Advertising: 'Fortune' has the time of its life in an American world
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Your support makes all the difference.Oh Time, Oh Life, Oh Fortune! These are the magazine brand properties of Time-Life Inc, which then became Time Warner and then the gigantic "troubled" AOL Time Warner. They're wonderful brands, American Golden Age brands. Just imagine being CEO of Time Inc and saying "Time, Life and Fortune".
And, of course, they're global brands. Fortune has a commercial running on CNN which says flatly – there's no room for shades of meaning here – "the global leader in business".
That's what Fortune says about itself, and "global", for practical purposes, means American, the world delivered to America's offices. The world is identified by its exciting local production values, pictures of those traditional theatre troupes for China and so forth. It's a 15-second slide show designed just like a conference presentation and, give or take the odd technical blip, could have been done for any giant American corporation at any time in the past 40 years.
Fortune covers and spreads line up across the screen, great issues scroll across the bottom, rather too fast to catch. All the global/US ex-pat dinner party subjects are there: "China's largest companies" (huge opportunities for Americans); "impact of the euro" (Europeans are tired and socialist-bureaucratic. The French are a special problem; they are completely unclubbable); "rewiring the world" (only America can do this, of course); "De Beers global monopoly" (anti-trust is written into the constitution, but then again ...); "Japan's economy" (a problem, they could drag us down, but it's better than challenging us like in the Eighties).
"One world, for better or worse," they say, but the style so utterly betrays the rhetoric, you know it's one world centred on Wall Street. The music is big, imperial – a bit Gladiator – and at the end there's a great clanging sound effect, the sound of huge New York bronze Beaux-Arts doors – the doors of, say, the original JP Morgan building – clanging shut.
It's all got that sententious Walter Cronkite quality, the look and feel of the first generation of US multi-nationals that were Fortune's first advertisers (now it's overwhelmingly IT companies). Corporate America Lite, those IT companies, the Gap-generation, all think they're much cooler than this iron-clad George Bush Senior rust-belt and oil-well gang, so it's interesting that it's Nike, Starbucks and Gap that the anti-globalists everywhere seem to hate most of all.
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