The Platonic Advertisement

Product: Cathedral City Cheese Summary: As a woman consumes cheese on toast, the camera zooms out to show a postman watching her consumption hungrily. Cut to him in a cafe, enjoying his own toastie--again, he is witnessed by a woman who in turn goes on to eat and be witnessed. The chain ends with an image of a cheese toastie in an oven, being all bubbly and golden brown and delicious. I imagine. The v/o gives us the tag line -- "You see it, you want it." Themes: envy See Also: mirror neurons, neighbors' asses I can't contain my admiration for this ad; it is perfect. Okay, except that I had to do a bunch of googling to actually find the name of the product. Aside from that. It's the ad I had in mind when I conceived this blog, in fact. Now, what I believe, what I really take to heart, is that humanity's defining characteristic is sociability. Not intelligence, no--our big fat brains were built to serve us better in increasingly large and complex societies. We are evolutionarily-honed social machines. And the basic mechanism of social life is imitation. We watch, and then we act out what we watched. We watch our parents and relatives speaking, and so we learn to speak. We watch our peers for appropriate social behavior, and so we learn the boundaries of our social environments. As such, behavior modeling is a major component of advertising, in the same way that words are a major component of novels. Look, here's my script for every ad, okay? SCENE 1: An attractive person demonstrates need or desire for a product. SCENE 2: Close-up on the product being used--the closer the better, frankly. Get SCIENTIFICALLY, MICROSCOPICALLY CLOSE if possible. SCENE 3: A positive social outcome ensues! Okay, there's some variation, particularly when advertising or community standards prohibit visually displaying your product being used (e.g. American alcohol ads, toilet paper); or when your product is nebulously defined and dubiously enjoyable. But at the most basic level, this is what an ad is. And there's not much more to this cheese ad than that. The sophisticated part of this ad is in what behavior it models. No, not eating a cheese toastie. Anyone can film someone enjoying a cheese toastie. That's easy. They're lovely. You'd have to be some kind of vegan not to be able to enjoy a cheese toastie, and/or allergic to wheat, and even then you could have vegan "cheese" on spelt bread. Although it would be fairly difficult to capture enjoyment of that. I digress. What this ad models is the moment where viewing becomes desire. What the viewer sees, essentially, is people watching the ad and being influenced by it. It's not merely an ad for cheese, but an ad for advertising.