{"id":66615,"date":"2016-01-10T15:22:33","date_gmt":"2016-01-10T20:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=66615"},"modified":"2016-01-10T15:22:33","modified_gmt":"2016-01-10T20:22:33","slug":"ad-nauseam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/ad-nauseam\/","title":{"rendered":"Ad Nauseam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_ADRgzUez1E\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u00c2\u00a0<span style=\"text-align: justify;\">I have always detested TV commercials\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwith the too-rare exception of clever, funny ones. Alka Seltzer used to have some pretty funny commercials, like the cartoon with the guy and his stomach sitting in two chairs opposite some kind of counselor, trying to talk out a conflict: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I happen to <\/span><em style=\"text-align: justify;\">like<\/em><span style=\"text-align: justify;\"> pepperoni pizza!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do you like indi<\/span><em style=\"text-align: justify;\">ges<\/em><span style=\"text-align: justify;\">tion? Cause you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to <\/span><em style=\"text-align: justify;\">get<\/em><span style=\"text-align: justify;\"> it every time you eat pepperoni pizza!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d You know the solution. I guess my favorite was one inspired by the 1960s Monster Boom. Count Sore Throat Pain was begging viewers not to avail themselves of Isodettes throat lozenges. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Vat do you vant from me, a song and dance? <\/span><em style=\"text-align: justify;\">It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s<\/em><span style=\"text-align: justify;\"> like sticking my heart <\/span><em style=\"text-align: justify;\">vit<\/em><span style=\"text-align: justify;\"> a golden stake!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But most were just boring, tedious, trying the patience till the show you were watching came back on. Not much has changed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There are still comical commercials, even more of them. These days I get a chuckle out of Geico ads with Peter Pan showing up at his 1965 high school reunion still an annoying adolescent jerk, with the Kraken grabbing golfers out of a water hazard, etc. I like seeing the Coneheads shilling for State Farm and Norm MacDonald impersonating the late Colonel Sanders (who can be expected to start haunting him pretty soon now). But it would never cross my mind to reward these advertisers by switching to Geico insurance, signing on to State Farm if I weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t already with them, or buying KFC. (It ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bad, mind you, but why bother when there are joints around here that serve <em>real<\/em> Fried Chicken? KFC is to fried chicken as Arthur Treacher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s was to real fried fish.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In all these cases what you have is really corporate sponsorship of half-minute comedy skits, essentially no different from them sponsoring half-hour sitcoms. The cleverness of their comedy writers is no reason to buy their product. The one has nothing to do with the other. In fact, it reminds me of what Voltaire (I think) said about the epistemological irrelevance of miracles: if I tell you to watch me prove that 2 plus 2 equals 3 by making a ball disappear from my palm, and I do in fact make it vanish, 2 plus 2 still make 4. The one, no matter how impressive, has absolutely nothing to do with the other.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">But my enjoyment of these \u00e2\u20ac\u0153comedy-mercials\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is more than offset by my indignation at other recent advertising trends. It really galls me, for instance, when we are shown numerous individuals, supposedly satisfied customers, all using some contrived, punning slogan (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is my body of proof!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is how I own it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) as if it were common conversational usage. Are they trying to create a Newspeak of advertising jargon so to ingrain their ads and their products in our subconscious? Well, you know where they can stuff it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A related, larger gimmick is on display in a zillion commercials in which we are asked to accept the ostensible testimonials of satisfied customers in what are obviously scripted fictions. Take the Aleve commercials, where the voice-over informs us that coach So-&amp;-so has chronic knee pain but soldiers through his day aided by a mere two Aleve pain pills, and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we\u00e2\u20ac\u009d asked him to trade them for the day for a bottle of Brand X, as if the whole thing were a medical experiment. And every time (there are loads of versions of this one), the Aleve addict grouses that he\/she has to interrupt his\/her day constantly to take handfuls of Brand X to do the same job as a mere pair of Aleve. Or we see a series of dizzy models being asked to apply some non-sticky deodorant, eliciting excited praises. Or some computer dating site shows satisfied customers offering grateful testimonies\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand then you remember their faces from other commercials they appear in. My point is that those who produce these commercials do not even try to cover their tracks. The ads have the spontaneous genuineness of a scene from a soap opera or a sitcom. They are not even trying to deceive you. They know you know it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s phony. So why do it? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what we wish customers were saying about our product\/service.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">It comes to the point that the audience not only knows what they are hearing is not true, but that they even realize it <em>couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t<\/em> be true, just like the cheery government propaganda in Iron Curtain Europe about successful five-year plans that will revive the economy, etc. Of course, government propaganda in our day has sunk to the same depth. It is all spin. What is said is not meant to inform but to manipulate. In the case of TV ads, my guess is that the goal is to model behavior among viewers. Hearing these bogus testimonials again and again, obedient consumers will begin to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153think\u00e2\u20ac\u009d they ought to behave the same way, whether the products deserve their accolades or not. It is like the laugh track on a sitcom: it tells you what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s supposed to be funny because you couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t guess it from the content. You hear the machine guffawing and so you think, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Okay, that must be funny\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtime to laugh.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">And I rankle at the manipulative slippage of pronouns, like on the Liberty Mutual insurance ads. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You loved your car. You named it Brad. You screwed countless guys in Brad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s back seat. But then you wrecked Brad. You cried. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNothing can replace Brad!\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 But then Liberty Mutual calls and you break into your happy dance.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Really? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s odd that I have no memory of these things! Or Ty Young congratulates me because I saved money and successfully invested it. I <em>did<\/em>? Obviously, these actors are telling me what <em>they<\/em> did, but they want me to identify with them, to picture myself doing these things, buying these things, and so to allow myself to adopt these behaviors.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">How about the ones where, beneath the talking head giving the testimonial, it says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Not an actor, but a real customer,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but their testimonial is obviously composed of ad slogans that real customers, even actual satisfied customers, would never naturally use. The captions ought to read, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Actual customer reading a script.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I remember how, when you, er, I mean when <em>I<\/em> first read Orwell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel <em>1984<\/em> and got to Eric Fromm\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s afterward, I bristled when he opined that Orwell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fictionalized dystopia was not just a satire of the Soviet Union but applied equally to the Capitalist West. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand then, but subsequently I have come to realize he was quite right: Television commercials betoken a socio-economic system which seeks to catechize and manipulate us via a constant fusillade of lying propaganda. Maybe being a curmudgeon is the only way to fight back. It is a battle in which I am constantly engaged. And of course my two weapons are the mute button and scathing mockery yelled at the screen. Won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you join me in the fight?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So says Zarathustra.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/television-advertising-new-rules1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-66629\" title=\"television-advertising-new-rules\" src=\"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/television-advertising-new-rules1.jpg\" alt=\"TV ADS\" width=\"670\" height=\"377\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/television-advertising-new-rules1.jpg 670w, http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/television-advertising-new-rules1-300x168.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 670px) 100vw, 670px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00c2\u00a0I have always detested TV commercials\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwith the too-rare exception of clever, funny ones. Alka Seltzer used to have some pretty funny commercials, like the cartoon with the guy and his stomach sitting in two chairs opposite some kind of counselor, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/ad-nauseam\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}