The curse of the ad man

No one, including me, is able to unravel the meaning of the Bud Light ad in the post below, making me think that I am doing what I often do, overthinking. This morning as I reflected on it, I realize that the opening of the yellow-arched door at about 30 seconds in contained the message of the ad, that the people on the other side of the door were having real fun. Why? Bud Light, of course, but more generally, beer, or more generally, alcohol, or more generally yet, escape.

This morning I recalled something I’ve long … accepted … more than understood, that in life there is an 80-20 rule. 80 percent of anything we do is going to be dominated by 20 percent of the people doing it. It applies to religion, eating chips, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, and drinking.

Most people take religion lightly, but a minority are very serious about it and believe in the precepts. I don’t mind it even as I am as far from religious belief is a person can be, so far in fact that I have come around the back door. I have no use for rituals and superstition as I was brought up to believe in, but I now understand that we are complex beings who carry in our temporal bodies a spirit. Humans are far too complex to be understood by evolution, which is at best an only partially developed science that doesn’t really explain much. Our bodies are frail, but our minds are rich with concepts and understanding that natural selection cannot begin to explain. Evolution might somewhat explain the behavior of apes and monkeys and polar bears, but not humans. All Darwin could muster was finches who developed in different ways on different islands. Not even close.

But let’s not go down that road. I’m more interested in that ad. Subliminals aside, and I imagine the Bud Light ad is crawling with them, what is the message? Drink! The more you drink, the more fun you will have!  Superbowl Sunday, like some other holidays (St. Patrick’s, 4th of July, for instance), is set aside for heavy drinking. But most of that drinking is done by only a minority percentage of the population. However, on that day, Superbowl Sunday, that minority fits in, belongs, blends, and is not noticed for what they are, heavy drinkers. During the rest of the year, as heavy drinking among the prime consumers of Bud Light is a daily activity, is done in private, quiet stinky bars or at home.

Who am I to criticize? I am an abstainer, but have a family history going back generations of heavy drinking, enough so that I understand why my ancestors lived in poverty. Excess drinking is debilitating, leads to shortened lives and a general overall sense of misery, punctuated with intervals of extreme joy brought about by drinking. Why am I an abstainer? The same reason that my three brothers were also abstainers. We could not, cannot drink normally. Understanding this, we avoid booze. Experience taught us that, not intellectualism. We all learned the hard way, but dammit, we learned.

My older brother Tom died in 2011, and I sat by his death bed. He was a deeply religious man, as life didn’t offer him much else. He was in a coma, but I was advised that hearing still worked, so I spent that evening, night and early morning reading Bible verses to him. I settled on Psalms, as there’s some really nice stuff there, and repeated some of them over and over. Raised as a Catholic, I was taught that it was OK to read the Bible, but don’t dare try interpreting it! So I just settled on nice stuff with a pleasant air. After all, I took that advice not to interpret the Bible to mean not to read the Bible. There’s a lot of wonderful stuff in it I realize. I just don’t know about it. After twelve years of Catholic education, I managed to avoid reading all of it.

Tom was in death throes, prolonged heavy deep breathing, but now and then he would … not yell … but exclaim in a loud voice “Beera!” In time a nurse would arrive with a can of Michelob Light and feed him in sips. The nursing crew, knowing he was going to die, was doing last wish rituals, and Tom wanted beer. I had thought of Tom in all of our adult years as a deeply religious abstainer, but finally understood what led to abstinence, the same as with my brothers Joe and Steve, and our Dad, and me, the inability to drink moderately.  Tom knew he was on his way out, and so could finally lay back and relax and drink too. His final breath came in the wee hours, and if you’ve never witnessed death close up, well, its a moving experience. Something changes, the body simply stops, breath is one final heavy gasp, and it’s over. Does the spirit inside continue to exist? I suspect so, as there is no other explanation for us even existing on this prison planet. We are too complex to be monkeys or polar bears. We are self-aware, the key to our marvelous undertakings, our music and literature and architecture and engineering.

But I don’t know, of course.

Overthink much? Yeah, that’s me. Wilson Bryan Key, whose books I am reading these days, says that death imagery** is all about in the advertising for liquor, but is not present in advertising for food or other stuff, which generally uses sex. Excess drinking is slow death, and those who do it know it. So advertisers, steeped as they are in behavioral psychology, know the buttons to push, which are escape, and death. I am not going to spend any more time on that overdone Bud Light ad, but know if I went deep enough, I would understand the feeling it gave me, which I described as “occult.” That was the best word I could think of, but I now know better what it is about: Ecstasy and morbidity at once. Maybe that is a long way of saying occult. But of course, I don’t know.

Anyway, this is more about advertising than anything else, as I have come over the years to look down my nose at that profession. Their job is to sell. The profession is littered with artists who cannot make a living doing art, and who settle in ads, as it pays well. But to do so, they sell their souls. They talk about ads that “work”, that is, move products off the shelf, no matter the product. That’s all that matters, sell! If the ads don’t work, the people working for the agencies get fired. There’s a high rate of agency jumping and “freelancing” in the profession, and aging out. It’s a young people’s game. Has anyone noticed that Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, who gave us so many memorable tunes, quit writing really good stuff as they got older? The same in advertising … the juices flow in young people. The older ones, who become overpaid boat anchors, are escorted to the door.

I suspect the Bud Light ad, which cost a fortune just to air, much less make, led to some loss of jobs, as I don’t think it worked. It did not move product.

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**Keys also mentions impotency and castration, as alcohol is known to affect those departments.