To call this a “beef” is almost insulting. At this point, it’s pretty much a slaughter. As I write this post tonight, Drake is performing at his Canadian OVO Music Festival with memes of Meek from Twitter on a big screen, live on stage. A character assassination is pretty much an understatement at this point. But, not here to talk about this rap beef. Let’s look at some of the companies that have decided to tweet their way into hip-hop culture this week.
Companies like Mercedes Benz, What A Burger and even Egglands Best (yes Egglands!) decided to tweet about the Drake versus Meek Mill beef. Now you may say to yourself, “self – these companies must really love Drake, or perhaps they’re Meek Mill fans,” I would conclude that neither of those are the case. However, what I would guess is companies have brilliantly learned how to market themselves for free by shamelessly using pop culture. Right now, we wont even talk about pop culture, because all pop culture isn’t built the same. Let’s talk about black culture, more specifically, the hip-hop culture. Business executives, analysts, and music executives have been trying to convince us for years that rap culture isn’t as valuable as other genres. Look at the prices of radio ads on a black radio station or tv network in comparison to the prices elsewhere; it is definitely obvious that buyers are putting more value on genres that steer away from hip-hop. Simultaneously, its almost impossible to find a pop song, without a hip-hop artists attached to it these days. Katie Perry, one of the industry’s highest grossing artists of 2015, biggest hit last year was “Dark Horse” featuring Juicy J. Hip-hop trends, style, and influence is obvious within almost every genre of music – however, they continue to try to downplay hip-hop as a dying culture.
As the world continues to try to show this segment of our culture in a dim light, big brands are capitalizing off of hip-hop as usual. During the Drake/Meek beef, companies received hundreds of thousands of retweets regarding the hip-hop beef. This means, these companies (which most of us never even knew had twitter accounts) reached millions of people – FOR FREE. If you’re still not following how significant this is, you have to know about advertising, reach, and engagement. I don’t have time to give a lesson about social media marketing, but in the real world, advertisers would have had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve the type of engagement they received with their tweets regarding the Drake/Meek beef. At last look, one of the Mercedes Benz accounts @MBUSA, which usually gets about 20-30 retweets per post, received over 2,000 retweets on the tweet listed below. Many people may not follow me, but imagine if you had a company and your business got television advertising during the Super Bowl – AND IT WAS FREE. That would be a win for your company, right? Well, that is what basically happened. Users retweeted company tweets, which are retweeted and favored over and over again, which means millions of Twitter users saw the tweets and more than likely visited the companies’ twitter pages, websites, shared it on facebook, etc. This is like a lightning strike in marketing and a rare occurrence to get this type of engagement without having to pay 1 cent. These companies should definitely thank #BlackTwitter for making them great.
I saw a few Twitter users complain about that fact that big brand names are continuing to exploit our culture, but if we were to show up at a job interview and our names were too black, or we had dreads, or gold teeth – many of these companies wouldn’t hire us; and this statement may be true. However, the most important lesson is to understand that WE as young African Americans have to stop letting people assign a value to what belongs to us. We have to stop allowing people to tell us our culture, our names, our skin, our features are second class – especially when we see people mimicking these things on a constant basis. I am not mad at these companies for using the culture to promote their brands because that is what a good social network marketer should do. I am mad at us for not seeing the value in ourselves! We have people that look like us, but still turn their noses up at the mention of a rap song or artist? Why? Because even they have bought into the hype that this segment of the culture is not as valuable.
This is cliché, but we have to know our own worth. If Mercedes Benz and Egglands’ Best know the value of hip-hop, then why is it you don’t know the value? They are not going to stop telling us that we are not valuable. They will continue to tell us that hip-hop is a dying culture. They will continue to write stories about how TIDAL is failing and all the other music services are flourishing. They will continue to do research that shows a connection between black on black crime and rap music, which is total bullshit. Yes, they will continue to tell you your Serena features are manly, but a Kim K look is beautiful. And – they will continue to capitalize off of everything that our culture created organically. Now is the time to wake up people – who’s story are you going to believe, theirs or your own?
Syllabus Magazine, the Carolina’s source for Music, Culture and Fashion
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