Category: Social Media

Evil Ad Empire Revealed – almost

I’m going to tell you a little secret.  There is no, I repeat NO, corporate conspiracy trying to turn us all into mindless consumers.  Advertising is not carefully contrived to make us want to buy things.  And there is no subliminal seduction in advertising.  I hate to burst your bubble, folks, but if you buy useless crap it’s your own damn fault.  How do I know these things?  Very simple, boys and girls: if there was a way to make advertising effective, those ruthless bastards on Madison Avenue would have used it by now to drive their own competitors out of business.  Q.E.D.  Personally, I think the whole conspiracy theory thing about advertising emerged in the 60s when large numbers of college students got the munchies and needed to explain to each other why they were eating Oreos and Twinkies instead of celery and whole wheat granola.

Here’s the truth.  Advertising, especially television advertising, is, at best, a brilliant art form and at worst a minor annoyance.  The creative people behind advertising — including the psychologists — are a bunch of shysters who are lying to their corporate masters.  Nobody really knows what makes people buy things.  However, ad people, over the years, have intimated that they can figure it out.  Their hidden agenda, if they even have one, is to secure a way to indulge their art and make bundles of money doing it.  The results are all those ads you see everywhere in our universe which are simply following trends that you, “the consumer,” have already set.  Look around you, folks!  Do you see any ads for sewing machines?  No! Why?  Because the great mass of people don’t sew anymore.  If advertising was the sinister force it’s always been proclaimed to be, there would still be ads for sewing machines, and people would still be buying them.  (Whether they sewed or not is a different matter.)

Here’s how ineffective advertising really is.  (I’m a little scared of getting sued, so bear with me.)  There is a company named after a fruit.  Their whole image is based on Young And Cool and they charge outrageous amounts of money for their product — which never goes on sale.   Their theory is that people will pay a lot extra for totally cool, and it works.   They started an ad campaign in 2006 which featured a comparison between a young, laid-back style of guy and an older, pudgy, suit-and-tie guy.  They introduced themselves, and, in the course of 30 seconds, they made fun of the pudgy guy and his product.  There were tons of variations on this original ad, and everybody recognized the scenario.  Unfortunately, after 3 years, there was no appreciable increase in sales.  In fact, the only result of the entire campaign was that people got turned off the company’s image of Young And Cool.  The ad was mercilessly lampooned on YouTube.  What happened was people began to feel sorry for the little pudgy guy because, after people had seen the ads 110 thousand times the jeans and t-shirt guy just seemed smarmy, sneaky and a bit of a bully.  It was an unidentified side effect of doing a direct comparison.  In general, people turned slightly against the company named after a fruit, because they perceived it to be mean-spirited.

This ad campaign cost literally tens of millions of dollars and generated a direct negative result.  So much for the corporate menace theory!  But, here’re the sprinkles on the doughnut.  There is another set of ads for a cell phone company in Canada which is using the same type of scenario and is producing a similar negative image.  Live and learn?  Doesn’t look like it!  The cell phone company is spending a dump truck full of money — just the same as the company named after a fruit did — for what is obviously going to be the same result.  My question is this: If the evil ad empire can manipulate whole populations at will, how come they’re not doing a better job at it?  The answer is simple.  Advertising is not that powerful, no matter what people say.  Let me explain using television ads as an example.

TV commercials are just little, itty bitty movies.  You have to have plot, character, conflict and resolution.  They have to contain all this in a 30 second package, and, in most cases, they have to be made in such a way that they can be cut in half and still make sense.  Then these ads are always shown with several other little movies in a tiny film festival, stuck between touchdowns in a football game, or something like that.  Plus, unlike regular movies, the mark of a good ad is not whether you remember it or not – that’s extra — it’s whether you remember the product or not –which is a good trick.  Given this set of constraints – and regardless of how brilliant the film maker is — the chances of an advertisement catching your attention is astronomical.  Believe me, Spielberg, Scorsese and Ridley Scott would all suck at making ads.  And by the way, radio and print ads are even more difficult. 

In actual fact, maybe at one time — when Mad Men ruled the earth — advertising was a powerful thing — to be respected and, perhaps feared.  But these days, it’s a weak sister to the much more powerful persuader: “word of mouth.”  So this weekend, when you discover all those new Super Bowl ads, sit back, relax and enjoy yourself.  You might be watching something that, 1,000 years from now, will be considered a masterpiece of early 21st century art.

It’s Oscar Season…again!

I love movies.  When I’m finally convicted of a capital crime my last request on Earth is going to be dinner and a movie.   Movies are one of humanity’s last intimate experiences.  They are personal, powerful and private.  That’s why people cry at the movies.  So it’s with great sadness that I take this opportunity to bitch about the movies and all the claptrap that clings to them like smeary stuff on Velcro.  Movie people are ruining movies. 

Normally, I don’t care.  I can avoid the artful dodger directors, the over-medicated actresses and Alec Baldwin.  I wouldn’t know Scarlett Johannson, off camera, if she hit me over the head with a 2-by-4, and I like it that way.   I don’t give a rat’s buttock for camera angles and lighting.  Nobody should, unless you’re a camera angle person or a lighter-upper guy.  But every year, at this time, the Academy Awards release the names of their nominees, and the pompous asses come out to pontificate like it’s cinematographic Hallowe’en.  It’s as if we all died with a sin on our soul and Purgatory is Entertainment Tonight.

First of all, if God had a modicum of mercy, He would put a stop to all these “Gimme an Award” award shows.  By the time the Golden Globes, The Screen Actors’ Guild, The People’s Choice etc. etc. etc. etc. get around to the Oscars, every living creature from Santa Barbara to Laguna Beach has a film award.  I’m surprised that all the people accepting their awards, night after night, have any time left over to actually make movies.  It must be embarrassing:
“I got a Golden Globe!”
“Yeah?  So did Bingo, my hairdresser.”
I’ll betcha they’re using them as hood ornaments on their Hummers.  It’s like the Student-of-the-Week certificate you got in grade school.  I kept mine for a while — until I finally figured out what Mrs. Cranston was up to.

This year’s Oscar nominees are remarkably similar to last year’s nominees, and the scary part is I haven’t got a clue what this year’s nominations are all about.  I take that back.  I know there’s one where everybody talks with an English accent; you’d have to be living on Jupiter not to have heard about that one.  (I’m betting my nickels it’s Colin Firth’s turn.)  There’s one with Jeff Bridges, a remarkable actor who can actually play The Big Lebowski playing a cowboy playing John Wayne playing Rooster Cogburn.  There’s one about a true life struggle or the triumph of the human spirit or something.  There’s the perennial favourite They Came to Talk, a tale of heartwarming sadness, and then a whole pile of other ones.  Oh, yeah!  And everybody’s pissed ‘cause whatshisname didn’t get nominated, eh?  That’s par for the course.  A lot of people in this country are still mad at Hollywood because Men with Brooms never got anything.  This all sounds oh-so-catty, but, deep in your heart, you must know that the 367th running of the Academy Awards is getting a bit predictable.   And poor old Oscar is becoming woefully outgassed by all the other hardware that’s getting thrown around.

However, come February 27th, I’m going to watch — just like I do every year.  Oscar is still the Big Kahuna, Gidget, and Hollywood still makes good movies, despite what the CBC will tell you.  Of course, in recent history, I spend a bunch more time doing other things on Oscar night.  I check out the red carpet, for example, to see which bony bimbo shows up dressed as a turnip.  And I watch anxiously — all evening — to see if Johnny Depp finally achieves maximum cool and bursts into flame.  I’m getting a little tired of baby bumps, though.  Honestly, if Natalie Portman doesn’t want to practice Safe Sex, that’s her business.  And I’ve noticed it’s getting harder and harder for Sean Penn to even walk across the stage since he got that stick shoved up his ass.   Of course, that’s what’s wrong with the Oscars, isn’t it?  Movie people just take themselves too damn seriously.

Movies, films or cinema — depending on how far you went in college — are about entertainment.  Full stop.  Shakespeare knew this, centuries before he fell in love with Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench got an Oscar for a walk-on Elizabeth I (who came across as M at a costume party.)  But I digress.  Shakespeare and the boys invented show business, and they knew the reason people came to the Globe Theatre.  It was because they wanted to put their mundane lives on Pause and hit Play on their imagination.  After that, you can do what you want to.  But if Hamlet’s teenage angst hadn’t captured the crowd’s imagination in the first place, we’d all be watching bear-baiting on A&E.  Trust me; that’s where Shakespeare’s audience was headed when they saw the marquee.

Acting, directing and producing movies is hard work.  The people who do it are serious.  In the main, I like their product but not every “good” movie is a Testament to the Human Condition, and not every “good” character is a reflection of all of us.  I don’t care what a director is “trying” to do, nor how many critics stick their body parts in the air, in approval.  In the end it’s all make believe.  It’s been that way since Grog the caveman played the mastodon in the original Quest for Fire.  Come on! What are the chances that Darth Vader is Luke’s Dad?  I mean, really!

When the gods are changing

It’s hard to live in a time when the gods are changing, but it’s loads of fun, too.  This transitional world we live in is so full of cool it’s difficult to sort things out.  So many neat things are going on right now that I’m totally pissed I’m never going to see where they end up in 50 or 100 years.  Honestly, I haven’t completely comprehended our world since back in the 20th century.  Sometime around the Y2K scam, I started to lose track, and even though I faked it for a couple more years, the gaps in my understanding just got too big.  Now, like old underwear, there are far too many holes in my knowledge to ever claim decency again.  Fortunately, the world has gotten so large that I can just narrow my focus, avoid the stuff I don’t recognize, and keep on moving.  There are certain things that I miss from the old world, though; things that were quaint and homey and comfortable.

For example, I miss quiet contemplation on the bus.  In the olden days, people on buses used to sit there, stunned, staring straight ahead.  They read books and newspapers.  They decided what to have for dinner.  They mulled over their problems.  They carried open bags with their new possessions in them.  Sometimes, they talked to each other in that secret mono-voice reserved for private words in public places.  They looked out the windows and thought about their lovers.  Buses were romantic places.  These days, buses are full of people who stand when there are seats available and boldly declare to their invisible friends that they are indeed on the bus.

I miss babysitters, too.  I think it’s too bad that a whole generation of young people are probably going to have to resort to prostitution to pay for their music and hairstyles.  Babysitters should have been made an essential service — years ago.  They allow us to have time.  Sometimes, adults need adults only.  There’s something relaxing about having a second cup of coffee after dinner when somebody else is going to do the dishes.

Restaurants are made for love affairs because they capture time for the person you’re with.  A few years ago, the one requirement for a quiet evening like this was that the chairs in the restaurant weren’t made of plastic.  These days, however, most restaurants offer complimentary crying babies or young families eager to share their experience.  It’s difficult to have a trivial conversation when 4-year-old Kay-lee (with a K) at the next table is pffting her potatoes and going for distance.  In the olden days, a good babysitter would have saved both those marriages.

And I miss newspapers: those big Sunday thumpers that killed half a forest to make and half a morning to read.  They had complete sections that you could trade across the breakfast table.  They were big enough to fold, so you could drink your morning coffee.  They were lazy with long stories.  They had movies you wanted to see and places you wanted to go.  They had columnists from faraway Chicago and Frisco, who caused discussions and arguments, and the loser made breakfast.  And they had crossword puzzles that might take all day — even with help.  Today, news and opinion are a solitary business backlit and scrolling, rushed through on our way to somewhere else, over a breakfast we can eat with our hands.

And I don’t like “relationships.”  They’re artificial affairs.  They’re built on the premise that the squiggy feeling in the bottom of your belly has a beginning, a middle and an end.  They take too much thought and are almost corporate in their planning.  Following their path is like playing a video game where each success leads you to the next level — more difficult with bigger dangers – until, finally, it’s too familiar to play anymore.  I prefer the olden days when people had love affairs that began by accident — at places like bus stops.  They took time to unfold, over longer and longer, long evenings.  And even though they always began as separate adventures, unlike relationships, love affairs got passed back and forth so many times that they became a jungle of intertwisted experience that can never be understood separately again.

This isn’t a brave new world we live in; it’s a brilliant place, with new and exciting things going on, all the time.   And even though, most days, I can’t wait for tomorrow, I still like the feel of yesterday.