is the way to control the 'ownership' of stars. “By capitalizing in their fame in this way (beauty tips, workout routine), the celebrity becomes a commodity. They capitalize their fame by associating themselves with products3”.
Celebrities have always captured the imagination of the public. Their influence on our behaviour can be seen worldwide. Harnessing this power can reap huge rewards for business. Celebrities have the power to use their names and basically their fame in advertising. That way both, business and celebrities, are earning money. An example of that is the various advertisement of different kind of fragments from celebrities. A major example of a star taking advantage of his fame to earn money is Bob Dylan. Dylan does not suffer from a lack of name recognition and he probably does not need the extra money. But like an increasing number of A-list celebrities he thought that making adverts in the television is a good move. Dylan was advertising iTunes and IPod which are both products of apple computers, giving this way extra profit to the star and promotion for the apple. Dylan also uses the advertisement of Victoria Secret to promote his CD, "Modern Times." Many celebrities saw the TV spots as potentially chance to be on the stand, to be the face of the day. “The stars are a brand. You have the core brand and then you have the celebrity brand, and, when that confluence is positive, the impact can be tremendous.4" Stars represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value.
Britney Spears is a resemblance of a star becoming a commodity. According to the most prestigious magazines of New York, Britney cost about $110 million to $120 million annually to the struggling U.S. economy. Between January 2006 and July 2007, Britney was a cover subject of People, Us Weekly, In Touch, Life & Style, OK!, or Star a total of 175 times in just 78 weeks. Britney is building her fortune not only by singing and record albums, but mostly from her fame. What the popularity of Britney Spears means is that someone paying extravagant amount of money per year to own her for a promotion purposes. Britney Spears rage is not just pictures on the Internet; it's also her lyrics promoting every aggressive male fantasy like her brand new song “gimme” which has sexual insinuations in it. Her songs and lyrics are components of the process of her image creation in popular music. Music videos, concert tours, and the media is more crucial to a performer's success than the music itself, and lets face it, Britney's song are not masterpieces and her voice it is not for the opera house. However the Britney Spears phenomenon is inevitable under capitalism, partly as progress over previous economic systems. Britney has become a brand, constructed around a real person that we can hardly see anymore. Dan Rubey discusses “the dual functions of musical celebrities as both role models and instruments of the advertising industry5”.
I would also like to refer in to other singers that are involved into making themselves into commodities. Those two are Despoina Vandi and Sakis Rouvas. They are the two biggest pop stars in Greece and I would like to take them as an example since I know so much about them. Both of them are extremely beautiful people and they are trying really hard to keep that. They are working really hard in the gym; they are having a healthy lifestyle. Despoina signed a huge contract with TIM mobile (mobile company) and since then everywhere she goes she is advertising the company. In every single video clip of hers, there is always the logo of the company. Sakis has done the same with a different mobile company and he is doing the same in his video clips. Those two companies now are trying so hard to keep their stars (each companies its own) since the competition is huge. We are talking about the two most famous pop idols. The companies are actually paying a lot of money to keep them and the singers are just enjoying the profit they make out of them. After all the success that the companies had, now more organizations are trying to book the stars for a commercial or even paying them to refer the organization in one of their interviews or at their concerts. Despoina, besides the money that she gets with all the commercials she actually promoting herself. In one recent commercial of a chocolate that Despoina is it; the song that we listen on the background is one of her new songs. This way, Despoina is earning money and she is promoting her self and her song. The system works always with something as an exchange, everyone benefits.
Between all the celebrities at the present, I personally believe that the most commodified couple is the Beckhams. David Beckham the country's most famous sports star and his wife Victoria is a singer and the face of the British celebrity gossip industry. Recently, David Beckham has signed a three-year royalty-based $40 million deal to be the global face the brand's Emporio underwear collection. David's advertisement is almost in every single magazine, on the buses in here in London and on huge posters in stores. He is also playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy with a five-year contract of $250-million. Beckham gets a wheelbarrow full of cash and an unconquered media market. Victoria or otherwise Posh is a member of the touring phenomenon Spice Girls. The group after its separation was reunited recently for one special concert in London, ticket sales combined with merchandise sales and sponsorships earned the girls $100 million. A celebrity can licence his/her signature in a various kinds of products such as perfumes, clothes and so much more, Posh turns that in her account expanding the Brand 'Beckham'. She's going to launch her own make-up range as part of a deal with Coty. David has already created a best-selling aftershave with Coty and Victoria is looking to follow in his footsteps. Both of them, David and Victoria are capitalize their fame with the most profitable ways. They know how to manipulate and attract all the media on them and have everybody talk about them. They have done commercials, they are producing their own products, and they are actually producing their own label, their own name. Beckhams are a brand - a commodity
An interesting approach to stardom the commodification is through the film industry and the film stars. A film does not define stars, stars are defying by the way the film is promoted, through interviews, pictures, posters and so on. “A star image is also what people say or write about him or her. Stars are produced by the media industries and film stars by Hollywood. Hollywood controls not only the star's film but their promotion, pin-ups and glamour portraits, press releases and to a large extent the fan clubs6”. Stars are a kind of investment in a movie, a huge amount of the money goes to the star, because the star is the one person that is the guarantee that the cinemas will be full of people because of him/her. Stars have the place of occupational leaders in the Hollywood hence they are promote the movie to the public only by being in the movie. They draw great audiences not only because of their beauty as people but also because they are symbols of certain types of entertainment, people will know what kind of movie is going to be if Kevin Costner is starring in the film. Or in the case of Marilyn Monroe that she was presenting herself as a sex object, was a guaranteed to bring recognition and appeal to her as to the film. This is how stars are becoming part of the way that films are sold. So “by focusing on stardom as form of working within an occupation one does not exhaust all that need to be said on the matter, but at least one does begin the specification at a pertinent point. Stardom is like an arrangement proceeds to elaborate what these enthusiasms are by a series of cultural meditation on stars and stardom7”. But personally I believe that the starring actor of the film may be really helpful and sometimes extremely important but a movie could be successful because of the talent of the director, the script, the every single thing that has contributed into the creation of the movie. Stars are used as representations of culture. For instance, Spice Girls were a represent of girl power.
Stars are involved in making themselves into commodities; there are both labour and the thing that labour produces. What R. Dyer meant was that stars can easily make money out of their and they are taking advantage of that and they turn into a products in the name of commercialism. Stars are special people with extraordinary talent and skills. Someone to succeed and last in the star system means that he is actually a talent into being famous. So they try to create the perfect image around their name that will secure them a place into the star system, furthermore, I will ensure them that they are going to make some money. “The star image is then a given, like machinery, an example of what Karl Marx calls 'congealed labour' something that is used with further labour (scripting, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce another commodity, a film8”. Everything goes around the words money, fame and success. I have the sense that celebrities have a higher goal when they accept to participate in an advertisement. I mean the money are good but that way they can promote themselves more, and gain more power in the media world. I guess when a company, like Pepsi, wants Britney to be the star in the advertisement, means that they believe that Britney is already successful and they expect to gain from her fame. But maybe the case in this point is that fame is never enough. Celebrities are doing everything they can to get into the cover of the magazines, and to be the gossip of the day. Fame is addictive, is like drugs that you keep asking for more and every time you are going further and further to get it.
Commodification refers to the processes through which social relations are reduced to an exchange relation. Money allows all social relations and needs to be quantifiable and therefore to have exchange value. Nothing escapes commodification. More and more Americans are selling their very selves: their blood, semen, ova, even their newborns. Everything has become about money.
Celebrity is well and truly a business. Given that most people say they are not influenced by adverts, is using celebrities worth the time and money? Can Chanel really justify spending pounds 18m on an advert featuring Nicole Kidman? I strongly bilieve that so much money are spend for no special reason. But I think that the use of a star into promoting of something is a very smart movement. I will be influenced by my favorite stars, I am already. I have become victim of the commercialism and consumption but obviously, that works. Stars are basically becoming products to be used by companies/studios in a profitable ways. The competition is hard and everyone is trying to be on the top, they using the best they can get and that come as benefit to the stars. Besides the cooperation within celebrities and organizations, stars with all the power (fame and money) they have, they can actually become a brand on their own. They can design clothes, they can create a new fragrant named after them and so much more. I believe that if someone is smart, will try to make as much as he can during his stardom is still 'selling' site. Because lets not forget, stars are products and products expire.