Terror Phone: The Phone That Is Frightening

Product: Motorola Droid smartphone Summary: Black Myriad font descends onto a white, reflective surface. It's an iPhone/iPod ad! But wait--the text is saying "iDon't have a real keyboard." That's not positive at all! Why, this is a parody of iPhone ads, listing the qualities they lack, which presumably another smartphone has. Taking pictures in the dark...that's an odd choice. Simultaneous apps, though, thaAAAAAAAAA Super closeups, quick jagged digital cuts, a soundtrack like an old modem--these should all be familiar to the modern horror aficionado. You feel a sense of unease. The jagged moving pieces resolve into a logo: Droid. If you look closely, you can see along the bottom that "Droid is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies." The picture comes slowly to a stop and holds still and quiest for a moment, before shattering, screeching, and rushing towards the camera: the final scare. Themes: horror, halloween or something? See Also: The Ring, people's dumb scare videos that they post on youtube now so I find them when I am only searching for a movie of a sleepy dog falling over Earlier I said that ads try to create positive associations with their products. Often I will say a thing like this, and then come later to contradict myself directly. That's how it is, saying things. To refine my argument, perhaps it is best to say that ads simply want to create associations, and worry about positive and negative later. And what is more memorable than fear? If you require amusement, you may visit the droid website, which replays this ad but follows with more traditional gushing copy. "Don't you wish you had a robot sidekick that moved at light speed, could get you out of any problem, and lived in your pocket?" I infer that, after making some sort of Faustian bargain, I will receive this daemon, but that the wondrous power it lends me will come at a terrible cost and I will be forced to watch my loved ones die around me. Still, simultaneous apps, eh?

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.

clean and dirty

Product: Soft Scrub Scrubby Pads Summary: A woman sexually pleasures her gas range with a disposable sponge. Themes: hand jobs See Also: Bondage Boob Tube, The Feminine Mystique What is there to say about this ad? I encountered it while watching Iron Chef, a show I used to watch as a child to laugh at the Japanese, in the pure, joyous way that a child laughs at the Japanese, but which I now watch for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. In my memory (though not on Wikipedia), Iron Chef was broadcast on, like, TNT or Spike or G4 or the Sci-Fi Channel: something wholly unrelated to the nominal subject of the show, which was fancy cuisine made by guys in metallic uniforms. And, again in my memory, it was preceeded and followed by non-food shows, and peppered with unrelated advertising. This would have served, if it had been the case, to heighten the absurd nature of Iron Chef, its overblown pageantry and dramatics. Currently, Iron Chef is broadcast on the Fine Living Network, a kind of Martha Stewart-inspired channel for upwardly-mobile upper-middle-class housewives. It's preceded and followed by shows on the same theme, and the many, many ads reinforce the impression that Iron Chef is serious business. We are not meant to laugh at the idea of an actress eating a bird's nest full of shark fins, but to find it aspirational. Even more disquieting, as we watch the ads for resorts, holidays, getaways, restaurants, we come to realize that what we must aspire to is not master chef-hood, but that we one day eat their food. The purpose of the thing in its original Japanese broadcast was clearly to provide some extra advertising for gourmet restaurants in Japan, so I can't exactly claim that the new broadcast has perverted the nature of the show. But the meaning's changed for me, and now I wince and watch it through my fingers. So this was where I saw, or rather heard, this commercial. The gas range moans loudly, in a deep Jersey accent that says nothing so much as "I'm here to fix your pipes" or "I am James Gandolfini." They even use that Wilhem of sexual dialogue, "a little to the left." The woman goes through a slight range of emotions: first she is beatifically happy that she gets to use Soft Scrub Scrubby Wipes rather than regular baby wipes; then she is shocked that her gas range is making these noises; then she is disturbed, but intent on cleaning it very thoroughly as it groans; and finally she is indulgently smug as she tosses the used sponge into a gleaming trash bin and the range sighs "Oh yeaaah. Nice. Niiice." As with most ads that sexualize the figure of a wife or (even worse) mother, the tone here is of consent grudgingly given, bought, or negotiated for. Think of the ubiquitous diamond ads around Valentine's day, or the Wendy's ad in which the wife, dressed as a Wendy's employee, grouses "I'm only doing this because it's your birthday." Here, the factor that makes it worthwhile for Conjugal McMilf to polish that grill is that it's "easily clean." The unpleasant task is over in record time, and she can get on with her day. Based on a passing familiarity with Bernays and the two or three episodes of Mad Men I've seen, I'll often try to picture advertising meetings that lead to this kind of thing. And you know, I want to be charitable here. I want to be hopeful in my life. I want to believe that the age of eroticizing housework for women is over, and that the sexual connotations here are some kind of innocent mistake that none of the hundreds of people involved in the production of the commercial intended. If that were the case, I can't believe no one would have said "Hey, instead of a porn star voice, couldn't we have the range make dog noises? Because almost no one has sex with their dogs?" It's unquestionably intentional. The only thing I can really wonder about is whether the timing of this ad--for I only began seeing it around February--is meant to tie in to the stereotypical tradition of the obligatory Valentine's blowjob. Does Soft Scrub picture a woman, tired of married life, tired of drudgery and performative sex, picking up the product that promises them it can all be over soon?

Pure Delicious

Product: Hershey's bars Summary: The perforated mini-bars of a Hershey's bar begin to swirl and melt into liquid chocolate as a warm female voiceover asks "What makes a Hershey's bar pure?" A drop of chocolate splashes into the liquid surface, then begins to reform, T-1000-style, into a young chocolate woman. The ad cuts to a wider shot as her feet leave the ground; she is on a swingset in a world made of chocolate, with an embossed chocolate sun and clouds and puffy chocolate trees. Chocolate butterflies and flowers appear as the girl kicks up her heels, letting her long, straight hair blow backwards in the (presumably chocolate) wind. "Pure simplicity," the voice intones. She leaps off the swing and dives back into the liquid ground, and the scene again reforms. Now she is driving in a chocolate convertible with a young chocolate man--don't get excited, they're still both clearly caucausian. "Pure happiness!" comments the voice. She throws her arms around him and they drive blissfully through the pastoral chocolate landscape, which swirls and reforms into Hershey's bars. "Pure, delicious chocolate. Pure Hershey's." Themes: maidenhood, Eden, opioid peptides See Also: madonna-whore complex, Germany, physical dependence There's two main ways to market something. The first is to appeal to the qualities of the thing itself, describing what makes it different and better than other, similar things. For obvious reasons, this is howlingly unpopular. The second, pioneered so successfully by McDonalds and Coca-Cola, is to create a web of pleasant associations for your product. Food ads are particularly open in terms of emotional appeals. Unlike a cell phone, car, or non-sex service, foods create unambiguous chemical changes in your body. Eating raises endorphins and blood sugar and generally makes you feel like a primate that's successfully fulfilling its essential biological functions. And because we are not merely biological, but also cultural, food carries additional positive meanings for ads to play upon. Food preparation and consumption are ritualized group activities, ranging from Thanksgiving to barbeques to the late lamented family dinner. Ads piggyback on our cultural senses of propriety and nostalgia to sell us not only food, but comfort, warmth, shelter, emotional closeness. Because food ads are so--if you'll indulge me--raw, they tend to distill into main types: Food As Family and Food As Sex. (recently I've seen several that I'd classify under Food As Pain, but more on that later.) After some deliberation, I think this Hershey's ad falls under food-as-sex, from a decidedly feminine point of view. (As you may be aware, women are the--pardon me again--biggest consumers of chocolate, and with the redoubtable exception of Yorkie Bars, most chocolate ads target women.) The first and second parts of the ad are complementary messages, the girl on the swing typifying sensualism and freedom, while the couple in the car (note the seatbelts) emphasize intimacy and emotional security. The tone is innocent, "pure"--nothing is dirty or wrong about eating this chocolate, and as in food-as-family ads, frisson takes a backseat to comfort. Let me take a page from Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth here and say that good ads promise to provide things that are lacking in the lives of their targeted consumers. This ad targets women, and promises them perpetual virginity, intimacy, security, simplicity, and happiness. It is not only an ad for a cheap chocolate-flavored candy: it is a diagnosis.