My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #39, June, 1996

AD LIB

As I was driving to Michigan last week, a cute little tune kept circling around in my head, and I kept trying to figure out what it was--Tom Petty, maybe? No, though the voice sounded like his. And then it came to me. It was a jingle about a chemical that would kill all my corn bores (not a problem I actually have). If you live in Iowa and you watch the news, there's no way you're going to avoid knowing all kinds of advertising jingles for pesticides and fertilizers. They're such catchy tunes, and they sneak into your head whether you want them there or not.

American culture is powerfully infiltrated and shaped by our commercials. There is a good side to this. An awful lot of our brightest, most creative artists, wordsmiths, filmmakers and composers go into advertising because there are a lot more jobs there than there are in feature films or television programs. As a consequence, a lot of the ads are funny, warm, even moving. Some of my favorite television moments are from ads. I remember fondly the commercial showing a little boy walking along, enticing a kitten by dropping bits of cat food, then crashing through his front door hollering, "Look what followed me home!" And the current MacDonald's advertising campaign about future Olympians, like the future discus thrower, a little girl throwing her plate off her high chair.

Ads are a rich source of shared cultural knowledge, because we all see the same ads, even if we don't necessarily see the same programs. We adopt tag lines from ads all the time: "the Pepsi generation." "Just do it." "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!" "Where's the beef?" Of course, simplicity like this doesn't come easy; some ad agency writer sweated blood to come up with these cute pithy sayings that resonate, that sum up a common public attitude. But once these sayings are in the marketplace, we appropriate them, because they are a valuable shorthand. The images that go with the words are another part of our shared knowledge, and the images are then played on by other advertisers, and other artists, like Andy Warhol.

Ads are also little mini-dramas that, like any TV drama, show us how to behave. If we have no other models of how to handle certain social situations, we can draw on the ads. The Tasters' Choice commercials (about a budding romance that began with one of them needing to borrow some coffee) offer a model of sophisticated courtship. Long-distance telephone ads and Folger's coffee ads offer wonderful models of family warmth and tenderness. And LOTS of ads offer models of flirtation.

I watch a lot of sports, and therefore see a lot of beer ads, and it has become clear to me, from the bimbo-intensiveness, that they are not trying to sell beer to women. They are trying to sell a particular image of masculinity to young men, an image of how guys have fun together, sitting around, drinking beer, joking around, ogling girls--"It just doesn't get any better than this." (It's interesting to note that when a car company did a role-reversal, with women ogling guys and commenting on their car choices and what these said about the man's probable sexual capability, guys didn't like the ads at all. Turn about may be fair play, but it's not necessarily fun for all concerned.)

But the purpose of the ads is to sell, and that means that they need to appeal to us at gut level, overtly and subliminally. And this means that certain American values and attitudes are exaggerated almost to the point of lunacy.

Americans place an inordinate value on personal freedom. We value pristine wilderness. So the ads for jeeps and off-road vehicles tell us we can go wherever we want, roads or no roads; the images on the screen are of mountains and deserts and forests. Many of us know perfectly well that taking these vehicles into these fragile environments will cause untold damage to the delicate ecology, but the purpose of those images, and that music, and those emotive words is to bypass our reason and slip sideways into our brains.

In a number of recent commercials, that love of personal freedom has taken a further step into the actual glorification of lawlessness. "Break all the rules," we are told in a number of campaigns. The people who are shown abiding by normal social conventions are timid, dorky-looking people, that nobody in their right minds would try to emulate. The goodlooking studs, the guys who are having all the fun, are the ones who are defying all the rules. (Of course they do this by buying, wearing, drinking, or eating, a product that anybody else can buy, wear, drink or eat.)

Just as our ads themselves provide quick, shorthand summations of cultural attitudes, so are the advertisers driven to use already existing cultural shorthand. The more expensive advertising time becomes, the shorter the ads get; the shorter the ads get, the less time they have to convey both information and emotive power.

This, I think, accounts for the way ads use and abuse symbols of the sacred. Teddy Roosevelt, on Mt. Rushmore, becomes a shill for toothpaste. Nuns and monks and Charlie Chaplin tell us what computers to buy. The statue of liberty sells underarm deodorant. The Beatles sing "Revolution" in order to sell athletic shoes. Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart film clips are mutated into soft drink endorsements.

When symbols of the sacred become nothing more than just another way to move the product, though, we lose something important--the sense that some things are of enduring value, above the mundane world of buying and selling.

Celebrities are also useful for the quick sell, because we recognize them, and associate certain values with them. Michael Jordan=outstanding athleticism. Basketball player Dennis Rodman=flake. Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight=throwing chairs when displeased with the referees or his players. It is unfortunate that commercials lately have been using some of the more antisocial characteristics of celebrities as jokes: Deion Sanders (football and baseball player) trading jokes with his team's owner about his exorbitant salary; Bobby Knight trying, not very successfully, to be easygoing when one of his players has done something stupid; Dennis Rodman refusing to do something because it's too wild and crazy.

The problem with this is that it treats these traits as if they're cute and endearing. Ugly temper tantrums, greed, craziness, are made to seem like perfectly acceptable behavior. "In your face" has become a bizarre sort of compliment.

This may have started when the play in the NBA became strikingly more physical, with the rise of the Detroit Pistons. The NBA could have chosen to rule that style of play out of bounds; it could have issued rule changes, and fines. But the NBA saw a narketing opportunity, and they began to glorify the Pistons, in all their advertising, as the "Bad Boys." "Brutal" became "physical"--and perfectly acceptable.

Or it may have begun earlier still with the National Football League's marketing campaigns, which were heavy on bodies crunching together. In these ads, violence was never incidental to the game; it was, quite clearly, the point of the game.

Our advertising has a mixed effect on us. It does have a uniting effect, in the sense that we all recognize and use the same advertising jokes and tag lines. The ads bring our values out into the open, though revealing them in a curious, funhouse mirror image. They show us idealized versions of ourselves: youthful, carefree, independent, daring, and above all, free.

But above all, our advertising cheapens and demeans our culture.

1. It tells us that no value, be it God or country or family, is too sacred to be put to use in selling a product.
   
2. It doesn't worry about the consequences of pushing our hot buttons, like personal freedom.
   
3. It doesn't worry about glorifying antisocial behavior.
   
4. It doesn't worry about the social consequences of fostering greed and a permanent sense of grievance because we never have quite enough stuff.
   
5. It doesn't care that showing only pretty people devalues ordinary-looking human beings.
   
6. It doesn't care that it's teaching children to want things and whine until they get them.
   
7. It doesn't worry about the consequences of telling us that politicians are just another product to be pushed.

There's not a whole lot that America, as a society, can do about this. Our television and radio have been run by advertisers from the very beginning, and we are all addicted to our "free" entertainment. Our current government is hostile to the notion of publicly funded broadcasting, and public TV doesn't compete all that well against the commercial networks in any case. Commercials are our past, our present, and our future.

But as individuals, we have these powers:

1. We can recognize what ads are doing to us.
   
2. We can turn the damn things off. It may be that God gave us the remote control for a good reason.
   
3. We can refuse to buy the product.
   
4. We can tell the advertisers why we will not buy the product.
   
5. We can tell them that some things are sacred, and if they abuse the sacred they will lose us as customers.
   
6. We can tell them that we are a better people than they think we are, and better then they portray us in their ads.

My Word's Worth Archive

Current column

Marylaine.com/ home to all my other writing

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.