March 06, 2010

By CORTNEY HARDING

The offices of the Vice media empire are located a few blocks from the East River in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The employees are much like Vice's target audience: attractive, American Apparel-
attired millennials, who move around the converted warehouse space, buzzing about events and hot new bands. The staff of VBS.tv, a video site that just signed a partnership with CNN and features original longform content like the not-for-the-faint-of-heart "Vice Guide to Liberia," sit in one row of cubes near video editing rooms; the writers and editors for Vice magazine and Viceland.com huddle over computers nearby. Vice Films and Vice Music reside against another wall, and in a glass-enclosed space that resembles a fishbowl are the staffers of Virtue Worldwide, Vice's 3-year-old branding agency.

This shabby chic, alt-corporate biosphere is a far cry from the early days of Vice, when three Montreal slackers, armed with a government grant (O, Canada!), started a magazine in the mid-'90s. A few years later, they bought out the original publisher and changed the name of the publication to Vice. The magazine exploded in the early 2000s, becoming the bible of the cool and marginally disaffected. It gawked before Gawker and featured hysterically mean album reviews, snarky and explicit do's and don'ts, and articles about politics, pooping and cocaine.

Vice magazine could've easily flamed out, or, just as easily, sold out, in the hopes of fashioning a next-generation Rolling Stone. But rather than losing its edge, Vice grew, launching Vice Music?which releases albums by such acts as the Raveonettes, Black Lips and Growing?in 2002 and VBS.tv in 2007. The organization has offices in 30 countries across six continents; 500 full-time employees, 50 of them at Virtue; 3,000 creative contributors; and claims to have an audience of 15 million worldwide.

Nothing at Vice happens in a vacuum. "Traditional agencies are very silo-ed," magazine co-founder Suroosh Alvi says. "But Virtue is very integrated into the Vice structure. When they need video assets, for example, they can use VBS; when they need music, they can use Vice Music." (He does add, however, that Vice magazine remains editorially independent from other arms of the company.) Adding Virtue to the stable was a no-brainer, according to Alvi. Spencer Baim, who worked as a creative strategist at the Fallon Agency, approached Alvi with the idea. "When Spencer came to us, we were doing AdVice Music Marketing, but it was a very music-oriented project," he says. "Spencer had agency experience, and we thought it would work well. We knew there were problems with the traditional industry model that we could address."

Since Baim first pitched the idea to Vice, Virtue has worked with clients like MTV, Dell, Scion and Volvo, among others. Virtue has defined itself as more than just another company willing to take corporate dollars to try to court hipsters. It's the model for what the new 21st-century media company looks like: a branding agency that integrates music and products through means that don't alienate its target market?or its client.

It's that comfort in navigating both corporate and underground cultures that has attracted big-name clients, most recently Harley-Davidson. The motorcycle-maker has worked its way through the Vice chain, first partnering with it for a series of events to launch a cheaper bike aimed at a younger crowd, then with VBS to produce video content. The new venture with Virtue is the most ambitious yet. "We knew Harley was looking for someone to be its social marketing company, and we pitched them in November or December," Baim says. "We won the business, and we'll be forming an editorial team to post commentary and articles and blog posts and photos and video and music for young Harley fans."

But the ability to simply post creative content wasn't what swayed Harley in the end. "Lots of agencies came to us and said, 'Oh, you need a Facebook page, you need a Twitter,' all of that," Harley-Davidson director of market outreach Susanne Dawursk says. "But Virtue went way above and beyond. They actually learned to ride the bikes, and they showed us they knew what could make our customer tick. We didn't get a rote presentation from them; they got into the DNA of our audience."

FROM 'ROCK BAND' TO SCION

Virtue's first big project was designing the packaging for MTV Games' "Rock Band" videogame, using two staff members as silhouettes on the box. It also organized a series of shows across the country to promote the game, partnering with up-and-coming acts in each market and going so far as to organize a musical festival in London. It filmed the performances and posted them online.

Music seems to find its way to the center of most Virtue projects, and Vice Music has played a big role in many campaigns. Virtue's deal with Toyota marque Scion, for example, includes music festivals, a radio station on Scionav.com, a garage rock 7-inch series and a video initiative, in which Scion underwrote the costs of producing a full-length music video for two Vice Records acts: Acrassicauda and Lullabye Arkestra.

Virtue is open to using acts outside of Vice Records?but some clients want to keep it in the family. Vice's Lullabye Arkestra was in a spot for the Alliance of Action Sports (Alli), for instance, and Alli director of marketing BJ Carretta says that Virtue's sibling relationship to Vice Records was one of the factors that drew him to it.

"We started working with them last year on a re-brand of our organization and found that they were incredibly easy to work with," he says. "They are different from any other creative agency, not only in terms of their style, but the way they operate. It's very seamless and all parts of the campaign have the ?Vice' look."

It's such a one-stop shop, in fact, that in many cases Vice Music handles the licensing for Virtue projects. "Vice Music, when it grew into being a music company, started doing supervision and equipped ourselves to do publishing and agreements in-house," Vice Music GM Jamie Farkas says.

Farkas and Baim both know music is a central identity marker for much of the audience their clients are hoping to attract. They also know that those clients often have a reflexive distaste for showy corporate sponsorship and realize how hard it is to look cool while rocking out in front of a large, garish banner. So they give their audience some credit: On a Thursday night in January, a line of young people stretched down the block outside Brooklyn venue Bruar Falls, waiting to see two garage rock bands play a free show. Even the most na?ve music fan at this point knows there's no such thing as a free gig, but the branding was inauspicious and almost invisible. Scion's name was stamped on the ID bracelets at the door and a small logo appeared on the back of a free 7-inch.

"The thread through everything we do with Scion is that they want to be seen as a patron of the arts," Farkas says. "They are going to be seen as allowing artists to be artists." Baim adds that Scion is "a great example of doing things right. Lots of other brands we work with cite them as a model of what they want to do."

Baim says the agency has had a few missteps?an early project was the creation of Virtual Lower East Side for MTV, where users could "virtually" watch bands perform, check out clubs and, one only assumes, be vomited on by weekend-warrior bridge and tunnelers. The game never really took off, which Baim attributes to subpar technology. Still, he's proud of the musical aspects of the venture. "We shot everyone from Jarvis Cocker to Arcade Fire to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for that project, and we have this incredible library of performances," he says.

VIRAL EXPOSURE

While some of Virtue's content shows up in the usual places?on TV and in banner ads?plenty of it lives in the viral world. Computer brand Dell came to Virtue with a goal of connecting with Generation Y, and Virtue responded by creating a site called Motherboard, which was originally hosted by VBS and now lives on its own. The videos created for Dell explore the role of the computer in art, film, culture and, of course, music, featuring artists like Moby talking about vintage synth collections. The videos don't contain any overt product placement, and they come across as something a fan might want to send to fellow followers of a band or DJ rather than a shill.

Virtue, for all that it does for emerging bands, also represents a greater shift in the consumption of culture and the role brands play. It's all well and good to want to be a patron of the arts, but Virtue's clients are for-profit companies, not Medicis. By making advertiser-supported content that's so viral as to appear independent, they blur the lines between the commercial and the creative. It's the root of the cynical response that now seems to appear whenever people start talking about a new YouTube sensation; the feeling that it will inevitably turn out to be underwritten by some insurance company.

Baim, however, is convinced that the clock won't be turned back any time soon. "The seismic shift is permanent," he says. "The old models of advertising and marketing have been dated for at least 10 years and defunct for at least five. It's taken a long time for brands to understand this, but they are finally turning a corner. It's an incredibly exciting time to be doing what we are doing. And if we can facilitate brands supporting bands in a way that is authentic, then that's a good thing."

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