The Super Bowl, that global market interrupted by an American football game, is always a powerful generator of conversations, especially thanks to advertisements with which companies compete to attract the attention of the 202 million viewers who followed the event through television this year.
Within that
sea
of actors, actresses and singers who increase their bank account by appearing for a few seconds in an advertising space (from Ben Affleck advertising donuts to Beyoncé doing the same with mobile telephony), on this occasion the always controversial and increasingly erratic Kanye West, now known as Ye.
And he has done it in a practically homemade way: with a video recorded with his mobile phone.
Captured inside a moving vehicle and with very poor lighting, the American rapper and businessman addresses the public briefly and directly: “Hello everyone, I'm Ye and this is my advertisement.
Since we have spent all the money on the advertising space, we have not spent anything on the advertisement itself.”
The 30-second clip cost zero euros to record and $7 million to be broadcast during the Super Bowl commercial breaks.
But if the strategy is surprising, more typical of what was called guerrilla marketing as a euphemism for “there is no budget,” so is the objective of the video: to announce that all the clothing in its Yeezy fashion line can be purchased at its website at 18.95 euros.
A ridiculous price if we think that one of those products, the Yeezy Pods boots, went on sale in December for 200 dollars (about 185 euros).
From exclusivity to discounts
West had already announced weeks ago his intention to reduce his brand's clothing, statements that, like all those that come out of his mouth, generated suspicion.
We are talking about an artist known for announcing the release of his albums and then delaying them as many times as he wants.
In this case, he has fulfilled his promise coinciding with the release of his new album,
Vultures
, signed with fellow rapper Ty Dolla Sign.
But if the decision is surprising, it is due to a paradigm shift in the strategy of Yeezy, the firm that united him with Adidas from 2015 to 2022, the year in which the sports company decided to end the collaboration as a result of several anti-Semitic comments that the artist did in public.
Since its beginnings, Yeezy had been based on exclusivity and limited access to its products, especially the sneaker models with which West managed to become an icon of urban fashion, the so-called
streetwear
.
Each launch became a challenge for those who wanted to get their models, with limited pairs in physical stores first and later with raffles through websites and apps to choose to buy a pair of sneakers.
A strategy that, like other brands, fostered a resale market that, in 2023, the investment bank TD Cowen valued at $30 billion worldwide.
A model that sought an almost unattainable status of exclusivity that has been losing steam in recent years, with a saturated market and inflated figures.
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West's decision comes at a time of popularity crisis for what was one of the most influential personalities in global music during the past decade.
And it may seem like one more of the artist's attempts to attract attention, or also another example of an increasingly adrift character.
But also, if we stick to the data published by himself through Instagram, a commercial strategy that has generated 19.3 million dollars (almost 18 million euros) in a single day.
Looked at another way: it doesn't matter how far from reality West seems for his name to continue generating attention that turns into money.
A series of catastrophic scandals
October 2022 seemed like the beginning of the end of Kanye West as King Midas of music and fashion, although in reality his outbursts had begun much earlier.
Half of one of the most powerful and influential couples in entertainment for years along with Kim Kardashian, their divorce, made official that same year, seemed to inaugurate an endless fall in which each piece of news made them doubt even more about their ability to recover as a public figure. .
Since then, he has turned the details of the custody of his children with Kardashian into headlines and rants on social media.
He also attacked the various partners of his ex-wife, including the comedian Pete Davidson, with whom he starred in a series of statements in the media with West's mental health in question.
But the point of no return seemed to come with the artist's statements about slavery, his questioning of the Black Lives Matter campaign and his anti-Semitic comments.
Two years later, West is still generating conversation, sometimes portrayed by the media as a buffoon of the age of constant attention, but always present in one form or another.
This machinery for generating controversy covers almost everything: his rudeness to his fans with his continuous announcements of new songs that he almost never fulfills, his aesthetic decisions (one of the last, a titanium cap for his teeth that inspired the hoax that he had removed several teeth) or the relationship with his new wife, Bianca Censori, on whom he exerts an excessive influence for many, choosing her outfits and supposedly modeling her as he pleases.
A spiral of scandals and chaos that, for the moment, may have destroyed the credibility of Kanye West as an artist, but not with him as a brand.
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