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Let’s say you’re in advertising. But let’s also say you’re a caveman. A company that sells Throwing Rocks hires you to pitch their product.*
What’s the best way to sell the rock?
Consider two things:
1. Cavemen did not speak to each other. They only grunted.
2. Cavemen, like bears, were very protective of their families’ caves.
So the best way to sell your new Throwing Rock would be to invite a throng of cavemen to your cave, let all of them touch your rock, then place a big rack of dead dinosaur meat in the doorway and wait for a saber-toothed tiger to attack the cave. When the tiger arrives, you would throw the rock at its head. If it goes away, the other cavemen will be impressed and they will buy your throwing rock and keep it under their pillows. If the tiger doesn’t go away, it will probably wipe out your entire target audience, and you, so you might want to keep a spare spear or something as backup.
There’s really nothing sneaky or underhanded about this method of advertising. You’re selling the product based on merit and value. You’re completely acknowledging that the tiger stunt is an advertisement. Maybe you’re not telling the other cavemen that you brought a spear to protect yourself in case the rock trick doesn’t work, but what they don’t know can’t kill them, unless, of course, the rock is dysfunctional and the tiger kills them.
Advertising doesn’t work like that anymore. It’s much subtler, and sometimes you can’t even tell that an advertisement is an advertisement. Sometimes an entire city mistakes an advertisement for a terrorist attack and shuts all its roads down to look for additional cartoon bombs. But I like it this way.
The history of advertising mimics the evolution of military battles. During the Revolutionary War, soldiers would line up twenty yards from each other and shoot. Nobody thought, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t make it blatantly obvious that we’re attacking them, maybe we shouldn’t wear bright red, and maybe we should all hide behind rocks or something.” 230 years later we’re fighting wars against enemies that don’t even wear fatigues. They wear long, concealing burkas, hide guns where you think they’re pregnant, and shoot at you when you’re busy handing their child candy.
Advertising, similarly, has gone from overt to covert. And consumers are always slightly slower, and slightly stupider, than the advertisers. Consumers are like the British troops that didn’t know how to react when the Americans hired village people, Indians, and Frenchmen to hide in the forest before surprising the British with carefully aimed musket shots and hatchet tosses.**
In the old days, spokespeople would come on TV and say, “I smoke these cigarettes because they taste great, I look cool, and they’re good for me.” So we started smoking cigarettes. We didn’t realize that the cigarette companies were lying to us. Cigarettes didn’t actually taste that great.
When we finally did realize that companies were capable of lying to us, advertisers had to change their tune. Instead of telling us what to think, they dropped hints. They showed us a rugged, handsome cowboy smoking cigarettes, but didn’t explain why the cowboy was smoking. We had to decide for ourselves that this guy was smoking cigarettes because he was cool, or maybe it was the cigarettes that were making him cool, but it didn’t matter because we wanted to be like him, and ride horses, and eat canned beans around a campfire, and stare at mountain ranges while puffing Marlboros.
Or the advertisers presented really attractive women in bikinis, who would surround any guy – even if he was ordinary like us – that cracked open a Coors Light. Meanwhile, ads for women’s clothing featured skeletal models, and women had to decide whether to lose weight or stay unbeautiful. Nobody was telling us – at least not directly – why we should smoke, or drink, or lose twenty pounds to fit in a pair of jeans. All they had to do was show us pictures, and we would deduce the rest for ourselves.
But traditional advertising has taken severe body blows over the past decade. The explosion of cable channels and on-demand services, combined with the comfort of ergonomic remote controls, has made it way easier to avoid commercials. Now with TiVo and DVR, we can just fast forward through commercials. And with user-generated video all over the web, and with YouTube posting everything from Journey’s “Separate Ways” video to old Celebrity Jeopardy SNL skits, everything’s available on our time and we don’t have to deal with a network’s schedule at all.
So for the first time, advertisers have to catch up to the consumers and figure out how to trick us into believing what they want us to believe. The response from the advertising industry has been to diversify the ways in which ads are delivered to us. They’re hidden in reality shows, digitally pasted on baseball backstops, or taped under bridges in Boston.
I’m fine with this. If I have to digest advertising, I like to do it without noticing, or while multi-tasking at least. If I’m watching an old episode of Newlyweds, I can watch Nick Lechey reach in his mini-fridge full of Miller Lite, and I can wonder how much they’re paying him, and I can wonder if he even likes Miller Lite, or I can just watch him drink a beer and not worry about what kind of beer it is.
I don’t mind being surrounded by advertising, so long as it’s not a pop-up window or one of those obnoxious flashing MySpace banner ads that leaves you totally disoriented like when you have to pass a police car that has its lights on at night.***
On the last episode of The Hills, I counted five blatant product plugs – one for a magazine, one for an events production company, two for restaurants, and one for a nightclub. None of them bothered me. Our generation is totally accustomed to product placement, and therefore aware of it, which would seem like a distraction if we hadn’t developed a complete and collective ambivalence toward it.
I have not watched the Hills with my grandfather, but if I did, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t notice a single example of product placement. Our conversation – our entire conversation – during the episode would probably go like this:
A Papa, let me know every time you see a blatant example of product placement.
Okay.
…
What’s a “solo mish”?
A Apparently it’s slang for a solo mission. I’ve never heard it before either.
Why would anyone want to shorten mission to mish?
A I don’t know.
It’s not really any easier to say. I can see shortening “solo misogynist” or something. That one’s harder to say.
A True. Hey, did you just fall asleep?
No.
A Yes, you did. You fell asleep.
(Snoring)
Advertisers have learned from us – young people like blogs and viral videos, so that’s one new way to spread word about their product – but we’ve also learned from them. We’ve learned how to notice their advertising, and we’ve taught ourselves how to ignore it, if we choose to. But I don’t mind being pitched to during a television show. Thanks to The Hills, if I ever move to L.A., I’ll know of two hip cafes and one hot nightclub to check out, and when I go there, I will feel totally awkward and out of place, and I’ll drink in the corner all night, so it will be exactly like Boston except I’ll be surrounded by tanner people with blonder highlights.
Here in Boston we recently had a viral advertising campaign-turned-terrorism scare that briefly, but embarrassingly, paralyzed the entire city. Older people think it was irresponsible, younger people think it was a joke, but I suspect everyone got what they wanted. The local news landed a huge story, columnists found something to be righteous about, Cartoon Network drove extra traffic to their Aqua Teen Hunger Force site, the Boston Police Department got to practice panicking in the face of a terrorist attack, and terrorists got the unexpected, but welcome, opportunity to plant an enormous dirty bomb in the bowels of South Station while all of Boston’s finest were wrapping police tape around cartoon battery packs.
I got what I wanted, too. I got advertising disguised as news, ads that blended themselves into my daily life, where I can ignore them if I want, but then later, subconsciously, obey them.
*Pun intended.
**Obviously everything I know about the Revolutionary War comes from The Patriot.
***Which, by the way, is not safe. I don’t see why police cruisers have to keep their lights on. It’s dangerous when you drive by them, especially if you’ve been drinking.
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