Exit Chihuahua: Doughty Explains Corporate Marketing

Here’s what happened:
Despite the wild cultural success of the Chihuahua and "Yo quiero Taco
Bell" and "Drop the chalupa!"–all of which were Chiat/Day’s
creative efforts–Taco Bell was experiencing sluggish sales. New York 1
reported a "6 percent decrease in sales," whatever that means, being
a simplification of a complex interweaving of capital and material and labor
and a thousand other elements for the purpose of a local news broadcast. And
unfortunately for this Peter Waller cat, Tricon had recently "announced
it had posted a higher-than-expected 26 percent rise in second-quarter operating
earnings. But those sluggish sales at Taco Bell caused the company to lower
its full-year operating earnings forecast." What that basically means is–this
writer presumes–that all those paranoid corporate guys looking for something
to do had nothing to pay attention to other than Taco Bell, and so they started
poking and prodding at it and firing people and making changes, and generally
fucking with it in a thousand ways productive and unproductive.

My limited experience of
the corporate world is that it’s ruled by the Peter Principle–that
folks who are good at their jobs are promoted, and if they’re good at that
job, they get promoted again, and they will continue to be promoted until they
finally arrive at a position for which they are unqualified and/or ineffective.
And to some degree, people commenting in the media on the firing of the agency
are aware of the essential clusterfuckness of the situation. "Somebody
has to be blamed," commented Ron Paul, the president of Technomic, a "restaurant
consulting company." "It’s not shoot the messenger, it’s
shoot the agency."

The lesson for those of
us not on the corporate inside is that visibility does not necessarily equal
profit. For instance: Who’s sold more records, Destiny’s Child or
Jennifer Lopez? The answer is Destiny’s Child, by a million records. Despite
Jennifer’s iconic status and cultural omnipresence. When they write the
book about the era, Jennifer Lopez will be the hood ornament on the zeitgeist.
But that doesn’t necessarily translate directly to bucks.

And so it is with our beloved
Chihuahua, the dog that launched a thousand screensavers. The dog that caused
thousands of gullible people seeking companionship to get their own Chihuahuas,
only to discover that they were actually skittish, freaked-out, disagreeable
animals who didn’t really make pithy remarks in the style of a Latino Pepe
Le Pew. The dog that caused J.J. Walker–perhaps the most embarrassing man
in the history of television–to leave his seat on David Letterman
and exhort repeatedly, apropos of nothing, "Drop the chalupa! Drop the
chalupa, baby!" The dog that forced every Mexican fast-food eatery in the
Western world to drop their advertising strategies and parody the Chihuahua
instead. A friend of mine was once standing on a corner in Bushwick, watching
the presidential motorcade pass by on its way to the airport. "Hey Beel
Cleenton!" a guy shouted out. "Drop the chalupa!"

Apparently the wisdom that
people go to Mexican eateries to buy tacos–not to show support for a talking
dog–isn’t a new observation in the ad business. "It’s an
old rap that doesn’t hold water," said a guy from Chiat/Day in the
Times. "It’s product and promotion that drive frequency and
loyalty to fast food. It’s advertising’s job to create a window, and
we created a pretty big window." Apparently the Taco Bell people had recently
downgraded the Chihuahua’s role in commercials in favor of a focus on,
gasp, the actual food. "That’s not what we wanted to do," grumped
the Chiat/

Day guy.

Those of us who were of
legal drinking age around the time of the sublime cultural rift when hair metal
split and Kurt Cobain came into the picture are prone to a belief that popular
culture suddenly got smarter around that time. To some extent this is just a
function of run-of-the-mill generational haughtiness, and the fact that the
people in the advertising and creative worlds began to be closer to our own
age and thus reflect our set of references. But to some extent I think we might
be right; I think that the general level of writing on television has improved
in the past decade. Personally, my hope was–and kind of still is–that
corporate culture would at least develop a sense of obligation to entertain
with their commercials; that there is no way to reverse the flow of a world
increasingly stuffed with shills and pitches everywhere that a shill or a pitch
can fit, but that maybe out of a general desire to beautify their environment
the corporate powers might choose to create quality programming. But the only
real way to achieve this is to prove that quality programming is more commercially
viable than sheer hucksterism.

In my own world, music,
it is increasingly likely that the actual musical product will become so easy
to duplicate for free that trying to make a buck selling it will be impossible.
And it’s likely that making money from distributing a free product will
hinge on the same thing that keeps this paper running–advertising. What’s
really depressing about this scenario is just how backward and ugly music advertising
tends to be; television ads for records are usually a clip from the video and
a b-grade voiceover guy going, "New record! Out now! Artist name! Record
Title!" The videos themselves tend to be relatively unsophisticated affairs.
MTV promos and bumpers, the general esthetic identity of MTV, tend to be a lot
sleeker, prettier, more of the cultural moment and more interesting than the
videos they frame. Which is a great thing to bring up to music industry people
when they whine about how MTV doesn’t play videos anymore. And when we
speak of the music industry, we are of course talking about an industry that
in its 40 most profitable years has yet to learn how to sell its products to
people once they get out of college–i.e., when they start actually making
money to spend on music.

The Chihuahua is the property
of Tricon Global Restaurants, not the TBWA/Chiat/Day agency. Actually, a corporate
spokeswoman told CNNfn that the Chihuahua "continues to be a part of our
advertising." Chances are that they’re not gonna completely drop a
character that’s been such a hit, even if he can’t sell gorditas.
But the people who wrote the stuff that everybody found so hilarious–"Here
leezard leezard," etc.–have been dumped. I’d love to be able
to write a good doomy column about how a crucial moment has passed, how the
pendulum is beginning to swing back from better entertainment to blander, safer
advertising. But I think the only people who this hasn’t occurred to yet
are the people like me, who don’t buy the tacos, rather than the people
trying to sell them.