EMI Prepares To Hypnotize Its Consumers Into Buying Beatles Albums

From the mailbag (of yesterday): EMI has announced that it’s contracted Saatchi and Saatchi–you know, the geniuses responsible for Kurt Cobain, Doc Marten-wearing angel–to “help develop and execute strategic consumer marketing campaigns for key titles from its legendary catalog of albums for both physical and digital formats,” including albums from such slow sellers as the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, and the Rolling Stones.

This seemingly impossible feat of “[helping] EMI connect these legendary artists with music fans and to boost sales across a variety of formats, including physical CDs and DVDs, as well as for EMI’s premium DRM-free, higher-quality downloads and mobile music products” will happen not, as in the case of half of the artists in question, through séances, but intead through the strategic deployment of a Saatchi strategy called Lovemarks: “the methodology designed to create loyalty beyond reason.” Yes, that’s right: EMI wants to whip fans of its artists back into a Beatles-at-Shea-worthy frenzy through the magic of a crummy buzzword and “strategic planning prowess.”

Hypebot has a breakdown of the Lovemarks strategy, which was apparently designed to rescue the idea of the brand … by simply renaming it with a word that had “love” mushed into it and saying that it’s now mixed up with “mystery, sensuality, and intimacy,” an idea that could have only sprung from the well-designed hallways of our world’s advertising agencies. We eagerly await how the ad geniuses at Saatchi are going to put “mystery” back into the catalogs of these artists who have already been repackaged 8,000 times before (and “sensuality” into Frank Sinatra’s corpse), but until then, I’m going to ponder over this question from Hypebot’s analysis: “Isn’t going from legend to brand a step down?” I think it is, but that’s probably why I’ve been stuck in editorial my entire career.