Ad men

I was going through the ads in the Sunday paper this morning looking for Parade Magazine when I suddenly realized that without Parade, I would take the entire pile of ads and discard them. The magazine, with its easy style of celebrity gossip (and Marilyn vos Savant for those of curious mind) has wide appeal. Its purpose, I now realize, is to get us to search through the pile of ads, where something else might catch our eye.

We have a relative in the advertising business. He works for one of the big ones, and is currently working for Microsoft on the Windows 7 phone. He used to be a little more open about his trade, telling us at one point with that his job was to “get people to change their behavior.” From a start in bike helmets in LA, he’s worked on many national campaigns.

He doesn’t talk shop anymore, but has on occasion alluded to the process of putting together an ad. He is a “creative”, and works one who does copy to come up with short and catchy ads.

(Do you remember one for Ikea Furniture that has a lamp sitting on the curb in the rain? Along comes an old man with a Swedish accent who says “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you are crazy. It has no feelings. And the new one is much better.” That ad was directed by Spike Jonze of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation fame. It is a simple ad with an embedded message – break your emotional bonds with your old furniture. Don’t be afraid to buy new stuff.)

But before his team gets involved, another department within the agency has already set up a “theme” for the ads, and everything they come up with must advance that theme. No matter how clever or catchy, if it does not toe the line, it is trashed.

(My favorite, Bud Light: Superbowl ads for this product show juvenile humor – refrigerators that spin around to other rooms where young men bow in worship, talking frogs. According to ad critic Susan Linn (who wants children to be protected from advertising), the ads are aimed at young kids 13-16 years old. They are not so much wanting these kids to drink. They are “branding” them, so that when they do come of age they will select Bud Light. It is masterful psychological manipulation of children.)

There exists within each successful ad agency a team of psychologists, or at least of people who are very good at reading humans as we are, and not as we think we are. Advertising must speak to the real person. We buy cars, for example, as an extension of our personalities, and so do not react to the quality of the vehicle, but rather to the image projected by the advertising. Trucks are expressions of masculinity, an important trait for the emasculated American male. For that reason, over the past half century American men have preferred mechanically inferior Chevy trucks over better alternatives. Chevy knows its market. Or did, at one time.

I don’t like advertising because it seeks to manipulate me, to undermine me, to get me to do things by working on my subconscious mind. It invades my private space. I find that invasive and subversive. We now own a DVR, and I skip through the ads, rarely seeing more than a flash version of one. I was amazed to learn that most people who own DVR’s do not skip over ads. They choose! to watch them.

However, there are enough of us avoiding ads that TV show scripts are now being written to incorporate products. Where once they would show a bottle of Advil on the bed stand, now they have to somehow make Advil part of the script. Bad writing is going to get even worse now. The market is working its miracles. (Nothing is new – movies routinely incorporate products into scripts, as Reeses Pieces with ET. It is only going to become more prevalent in the DVR future.)

I suppose someone is going to remind me that without advertising there would be no programming. Have you even seen the crap on TV? We get over a hundred channels, and it is insulting garbage punctuated by mountains of ads. Do I want that to go away? Do I care? Yes, there is some original programming going on, some of it very good. Some of this programming is shown on ad-based networks, but most of it turns up on the Public or subscription channels. Isn’t that’s odd?

Politics, of course, long ago incorporated advertising into campaigns. Political advertising is subversive, just as regular ads are. The real message of the ads are discussed at panel discussions among ad professionals after campaigns are over. But even then they do not talk about the real embedded messages: Political advertising is designed to appeal to hatred, fear and envy.

But that is only the first layer. There is another unspoken layer under that: Political advertising makes you think that your opinion matters.

Your opinion does not matter. Only the the feeling that it matters that matters. Got that?