E6: Spice Capitalism Transcript

Oct 25, 2021

[cold open]

Sinead: It was hilarious to be writing this episode about Spice capitalism with Cheryl, while buying branded Spice merch, again.

 

[laughing]

 

Steph: Oh my god, I should have been wearing my t-shirt for this one. Dammit. 

 

Spice Invaders Theme Song: [over trumpet music] It’s got theme song vibes. Like danceable, funky. [Laughter]. So 90s. Girl power. Spice Invaders.

Sinead: Today we're gonna talk about the subject that probably started this podcast. We're going to talk about Spice Girl capitalism and all the wares. So we've been talking about 1997 for a while now because it was really the year that solidified their international fame and we wanted to start off today talking about one of the biggest reasons why, which was advertisements and merchandise. So what merch do you guys remember? Like what did you want the most that you never got? What was your most prized possession? Let's lay it all out on the table. 

 

Steph: Oh, I always wanted the dolls but I never got one. It's one of my greatest regrets in life

[laughter]

 

Sinead: They’re on ebay.

 

Steph: And it should be my mothers.

Elyse: Oh god I wanted everything that had Spice Girls on it. I believe I have mentioned my slammer Pog with Sporty Spice before which was definitely a prized possession, but I also had a flashback today in preparation for this episode about all of the Spice Girls back to school stationery stuff. So I had a plastic Spice Girls ruler that had like all of their pictures in a row down the full 12 inches and I loved it

 

Megan: I saw you turning around there Elyse, I thought you were going to grab the ruler. 

 

[laughter]

Elyse: Oh no, it’s just-

 

[laughter]

 

Elyse: It’s just tea. I’m sorry. 

 

Megan: Does anyone have any Spice Girls merch still to this day?

 

Steph: Like cleaned anything terribly well and might be a bit of a hoarder stuff you know this is a podcast. We're not gonna put that part in probably.

It's fine. You should know about it by now. But I asked her and she didn't really come up with anything so I think I would have to physically go to my parents house and have a root around through. I just haven't had time. 

 

Megan: My school had a club, like a trading cards club that was at recess. It was mostly boys and some girls but these girls came in one day with Spice Girls and I think there were Backstreet Boys trading cards too, I'm not sure, and the teacher told them they weren't allowed. It was like sports cards only banned them from the club for their pop merchandise trading cards.

 

Sinead: Oh my god.

 

Cheryl: A surprisingly large number of schools actually had to ban the merch, because it was just causing, you know, childhood ugliness on steroids. 

 

Steph: Yeah, I remember Pogs got banned from our school

 

Sinead: Yeah, pogs got banned from my school. 

 

Elyse: God that would have been a double whammy tragedy in my world. [laughter] There’s no way to bring in this slammer.

 

Cheryl: My sister and I, I had a ginger and my sister had a baby. I remember actually having a ton of gum and I think they had chupa chups. And I remember I think they also had like, a pop rock version or something like that anyway, but like, I remember being able to go to the corner store and buy just like a ton of candy. And it was like, you know, like, your mom would give you $1 and you got to like go buy candy at a ballgame but like they would have the Spice Girls chewing gum and you could buy that. 

 

Elyse: Oh my god Cheryl I completely forgot about the gum. I loved that stuff, and I don’t remember the gum at all. But I remember like getting the wrapper and seeing which Spice Girl you got.

 

Sinead: So I think like when we talk about all this stuff, the thing that's really striking and the reason why we started this podcast is for people our age, our memories of the Spice Girls are so tied to products and like things you could buy and consume.For me, and I know I'm not alone here , it made me wonder like do we like the Spice Girls because of their music? Or did we like them because we could buy so many things of them,  like the chicken and egg thing you know, like what was it that actually made us interested in them. According to Marketing Week, they became the most merchandise group in music history. 

 

Elyse: Wow

 

Sinead: So yeah, so we are going to get into it. 

 

Cheryl: Yeah, we're actually going to start with some of the brand deals. Brands were super keen to work with the Spice Girls. Pre-teen, teen girls and even young women were a group that didn't have a lot of marketing targeted to them. And they were you know, kind of viewed as underserved in the marketing world at the time whether they have an allowance or they're influencing their parents decisions, they're increasingly at this time becoming consumers in their own right. We all sort of had stories as we were talking about, taking like money we had saved to buy Spice Girls stuff and so that's a lot of what these guys are trying to go for. This is also a group that you're trying to set them up to make consumer decisions for life. There are decisions, you know, decisions you make about brands in high school, but stick with you for a long time. And so like they're attractive because they're building brand habits and the girls and Fuller are super open about this. They talk about children and teens being their primary demographic for their music, and it's something again with brands hopped on to. Marc  Greengrass account director for the advertising agency Gepetto said  “they have also appeared at a time when there is a distinct lack of female heroines for the age group and they use a terrific message of total empowerment” 

 

Megan: So for the girls, was it about more merchandise getting their name out there to get music sold? Was it all about the money, was it about that they just wanted fame? 

 

Sinead: Simon Fuller, their manager, he actually kind of addressed this. He was really eager to stem criticism that they were selling out too fast and to all these like corporate deals. And so he said “The sponsorship deals were far more about exposure than the money. A lot of money was made, but my thinking was if we can get Pepsi to spend $40 million basically running what was a commercial for my group, then Hallelujah! If Procter & Gamble wanted to launch a new image for one of their body sprays by spending £20 million ... That was the way I did it. And it happened so fast. I thought of it not as a deal in terms of making a million quid. It was about using their money to make my group famous, and then they'd make lots of money anyway.”

 

Cheryl: In particular, there's a couple of products that they sign on to, where actually the product is already the top selling in a particular market. Chupa Chups in Spain is a particularly great example of that. They were already the top selling lollipop, it was just putting the girls on there put them in front of millions of people in Spain. Pepsi in Turkey and a lot of Southeast Asia was a really good one and Target when they moved into the US.

The girls actually dip their toes into the endorsement game with the launch of a British television network, Channel five. This earns them an estimated £500,000 and attracts 2.5 million viewers to the channel for its first program which is actually the music video for the channel's exclusive single which we're gonna watch.

 

Elyse: Wait so what does that mean, that they like launched a channel like were they hosting or endorsing or like what does that mean?

 

Cheryl: Their music video was the first program to be placed on that channel, when it hit the airwaves, the next thing you saw when you turned to channel five was the Spice Girls video, and that placement of that video as the first ever program on that channel was used in a bunch of other ads. 

 

Elyse: Oh okay, so they didn't really have anything to do with the network other than they were the flagship content.

 

Cheryl: Yeah, 

 

Sinead: Like a brand ambassador type thing

 

Elyse: Yeah, okay. Yeah, 

 

Sinead: Like look how cool and relevant we are, the Spice Girls are opening our channel for us. 

 

Elyse: Okay. 

 

[Power of Five commercial plays ]

.

Megan: That’s gonna stick in my head.

 

Cheryl: And while this ad, as we can tell is slightly cringy now with its very bold 90s colors, this actually exemplifies the way the Spice Girls would actually operate a lot of their deals and how they would continue to in the future.

It's closely aligned with the girls own brand as the Spice Girls. The lyrics are explicitly about self expression and using the girls’ random personalities as a method to showcase that. The creation of exclusive content becomes a big one and lastly the idea of girl power as a commodity is repeated in the lyrics of that.

 

Sinead: It's fascinating because like we definitely in a  2021 context know of feminism as a marketable term and commodity and like thing to target a certain demographic of women and it does make me cynical seeing them yell girl power for the launch of a TV commercial. And it's just interesting like I wonder if people were doing that before this?

 

Elyse: Like do you have the lyrics there? Can we maybe say what some of those lyrics were?

 

Steph: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

 

Elyse: That's all I caught too.

 

Sinead: I just pasted them to the group chat.

 

Elyse: I can see why you said that Sinead, the commoditization of girl power in this form is so disheartening because yeah, like lyrics are “welcome to a brand new station, tune and now for a new generation, guaranteed to be the new sensation, who said? the Spice Girls, take it from us. It's girl power.Take it from us it’s the power of five, it's the power of five.

But like “take it from us it's girl power” has nothing to do with anything going on. Like I don't think this is like that “O” station that it's all like women's programming. 

 

Sinead: No, absolutely not. It's like the most glib term, like they know the term is playing well, so they want to put it in the song. But it has nothing to do with anything. It's just them, like Cheryl just said, they closely aligned these brand partnerships to promote their buzzword essentially. There's a lot of value in that. I mean, it does give them advertising that is sort of true to what they're saying. But you're right, that it's not really saying anything at all.

 

[laughter]

 

10:42

Sinead: The power of five is also applied to each of them having a personality which showcases an element or a variation on a product. So it's like giving five products for the price of one. For example, this is a quote by 19 Entertainment President Robert Dodds he said "You had Sporty and Baby and the rest, so it seemed very natural that you could go into Asda or Sainsbury's and pick up five different flavours of crisps that corresponded to what the girls were like. When we did Cadbury's, they produced a different moulded chocolate bar - one for each of the girls.” and so it's like just so many opportunities for a brand to pivot to this specific type of girl or young person who liked whichever Spice Girl.

Another example was the Spice cam by Polaroid, something I always wanted but never had, that was actually Polaroids first camera to be named after a group or person and they actually filmed six commercials. Five of them were individual commercials for each girl and then there was one ensemble commercial, so some companies were investing a lot of money and trying to capitalize on them individually and as a group.

 

Megan: I think as the buyer too, like so you buy the product associated with your favorite Spice Girl but also maybe you'd buy one of each five you know, maybe not like chips or a Polaroid camera but some of the other stuff, right, so you're buying five times as much just to get like the whole set.

 

Steph: And then some of this stuff you would have like the group thing too so then you'd buy the group version too. They're still doing it….they have the new records out on the Spice Girls website and you can get one each color for all the girls.

 

Elyse: Immediately when you said that I was like, oh my god, I have to look at these. I didn't realize you got a different color for each girl, like with my first instinct like, let me get my credit card. 

 

Sinead: My first instinct when I saw the post about the new merch was to buy the “Wannabe” vintage t-shirt, obviously, because I have no fucking self control. And it was hilarious to be writing this episode about Spice capitalism with Cheryl while buying branded spice merch again.

 

[laughter]

 

Steph: Oh my god. I should have been wearing my T shirt for this one.

 

Cheryl: So I think one of the biggest deals is Pepsi. Pepsi had been running with the idea of generation Pepsi since about the 1960s. The intention behind this has always been to connect with youth, originally it was actually to tie Pepsi to the counterculture in the 1960s. In some ways this lesson continues today with varying degrees of success - think like the Kendall Jenner flop commercials, that was painful, but again tied into the idea of youth.

So part of the Spice Girls campaign, they had actually leaned into a pretty anti-Gen X vibe. And it's an attempt to attract younger consumers and early millennials. So naturally the Spice Girls were a good fit for the next step. Pepsi also never explicitly stated that they wanted the politics of girl power, but they clearly did. Girl power is something that's very attractive to Generation Next, especially if you were trying to position them as opposite Gen X and the previous generation. 

 

Sinead: Yeah, so building on what Cheryl was saying, the Pepsi campaign included multiple 30 second TV ads in 75 countries, which featured an exclusive Spice Girls single which was a riff on some of Pepsi's previous marketing copy. Other placements included weekly advancement on the Pepsi charts show, an extensive PR campaign in teen magazines and lots of localized opportunities to win more Spice Girl swag because of course. It's generally agreed that Pepsi spent a million dollars promoting the Spice Girls brand on their can. The deputy managing director of Virgin, a guy named Ray Cooper said “"It's millions and millions of pounds worth of film and television advertising that we couldn't even contemplate. But Pepsi can build that into their game plan”  

And it was a global campaign for the band: they needed to maintain their presence in Southeast Asia. They were keen to grow their presence in South America. Their savvy media lawyer Gerard Tyrrell had made it known that the girls were really interested in using brand partnerships to expand into new markets, which Cheryl had mentioned before with some of those brands and some of those countries. So yeah, do you guys want to see the most iconic Pepsi picture? 

 

Elyse: Obviously yes.

 

Sinead: It is very, very intense and shameless. 

 

Elyse:Oh yeah, that is, that is a lot of Pepsi. 

 

Steph:The Pepsi logos are like right on Mel B's breasts. 

 

Elyse: It’s all I can look at.

 

Sinead: The first thing that popped into my mind is that in 2021 no celebrity or brand influencer would be this gauche about, like the intensity of it. 

 

Cheryl: I don't know, I think this is actually a precursor to stuff like... has anyone seen like the Panera Bread swimsuits? And like the... Taco Bell's had a bunch of stuff like that too, where it's like you have to wear like you have to like to buy it, you can buy a product that's branded with their stuff on it?

 

Sinead: I definitely agree with that for consumers. I just don't know that a celebrity would wear all of that. Now, maybe I'm wrong. 

 

Elyse: Do you know what I think is so interesting about it? I feel like because you're right, Sinead, it's so much more direct and explicit than celebrity endorsements now, like, because today, celebrity endorsements have so much to do with glamour and lifestyle. And typically what you'd see now with social media is you'd see how Pepsi fits into their glamorous lifestyle and it would probably be at least loosely tied with wellness culture, not Pepsi obviously, but I feel like whenever you see like five super hot fit ladies now they're probably more likely to be endorsing something that like fits in the goopy world. And so I just think it is more of an explicit like, we're wearing the logo so you should like this, it's like very there's no like second order thinking, it's just like one to one. We like it so you should.

 

Cheryl: You can see how far reaching the influence is but you can also see how they're also kind of muddying through it because they're the first group to be this bold in partnering with brands.

And they're the first group to partner with this many brands to the point where and I apologize I can't find actual statistics but there were actually studies and like people couldn't remember everything the Spice Girls represented as a brand.

It wasn't just that they were impossible to escape, it was, it was impossible to escape and they weren't remembering the brands anyway, which is the point of a deal like this. So yeah, it's funny to watch them sort of struggle through it, like flub it with things like Pepsi logos on hot pants.

 

17:03

Cheryl: I'm gonna just step back into generation next and talk about actually how in thinking about the music as well. But how integrated Pepsi was with the Spice Girl brand and how they actually did this for multiple brands. It wasn't just about you know, the ad and the buying of the product, they also actually ran campaigns where to receive a double A-side that included “Generation Next” and an exclusive single that would not be released anywhere else called “Step It To Me” - Pepsi drinkers would actually send in 20 pink ring pull-tabs, so like the opener bit, from the promotional Pepsi cans to Pepsi to receive that single. You’d actually end up paying like 15 or 16 pounds when it was all said and done for a double sided single. Drinkers would also be entered to win tickets to the group's only public concert in 1997 in Istanbul. This is actually a really great example of both the brand integration but also like a Fuller event, where like people are coming from all over for one event, so you get not just the event itself, but all the publicity of everyone moving to the event. And the reason Istanbul was actually selected was because Pepsi was the best selling soft drink there at the time and the deal was is that they could not have that concert anywhere where Coke outsold Pepsi.

Fuller and the Girls also put the group's logo likeness on everything they can. Like literally everything: watches, clothing, stationery, lunchboxes, stickers, backpacks, purses, birthday party hats and plates,  ties, hair brushes, sunglasses, you name it, you could probably put a Spice Girl logo on it, you could find someone who was willing to make that deal. One element that made all this merchandise possible was Asda, a supermarket chain that paid the girls 1 million pounds to create and sell exclusive products in their Spice Zone, for Christmas 1997. You could go in there and you could get exclusive Spice Girls merchandise along with all of the other licensed deals that they had. 

 

Elyse: It was like an aisle that was branded as Spice zone? Or was it an interactive thing.

 

Cheryl: They had like a section of the store that would be branded as Spice zone that you could go in and pick up all different types of things. They also actually had like a multiple page ad in the Spice Girls magazine that we'll talk about later. So that you get the Spice Girls magazine you would see like Asda has this exclusive Spice zone and you'd be encouraged to go. It shows again how brand deals weren't just about like, oh yeah we show up, we do an ad, we leave. it was we show up we do an ad we get you as many placements as possible with our brands, but it also means that on your side, you have to pay for as many places as possible as well.

So as we touched on earlier, one of the primary goals with this license merchandise was to target their young female audience, they wanted to slap their faces on literally anything a young girl could afford with an allowance. Again, Fuller and the group understood that this wasn't just about making a lot of money. It was about cultivating their fan base and it was about encouraging your fan base to feel closer by purchasing stuff. One of the most successful examples of this that we touched on was the Spice Girl Doll they actually ended up being the best selling celebrity dolls of all time, they sold more than 11 million units. They actually released eight different sets of dolls including a bunch of accessories and total sales were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There's the initial set of dolls with Geri and her union jack dress, this is actually called the girl power line.

There's another set that is all five of them again. There were actually sets released after Geri left that were just the four of them that were new and exclusive. 

 

Sinead: Yeah, so if you want to check the WhatsApp chat I put the classic first set of dolls in there, which I'm sure we all remember. 

 

Elyse: I remember Baby’s dress, I think that might be the one I had, I don't remember super well because I feel like you always played with your friends dolls too. So I remember handling certain ones.

 

Sinead: Handling?

 

[laughter]

 

Elyse: I definitely remember the pink shiny dress but I think she had a blue one too? I feel like I remember her having, she had a periwinkle - yeah okay.

 

Sinead: There ended up being so many sets and like a ridiculous amount of accessories too, so there definitely was not just these ones.

 

Steph: Yeah, why is one of the accessories a camcorder? like I get the boombox I guess. A boombox, a camcorder and a purse?

 

Elyse: Cause Victoria is super into voyeurism.

 

Sinead: Allegedly. 

 

[laughter]

 

Elyse: Allegedly. That’s not a fact, no one take that seriously.

 

Cheryl: It's actually funny that the camcorders there, because the Girls and we'll get into this definitely later, but like there's so there's so much documentation that goes on with this phenomenon that they end up repackaging and selling that like it actually doesn't surprise me there's a camcorder because like so much of the Spice phenomenon is actually just like, oh yeah, like we're putting a camera in front of this and we'll sell something prepackaged later.

 

Sinead: So yeah, um, due to how many things they made…. More recently there was an art exhibition called Spice World: The Exhibit and it is a huge collection of Spice Girls memorabilia and merchandise that has been showcased in different museums across the UK. There are over 5000 unique items in the collection. There are some pretty esoteric Spice branded stuff that I found on my internet travels so I wanted to show you guys a few of the surprising standouts.

 

Elyse: I'm so excited. Where's that exhibit now and can we go to it? 

 

Sinead: It doesn't look like it's run for years but um she obviously owns it. I actually found, there's a couple of major collectors who are named and own massive collections. I think she has the biggest one 

 

Sinead: Okay, so up first we have the Spice cycling sport pack.

 

Elyse: [laughing] What!

 

Steph: Wow, that's a leopard print seat cover.

 

Sinead: it sure is at a 

 

Steph: And a Spice Girls water bottle.

 

Elyse: and a scrunchie! 

 

Steph: and a scrunchie. Well, you gotta keep your hair up when you're cycling.

 

Elyse: You know how you can't do sports without a velvet scrunchie 

 

Sinead: or velvet leopard print bike seat. 

 

Steph: This is why I don’t sport, I don't have the proper equipment.

Sinead: Well, just let you know it is on eBay. Someone is selling eight open packs of it right now. Seems a good investment.

 

Megan: I was surprised looking because like there's Spice for stuff on Etsy, like everywhere for sale for sure. It's not super expensive, probably because it was so like everywhere, but it's not expensive to buy it. 

 

Sinead: There are definitely certain collector items that are expensive. The best analogy I can think of is like the Diana Beanie Baby. There's a few Spice Girls things that are hard to find. I think some of the original dolls are harder to find. Um, but you're right overall. I mean, the entire intent was to mass produce and mass ship everywhere. And yeah, as soon as they weren't, like super popular anymore, I mean, the world was like inundated with all this merch that had to be sold.

Our next random item I found that I definitely hadn't seen is this Spice Girls tattoo kit. 

 

Elyse: Oh!

 

Sinead: Where you made your own tattoos.

Steph: Oh my god that would’ve been amazing.

 

Elyse: That is so cool.

Steph: It looks like an etch-a-sketch situation, but I guess you end up printing out a tattoo? Where is this technology now?

 

Elyse: Wait, so does it come with like pre made stencils that you colour in?? Because if we were just drawing our own Spice Girls tattoos that would have been dismal. Oh, yeah. 

 

Steph: Okay, so it comes with a tattooed desk, non toxic markers, and sheets of tattoo designs, and sheets of tattoo paper. 

 

Megan: And this is definitely a Geri-free product, distinctly missing. 

 

Elyse: Oh, yeah. 

 

Steph: She's not even in the I in Spice!

 

Sinead: Yeah. I did not notice that actually. 

 

Megan: Deleted. 

 

Elyse: Okay, we can draw her. 

 

Sinead:Yes, exactly. No one's stopping you from making a Geri tattoo at your tattoo desk.

 

[laughter]

 

Sinead: But truly as a child of the 90s, I never saw a custom tattoo thing that came with sheets to draw your own tattoos and I would have been all over that. So I'm very devastated that I missed this product. 

 

Elyse and Steph: Same

 

Sinead: And then yeah, the third one was another one that I had never seen before. And it is a Spice Girls handheld video game. 

 

Steph: Oh, I remember having these kinds of video games but not Spice Girl. 

 

Sinead: Me too. I remember the games for sure. I think they're all like Hasbro or Tiger or something. 

 

Elyse: Tiger, yeah.

 

Sinead: So this one I looked into it. I guess it was like a dancing game. So if you look at the buttons on either side, it was like you had to match the moves to win the level. And I think you can only play as one girl at a time. 

 

Elyse: It's like DDR.  

 

Steph: Yeah, you got your arm and leg and you can do footwork, leaps, jump, another footwork or leap

 

Megan: Why are splits next to the arms?

 

Steph: I don’t know...

 

Sinead: This is 90s technology? I don't know. But yeah, those are just a few of the things. I mean, for the most part, their brand wasn't that much super weird stuff because they wanted to sell stuff that people were already buying so much that they would just buy their version of it.

But it expands, like there's so many grocery store items and stationery and clothing and stickers and posters, you know, all of like the kind of stuff you would expect a band to sell just on a really ridiculous scale.

 

Cheryl: Unsurprisingly, all of these small pieces of allowances and parents' money are making the Girls bank. It's estimated that merchandise and licensing alone netted the group 300 million pounds in 1997. By May 1998 an American estimate has them earning 500 to 800 million USD for merchandise and licensing.

 

Elyse: Wow.

 

Steph: And that’s just netted, yeah, after everything. 

 

Cheryl: Yeah, they actually would negotiate deals so that they would get paid later to possibly make more money. And just to show you how this actually was starting to change the game, A Virgin lawyer who was involved in their initial contract talks, estimated that sponsorship makes up about 10% of the groups income. In comparison to other artists that would it would typically only be about 1% 

 

Elyse: Oh, whoa, that’s intense.

 

Ashley: Well, at the time anyway. Cuz that's changed.

 

Sinead: That's a great point, within the music industry, the model that was invented by the band and by Fuller has had a really enduring impact. In a 2015 retrospective on the band's legacy. BBC’s John McKie said “Stars had used brand endorsements but the Spice brand was the first to propel the success of the band.” and he argued that their model changed the industry. Kim Glover, a prominent English music manager who worked with Ant & Dec, New Kids On The Block, B*Witched and others, said “the Spice branding was a real step forward and is a mega-important marketing stream which I open to my artists constantly”.

In another retrospective written about the band in Vice by Tara Joshi, she wrote “As the Spice Girls’ reign went on, they seemed to become less of a musical entity and more and more of an overt marketing tool, with Pepsi, Walkers, Polaroid, Barbie and more scoring very lucrative deals with them. But their success on the non-musical side of things only serves to reinforce the pop cultural phenomenon they had bestowed upon the British music industry and the world. A pop act having this much sway in the products people were buying was unprecedented – on that scale, it seems unlikely to ever be repeated.”, which is really funny because I feel like so much of celebrity culture now is about influencing people to purchase things and the scale of the Spice Girls changed the industry in that way. I think it's really fair to say that.

 

Cheryl: But this isn't without consequences. During an interview on the popular television show Ozone, the girls were asked if they risk over-exposure with their media approach. And Geri responded “If you wanna call it over-exposure, or just mass media attention, I think that’s just the way society is: When you like strawberry ice cream, you eat loads of it.” But Geri’s usual brash confidence was misplaced. But on the other hand, by June of 1997 the Spice Girls were wrapped into dozens of deals spanning crisps to luxury vehicles, and had reportedly applied for over 100 trademarks. There were quite literally hundreds of products with their likeness for sale, in every type of shop, like you could walk into Nordstroms and find the Spice Girls, or into your corner store and find them. In his band biography, David Sinclair wrote that “"So great was the daily bombardment of Spice images and Spice product that it quickly became oppressive even to people who were well disposed towards the group.”

 

Sinead: By the fall of 1997, it was evident a backlash was in full swing, especially in the UK but in the US too. The band was repeatedly accused of valuing their sponsorships over their music, and many cultural critics cited their marketing mania as proof that they were never anything but a corporate creation, something to sell stuff.

In November of 1997 Slate ran a piece by David Plotz where he wrote that “the music is an afterthought. The Spice Girls represent the Jurassic Parkification of pop. In the movie industry, spinoff products now account for a huge percentage of profits. The Spice Girls bring the same spinoff sensibility to music. Sure, there were Beatles lunch boxes and Michael Jackson gloves. But they were peripheral to the music. Life is different in Spiceworld. If there is a product that 12-year-olds use, there will be a Spice Girls version of it in your mall by Thanksgiving.” and this pretty succinctly expresses the sentiment across the media and even the public. Parents literally reported being sick of their kids being inundated with products and constantly asking for new stuff. And as Cheryl mentioned before, there was nowhere “safe” as Spice branded products could be found everywhere.  

Cheryl: As we grew up, also the idea of musicians working with brands grew up. One of the ways that this evolved was that they actually proved that working with a brand would not explicitly harm a musician's career, it could actually help them out. One of the funniest ones I found after this came up was Paul McCartney's work with Starbucks, there wasn't a ton of pearl clutching about it. As the demographic that was originally targeted to by the Girls, we saw like one of our I'm going to put this in scare quotes, but like “anti establishment heroines” Pink, she went on to work with Pepsi, and that Beyonce and Enrique Iglesias commercial, and also someone else was used to sell to us Justin Timberlake would collaborate with McDonald's. And again, a lot of this was done and it was just seen as the thing that you did as a musician. 

 

Sinead: Yeah. And secondly, while famous spokespeople were not uncommon before that, the idea of being famous for your ability to influence others and to get paid specifically for that was not the case. So previous celebrity spokespeople were valuable because they were talented first and that isn't quite the case with the Spice Girls.

 

[laughter]

 

Sinead: The majority of their advertisements features them as personalities, not necessarily as like singers, like singing is not a core part of their identity, although that is technically what their like trade is. It's really them the brand and in 2021 I mean, we're so used to that with influencer culture and the way that everything is now.

 

Ashley: We’re gonna end it here today. Thank you so much for listening. Spice Invaders is hosted by Sinead O'Brien, Cheryl Stone, Elyse Maxwell, Stephanie Smith, and Megan Arppe-Robertson. It's researched and written by Sinead O'Brien and Cheryl Stone, and produced and edited by me, Ashley McDonough. 

 

To see any visuals we talked about in this episode, as well as bonus content, be sure to follow us on Instagram at @spiceinvaderspod. Thank you to Lukus Benoit for composing our theme song.

 

Transcript created by Kevin Gontovnick, Sinéad O'Brien