Your Pretty Face Is Going To Sell: Iggy Pop’s Marketing K.O.

By Cait Brennan

In the twenty-first century, commercial endorsements are everywhere. For the right price, for the right product, every indie band would wrestle an angry bear for the chance to front an ad campaign, disregarding what was once the cardinal rule of rock and roll: Doing commercials isn’t cool. Even Hollywood stars know it, which is why in the pre-YouTube era, big shot showbiz weasels would don “Fargo North, Decoder” trench coats, phony accents, and Archie McPhee mustaches and skulk off to Thailand to bank a cool million for appearing in a 30-second carbonated hemorrhoid cream ad, knowing it would never see the light of day on American TV.

The Internet makes such secret-shame trysts impossible now, but even today it’s not uncommon to see stars of the, um, “magnitude” of Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, Kiefer Sutherland, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nicolas Cage, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Brad Pitt shilling for whale-flavored sodapop and carbonated yogurt containing frothy frozen octopus intestines.

What is uncommon, outside of hallucinations, is seeing Iggy Pop do it.

Pop, née Iggy Stooge, is a protopunk legend from an era when “selling out” was an unpardonable sin. Artistic integrity and commercial tie-ins did not mix. Sure, the Easybeats could get away with shilling for Coke, but serious rock was SRS BSNSS. Fair or not, survivors of that era are held to a higher standard, harassed and threatened at all hours by the stabby, Nyquil-fueled ghost of Lester Bangs.

But rock stars have needs, too. Perhaps hoping to raise funds to buy his first shirt, Pop signed a deal with UK insurer Swiftcover.com to be the face of a £25 million TV ad campaign promoting not profligate heroin use, rough sex, or onstage self-mutilation, but budget car insurance. Pop took to the in-your-face-with-what’s-left-of-his campaign with characteristic gusto, turning his TV eye on British license-fee payers with shouts of “I got it Swiftcovered! I got insurance on my insurance!”

Yeah, only he didn’t. Had he attempted it, Iggy Pop would have been denied coverage, because Swiftcover refused to sell insurance to musicians, or anyone else involved in the entertainment industry. A number of musicians were inspired by their man Iggy’s commercials and tried to get insurance through the company, only to find out that Iggy had sold them out. Swiftcover.com’s marketing director Tina Shortle told Billboard magazine that musicians were excluded because they have a “higher level of claim costs.”

“Swiftcover.com chose Iggy Pop as the face of its advertising because he loves life, not because he is a musician,” she said in a statement. “He is an actor demonstrating the benefits of Swiftcover.com.” This clever bit of public relations rhetoric had but one small flaw, namely that actors couldn’t get insurance through Swiftcover either. Embarrassed, the company was forced to admit that Pop could not be the driver under their policy. He could, of course, be the passenger.

It may be permissible in the UK to deny car insurance coverage to musicians, but misleading viewers is not. At least a dozen viewers filed complaints, and the Advertising Standards Authority banned the ad in April of 2009, ruling it was misleading. The company eventually made an exception for musicians, and Pop and Swiftcover recorded a new series of commercials featuring the gristly Stooge, made doubly disturbing by his constant doppelgänger, “Little Iggy”—a wiry, leathery Iggy Pop puppet that looked at least as lifelike as its subject. (To be fair, it was probably the more palatable of the available “Little Iggy” possibilities). But despite increasing “brand awareness” and boosting the company’s sales by a reported 30%, Swiftcover swiftcanned Pop in late 2011, replacing him with animated characters voiced by Bez from the Happy Mondays, Noddy Holder from Slade, and Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith from The League of Gentlemen.

Iggy is, of course, not the first punk-era pioneer to suck at the bloated teat of corporate advertising; John Lydon previously did a weirdly domestic UK ad campaign for “Country Life Butter,” but to be fair, at least the first syllable is still sort of rebellious. And while Lou Reed’s mid-’80s Honda Scooter ads made him the subject of ridicule among the highfalutin’ rock establishment, there was a certain sweet wrongness about hearing “Walk On The Wild Side” used to sell teenagers a plastic motorbike. And while it’s not quite the same as hamming it up on camera with a puppet doppelgänger, the music of Pop, Reed, Bowie, and other once-subversive figures are regularly heard in a bewildering array of commercials. Can there be anything quite as off-putting to music fans of a certain age as hearing (former) junkie drunkard Shane MacGowan slur “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” over footage of a happy middle-class all-American mom getting her tykes into a minivan?

For his part, Pop has stepped up his endorsement game considerably. In November, Pop signed on to be the face of fellow 1970s bad boy Paco Rabanne’s new line of fragrances, “Black XS L’Excès,” proving what Pop has perhaps known longer than the rest of us—that these days, excess is just another brand name.