I usually love Hamilton Nolan’s stuff, but this ill-founded rant about Vice Magazine is just plain silly.
Apparently Hamilton just discovered Virtue, Vice’s Ad/PR firm.
Well, for your info — there is a Vice Magazine, Vice Records, Virtue ad/pr and VBS brands (video content including series like “Drunk History”) — all under the same umbrella. Vice has a great brand and has done an amazing job of maintaining its voice while expanding as a company.And in defense of all things “indie” :
1) thinking outside the typical ad/edit model is, in fact, rather independent, no?
2) The indie dream isn’t to be poor, it’s to be able to do what you’re passionate about and do it the way you want — if you can make money playing by your own rules, then awesome.Why is that so hard to understand?
1. Because VICE isn’t playing by their own rules, they’re playing by the rules set up by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, who’re exactly the kind of people VICE would make fun of. VICE isn’t doing anything any more independently than CP + B, but at least the Crispin guys aren’t hipster assholes. Also, VICE - which has written numerous articles rallying against multinational corporations, sometimes falling just short of a particularly amicable issue of Adbusters - is now writing said multinationals’ ad copy.
2. Hamilton picked up the article because it was part of the news cycle; it dropped today in the Times; you tell me if they don’t come off sounding like a bunch of proto-Mad Men level twats:
With each new territory that launches, our hold on the elusive and rare bird known as the ‘tastemaker’ grows,” Vice says cheekily in its media kit for advertisers. “Together, we can grow drunk and bloated with power.”
and also - as we all well know - the blurring of editorial and advertising is an issue hitting close to home over there this week, so it’s definitely topical, and is part of the cycle (whether or not they created it). Ask anybody at the Bloodcopy party on Gawker’s roof tonight, I’m sure they’ll have something to say on the issue.
3. Shane Smith calling me a “Recession Proof Demographic” is a nice reveal on what VICE thinks of its readers. Not like we didn’t know this before, but being so shameless about it? Come on.
4. Yeah, everyone’s known about VICE Records, VBS, and the magazine as falling under the same umbrella. But for them to have their own ad agency built in? Reminder: VICE’s advertisers, cute as they think their “fearless” friends are, wouldn’t be too pleased if say, after dropping a VICE-writer penned ad for Pepsi in an issue, that same writer devotes 750 words to how kids can now shoot it intrevenously, get high from it, fuck while high on it, and then throw the can in a gutter where it will eventually end up at some sound-as-landfill, thereby killing any number of cute wildlife creatures in the process. And he does it because it’s news. Pepsi, charmed as they are, would probably pull the ad dollars. But VICE would never write that article now, because Pepsi’s paying for them to shoot the good stuff. So they keep their mouths shut. And that’s what’s so fuckin’ egregious about it.
