Tag: advertising

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Janet Jackson at the Superbowl

Did you see it? You probably missed it. You were probably in the bathroom.

At the end of Janet Jackson’s rather sorry spectacle of a circus of a fireworks extravaganza of incredibly self-indulgent excessive spatter-fest of over-wrought writhing orgiastic dancers and musicians– her boob popped out. In fact, it appeared as though Justin Timberlake pulled off one of her leatherette little shields and there it was. CBS remarkably cut the camera within a second or two. Maybe there was a slight delay available to them– you know, whatever they call it, when they reserve to themselves a slight cushion of time just in case someone like Janet Jackson, on nationwide tv, does something inappropriate.

So you are mom. You’re watching the half-time show because, Lord knows, you can’t stand to watch football. Your kids are watching too. They are Janet Jackson fans. The dancers wear costumes inspired by S & M fantasies. They gyrate and move in motions meant to suggest intercourse. You smile and continue your knitting. They are singing something about being naked for you or whatever. Doesn’t matter. You nod and shake your head– modern music. Then it happens. You leap up and cover your children’s eyes. If you were fast enough, you may have spared them a life-time of deviance and sexual perversion. They might not have realized that they had seen Janet Jackson’s breast.

The opening act for this bizarre annual ritual– the Superbowl– was Aerosmith. Hoo hah. There are tail-gate parties, which they also have at state prisons on the nights they are going to execute people.

Steve Tyler himself. Most young football fans yearned for his daughter, Liv. Liv, ridiculously, played a psychiatrist in one of Jim Carrey’s most earnest and preposterous movies, “Reign Over Me”.

Then Beyonce sang the national anthem, with all the heartfelt authority and sincerity Hollywood can muster. Then 40 grown men pumped to preposterous proportions by steroids (professional football does not test anybody for anything except marijuana) chase each other over a 100 yard field trying to retrieve an oblong object made of pigskin. This crowd cheers wildly.

There are 100 commercials. They watch the commercials (that’s why they cost an average of $2.5 million– they do watch.) They think, I will be happy if I have some Pepsi. I will download legally. I will have an erection. Most of these people would say they are Christians. In God’s name, I have no clue what they think they are talking about.

There is approximately 10 seconds of action for 20 minutes of commercials, inane chatter, Janet Jackson’s breast, Steve Tyler’s tongue, and American flags.

The audience, apparently, has what they want– the ratings for Superbowl games are great. These people are American voters. Not only are they choosing the type of costume they want Janet Jackson to wear, but they are also choosing the next government of Iraq and the future of the Israel-Palestinian peace plan. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake apologized about the breast.

Both of their careers, however, have been enhanced. There is no such thing as bad publicity.

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Lies and Damn Lies

I had always thought that the reason advertisers target mostly young adult viewers is because they have the most disposable income. I don’t think that’s really true. I think people in their 40’s actually have more money to spend. The real reason is because young adults still have a sliver of a smidgeon of a tiny little particle of belief that what advertisers are telling them is true. I know the feeling, just as sometimes I can remember what it was like to be an adolescent boy and to have fantasies of power or great suffering or genius. After a while you grow up, but not everybody grows up, and not everybody thinks the same thing makes you grown up.

You know that most ads lie or exaggerate but it just might be possible, you think, that this one product or service or whatever will gratify some desire or another. Sometimes you even ignore advice that you know is good. You just need it. You just need to try it. You buy it and, inevitably, it disappoints. You store up that information. By the time you are about 40, you are inured. You are immune to the scam. And advertising no longer works.

We’re the only culture in the world that has grown up bombarded incessantly by millions and millions of lies. We allow it. We are shameless. And I am pretty sure that most people, as with most things, tend to think it could never be otherwise. This is our system, our culture, our economy. There are a lot of things we like about our lifestyles– we wouldn’t want to throw it all away by trying something radical. So we abide the lies.

So I sat there one day and tried to imagine a world in which most advertisers had some kind of moral feeling about truth and decided that they would try to make their ads as reasonably accurate as possible. In a world like this, really lousy products would not survive because no one would agree to advertise them. But most of the products we see around us would probably still be around us. We just wouldn’t be under great illusions about what they can do for us.

So, again, imagine a world in which most of what you hear and see is generally true.

It will blow you mind. It’s a freaking wild concept. The biggest difference is that it would matter. You would care about stuff you hear. You might react. You might take it to heart. You might be moved occasionally.

When something really important came along, it would sound really important, and you would believe it was really important.

We might find out that there are a lot of things we’d like to change about our lives, because we know the truth about our chances of eventually winning the lottery or looking like Katie Holmes or Brad Pitt. We would know that this is what we are and we have to live with.

Truth

A TV production company approaches your airline company. Imagine you are the president of this company. The TV Production company wants to tape your staff in action, your pilots, your stewardesses, your customer service representatives. Nothing is out of bounds. They want to record what it is like to travel on your airplanes.

Your first question is, can we control what you show on TV? We can cut whatever we don’t like, right?

The answer is no.

You say no way, right?

That’s what most U.S. airlines did. They probably thought to themselves, are you crazy? They could show anything! They should customers complaining and saying that they will never fly your airline again!

But Southwest Airlines in the U.S. said yes. And they really had no control over the content. They were not pleased, for example, when the program showed that they charge fat passengers for two seats. They would have preferred that that little episode stayed on the cutting room floor.

But some smart people in the pr department of Southwest Airlines prevailed and the program was made. They gambled on the idea that people are not children, that they can understand reality, and that they will have more respect for an airline that is “transparent” than for one that tries to hide all of their faults.

I think they’re right. I hope they’re right. The jury is still out, but I’m betting that their sales increase and pretty soon all the big airlines will want a piece of the action.

Note: the program was based on a similar program that has been airing in Britain for 6 years.

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The Televisionization of the Internet

You probably don’t think of our society as Totalitarian. A Totalitarian society is a society that is rule by a pernicious doctrine to which all societal functions must be subordinated to one exclusive purpose.

By golly, we’re free to live as we choose, in our society. Aren’t we?

Suppose I wanted to come up with a new type of communication network that combined the functionality of the telephone, television, and radio, into one powerful medium, with one small proviso. The proviso is this: no commercial use of the medium is allowed. None whatsoever. No advertising, no selling, no profiteering. The system would be created and run by volunteers only.

There’s a lot of technical obstacles, of course. But probably not as many as you think. But there is one overwhelming obstacle: our society is totalitarian and will not stand for a non-commercial communications network.

Think that analysis is a little extreme? No television network will allow Adbusters to run their advertisements criticizing advertisers and the consumerist lifestyle. They won’t accept the money, they won’t run the ads. You can sell gas-guzzling cars, unproven pharmaceutical products, and booze, and even scantily-clad women, but you can’t challenge the fundamental religion of our society: consumerism.

And now the internet. When it started, it was beautiful, free, clean, and amazing. Have you browsed around the net lately? All you see is advertising, on every single damn site. And if you aren’t seeing advertising on the site itself, you are getting whacked via e-mail, or in the browser frames, or with pop-up windows.

You might think it’s merely a case of a lot of internet users deciding to try to make a few bucks. But that’s not all it is. Why on earth should your browser permit a pop-up ad? Why should it enable such a function? Why should it be difficult or impossible to turn off that function? Microsoft and Netscape design the browsers. They have incorporated features into the browser to guarantee that you will be whacked every time you go on the internet.

And Microsoft has designed the operating system to encourage the user to become a passive drooling idiot, gushing over the little animations and sound effects playing on his computer, while relinquishing control over his eyeballs and ears to the corporate politburos of America.

The internet is the largest single source of pollution. It is so bad, that for the first time since I first went “on-line” way back in the early 1990’s, I am seriously considering getting off.

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CTV Mutilates Another Film

For about 5,000 little reasons, I have always disliked CTV. It has always seemed to me to be the most “American” of the big three Canadian Networks, and the most commercial. By “American” I mean that it seems populated by editors and programmers who never forget for even one second that the bottom line is profitability.

Even the investigative journalism on CTV smacks of ABC’s “20/20”, one of the worst journalistic television programs in existence. What’s it called? W5? Sensationalistic and specious.

The CBC, of course, is a prize. Non-commercial radio and semi-non-commercial television. The truth is, in the last few years, CBC television is starting to show too many commercials. But it is still the last hope in Canada for television that is not controlled by corporations and the imperatives of advertising.

Tonight I watched a movie called “Something About Mary” on CTV. “Something About Mary” is a vulgar but sometimes hysterically funny movie about a guy who decides to look up the girl of his dreams 12 years after an incredibly disastrous first and only date with her.

I’ve seen the movie before. It’s not really very good, but a couple of scenes are actually pretty funny and sometimes I just want to veg out and go along for the ride.

There was no ride. First of all, there were more commercial interruptions than scenes in the movie, and the commercials went on and on and on. I guess I’m not as used to them as I used to be– we do a lot of video in this house– but it is also a fact that tv networks, desperate for new revenue as the internet begins to suck away their advertising dollars, are showing more commercials than ever before.

Did you know that “The Dick Van Dyke Show” presented 28 minutes of actual program for the half-hour slot. Two minutes of advertising! Today, your so-called 1/2 hour comedy presents about 22 minutes, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, we have seen “Something About Mary” and were familiar enough with it to notice that, in addition to interrupting the movie about every six minutes to show another batch of ads, CTV had edited or removed scenes and language that, one supposes, it deemed to be offensive to viewers.

And it went one amazing step further. The one scene that “saved” the movie from mediocrity in my view was the ending, where the entire cast exuberantly sings “Build Me Up Buttercup”. All right– it’s kind of hokey, but it’s a pleasant, good-natured hokey and keeps the film in perspective: it’s just fun.

I guess the CTV thought this sort of fun was dangerous or unprofitable– it was deleted. The film ended on CTV with Stiller kissing Diaz in their final embrace, after she turns down the hunky football quarterback. Then– the credits roll.

The obvious reason was so CTV could squeeze in some more commercials. The judgment of where the cuts should occur was obviously left up to a stock boy or janitor.

The decision to cut a portion of the film out is so unspeakably barbaric, stupid, and offensive, that I am almost speechless.

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The Mythical Open Road

As you sit in your car in the middle of yet another traffic jam in almost any major city and stare at your white knuckles, think about those beautiful car advertisements.

Obviously, Ford and Toyota and General Motors are never going to show you where you will really spend all your time in their glorious automobiles. But just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a round of good old fashioned outrage.

The ads show the beautiful cars– almost always perfectly, minty clean– cruising all by their lonesome selves down endless stretches of awe-inspiring roads that channel through hills and valleys, mountains and rivers, prairies and open plains. What is most astonishing about these scenarios is that there are never any other cars on the road. Nobody. Nowhere. No trucks. No cars. No ugly, fat, disgusting, gas-guzzling Winnebago’s. Nada. What a wonderful driving experience. You bet.

It’s like when they show anorexic models eating diet yogurt. Right. You’ll look like that someday. Some day if you manage to kidnap Kate Moss and transplant your brain into her body.

Nobody is surprised if car companies want to show their products in the best light. We probably generally laugh to ourselves and continue to wait for the normally scheduled program to resume. But why should we put up with this crap? Why are we so damn passive? Why can’t we muster a little righteous indignation for the outright fraud perpetuated on the consumer by these ads?

Let’s not mince words: these ads are indeed a fraud. They are filled with lies and distortion. You will never ever get to take the drive that is being offered to you. It doesn’t exist anywhere in the civilized world anymore. Why not? Because every idiot on the planet wants that driving experience so they are all stacked up behind each other on the freeways grinding their teeth and wondering why everyone else doesn’t just get off the road.

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Labatts Blues

Monkey See…

The Labatt’s Brewing Company of Canada recently ran an ad in which the two male characters were cleaning out their garages. One of them took an old “Yield” sign to the road for disposal; the other took an old “Stop” sign. Apparently, the two men had “grown up” and put youthful indiscretions behind them, including, presumably, the theft of traffic signs.

Now that they were grown up, they could be suckered into drinking Carlsberg Beer by stupid tv ads.

Well, why not? If a tv ad can persuade you to commit a criminal act–as every two-bit pundit in the wake of the Colorado shootings believes– it can probably sell you some beer too.

Six viewers of the Labatt’s Carlsberg ad were so alarmed by this implied endorsement of theft that they contacted Advertising Standards Canada and complained. As a result, Labatt’s pulled the ad. Six viewers. Six.

In another Labatt’s ad last year, a woman changes her clothes in a taxi. When she arrives at her destination, the driver flips the meter over– indicating that he was not going to charge her for the trip. Someone complained about this ad too, and Labatt’s, ever the responsible corporate citizen, edited the ad. In the new version, the the driver does not cancel the fare.

Notice, they did not change the part about the woman undressing in the back seat of a taxi (red light, anyone?). They merely removed the implication that the taxi driver had rewarded her for the peep show.

Am I alone here in thinking this is a little bizarre? Right after this or any other ad is shown, regular tv programming resumes, with it’s usual cornucopia of murder, rape, arson, drug abuse, and assault. “Trainspotting” ran recently, showing all of the above. If Advertising Standards Canada is trying to say that people may emulate the behaviour of people they see on TV, what about regular tv programming?

And why has nobody complained about car ads that show drivers speeding down the highway, obviously in excess of the speed limit? Why are they allowed to brag about the power of their engines? What’s the point of that power? You’re trying persuade someone to buy your car because it goes fast? Why? Are there cars on the road that can’t reach the speed limit?

What about the ads that imply that teenagers can become popular by smearing chemicals on their faces? What about that guy who likes getting hit on the face with a puck? What about those Nike ads that endorse a ruthless attitude towards sports?

Pull them all, I say.