One of my favorite subjects, apart from sex, is advertising. To be honest, I hate most of it, but the concept of advertising is vast and fascinating. A good friend of mine named Art had a turn of phrase that he used in relation to advertising and branding pervasion: mass media mind control. His vigilance in identifying the role of advertising in our every day decisions has influenced me to take a look at my own life and see how I have been affected. For instance, at a glance and without even leaving my seat, I can identify the logos of 30 different companies affixed to products laying within 5 feet of my chair. As much as I can protect myself from the manufactured want that advertising pushes upon us, the act of consumption manages to invite advertising into my own personal realm. When I roll out of bed and stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I've already seen the logos of 10 different brands. By the time I return to my bed at the end of the day, I will have witnessed over 10,000 attempts to get me to buy, hire or like something.
Most people think of advertising as something that just calls attention to a product or service. The goal of advertising is much shadier than that. Advertising exists to create a desire for something where it did not exist before. The message a company wants to send through an ad is more than "try our product," it is an attempt to shape your world. For those of us who care about true individualism, the answer is not to buy a product in one of 8 colors, but to not buy the product at all.
What I would like to focus on today is advertising disguised as entertainment. I am not easily offended, but this comes close to doing that. The internet may seem like the information superhighway to most, but the reality is that web pages, apart from any actual revenue, are valued based on the number of opportunities they have to advertise to viewers. This is why Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, a website that was actually profitless at the time. The worth was not in YouTube's ability to drive straight revenue, but in its ability to attract users for advertisements to be shown to. Now YouTube is THE place that people flock to in order to actually view advertisements, trailers, teaser clips, and "viral video" that all serve to promote products that businesses would like us to buy.
Many companies have created special websites for their products that allow customer interaction. OfficeMax let you "Elf Yourself" during the holidays. Burger King allowed you to order around a subservient chicken. McDonalds graciously invited people to create homemade videos based on their food. Hyundai now encourages you to piece together footage and music to create your own commercial for THEIR car. Facebook is a hive crawling with "applications" that serve no better purpose than to get people to use them for the sake of spreading around the name of a product or company. If this is fun for you, by all means, go for it. In my time working at an internet marketing firm, I spent many hours listening to account executives spouting idea after idea for viral inspiration. Their only goal was to make money; the entertainment was simply the draw. It really is that insipid.
Product placement is another form of advertising as entertainment. You might think of product placement as a relatively new concept that hit its stride in the last 10 years or so (directly corresponding with Will Smith's career), but it has been around for ages. For example, Blue Velvet, a David Lynch movie from 1986, has a scene with its main character Jeffrey Beaumont raving about Heineken beer for a single line without any motivation before moving on to other conversation. There was no logo shown in the shot, only a shining verbal endorsement from a character who would later sneak into a woman's apartment and watch her undress from within her closet. I bring this up to illustrate how advertising is deeply embedded within our culture and that it has been shaping our world and our perception of it for decades.
The acclaimed television serious Mad Men depicts a savvy advertising firm from the 1950's and its creative director passionately searching for the soul of a product for the purpose of a straightforward pitch. The show itself is incredible, but the scenes that depict the creative process of advertising are admirably candid. They explain why advertising is so powerful and they provide a good point of origin for our society's immunity to it. That immunity is why we must now endure a Nokia ad even after we've already paid $12 to watch the new Star Trek movie. Where it once began as a solid black division, the line between content and sales pitch has blurred, splintered and zagged over time. We are almost at the tipping point where all entertainment IS advertising.
I would like to rebroadcast my friend Art's call for vigilance in identifying advertising. Know when something is trying to create a need within you for some product that you never needed before. If you see something you want, be honest with yourself; recognize why you want it. Resist if you can help it.
Future mass media mind control blog topics: brand loyalty, subliminal advertising, brand image, and infotainment. Stay tuned for more.
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