24.11.06

Parkour is soo Un-Cool

Lots of 'officially' cool brands try and copy and paste the latest cool thing in some culture or sub-culture and dress it up with their me too brands. A quick glance at a leading Parkour outfit (will remain nameless it is un-fair) in the UK revealed no less than 25 projects for BRANDS in the form of ads and events since January 2006. I swear, if I see another dumb ass sports shoes brand doing a Parkour ad again I will run away barefoot in disgust. The point is not to slap your logo on a bit of subculture but to borrow the ethos and the values of that subculture and create your own interpretation of it otherwise those who know anything about Parkour in the UK would have seen the same crew in 25 different ads this year how un-cool is that...

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

can you explain in a little more detail dont fully understand?

speed said...

Hi Julian my point is brands that try to be cool look for whatever is considered the latest trend or the coolest thing particularly in youth culture, they then slap their logo on it in order to benefit from it, however if every single sports brand you can think off try to do this and around the same thing e.g. Parkour the cool thing starts to become overexposed, oversponsored, overhackneyed, overpromoted...mainstreaming cool kills it.

hidden persuader said...

Yep, Parkour is everywhere. Its elasticity is impressive from McDonald's ads and so on to the latest Madonna video shot in Japan. Parkour is becoming so passé :)

Anonymous said...

I think most of these comments are so unfair. Parkour is awsome and the people who do it are amazing athletes, if you've ever tried to do jumps from half the height these guys do you'd realise how impressive they are. be a little more open minded please!

speed said...

dear anonymous, if you read my comments again you'll realise that i actually like parkour and indeed it is an impressive thing. what i have problem with is not parkour itself but the 'exploitation' of parkour by a ridiculous number of brands and perhaps the 'selling out' of some of the parkour crews who will take money from who ever is prepared to give it to them. the problem is that brands are so dumb they rarely come up with new ideas on their own they have to 'buy' their way into youth subculture.

speed said...

...in other words i'd rather watch parkour the sport rather than the ad.

Heero Kirashami said...

First and foremost, parkour is not a sport.

Second, I think of some of those parkour crews as whores. Nothing else. Why? Because they sell their abilities for money. Like mercenaries, like prostitutes. I abhore those who abuse parkour like this.

Those parkour crews may have skills, but they don't always have heart.