I know a lot of you peeps, unlike me, work in advertising post-production, and know the world and the larger pipeline or interconnected ecology of “advertising” both inside and out, and thus know where it comes from, and knows where it’s going to and what its directive is. Maybe, however, there are some nodes and some layers that would be fun to jazz around with? Thinking outside the box might provide some fun tricks to play with and to defamaliarise (a fave word of mine)?
So, I’ve read around and travelled around quite a lot of the “theory” of advertising and, as typical dispositions, there are the cool-headed analytical and then there are the hot-headed moral tellings off that see the ad as evil iron curtains closing us off from azure heavenly dispositions, where we could be ad-free.
So, the terminus of the journey is either to “truth” or to “hell”, and there’s thus never no heaven to be had within these distractions from good healthy action where, again, we can be “ad free.” An example or exemplar of the “truth-analysis-values” would be Judith Williamson’s monumental Decoding Advertisements based around mostly 70s print advertisements but is a super-great model of analysis that can still be applied; and then in terms of advertising hell there’s the pathetic Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and The Waste Makers. I read these last two texts, back in the day, before I grew a brain, but I do have a strong ironic soft-spot for their diatribing preachiness and, as a clear example of how Packard haunts the scene, you can very easily see that Mad Men a few years ago really used these within its research cycle (eg Don Draper and the waste basket speech to Lane Pryce) on 50s world pictures of advertisements diverting one from big picture issues (watch North By Northwest again and look at how Roger Thornhill’s brain is being retargeted* to patriotism and paternal meaning and that literal cliffhanger and that almost literal train in the tunnel!). Love the 50s mythology of the true birth of the consumer.
Getting practical: Anyhows, I’m not asking anyone to have a slash or have a pee where they live and work (like the first episode of Succession) but on my YouTube wanderings today I found myself being chased around by an advertisement that made me quite quite angry, but also turned me onto a level of thinking, within my anger, at not being able to get away from it, but to peel back the layers of this message that I found myself resisting. Let’s talk car insurance and getting comfortable with new ways of living in my vehicle and of those around it, such as those oncoming trucks and bikes.
Yeah, I’ve known for quite some considerable time that the job or the prime directive of “the advertisement” is to take something that you are uncomfortable and uneasy with and very nervous about (the new or rethought or retargeted product) and to ease or transition it in by partnering it up with signifiers (sounds, images) and signifieds (meanings) that you are totes at one with and have become second or first nature to you. Now, I’ve known this tactical way or this modus operandi of “the advertisement,” this being-in-the-world, for what seems like an age, and yet today, this very particular anger-inducing advertisement that was offering or hailing me a change, within what it assumed was my thinking or framing of what “car insurance” “is” then gave me suddenly quite a different prime macro lens on that and peeled another layer or perspective back. I saw something a little more from what I’d taken for granted, even as I thought that I’d was above-the-ad and had it measured. What excited me in exiting the message of the advert was not so much the “ad” itself, but something about the way the ad is tending to work, at the moment (“dialogical” is about assuming an audience instead of “science” that is “monological” and sees the mere truth like some space telescope that doesn’t need to convince you).
So this very partcular advertisement for this car insurance was anchored and tried to write itself into my heart through the use of a down-to-earth voice that was telling me that being watched by everyone (ie the algorithm that will help reduce my premiums) was really quite a lot like having my mum make sure that I ok by watching (out for) me. How lovely! Mums love us.
I don’t know if this is a big deal, but there’s been a tendency in the pUKe, for a few years now, to have non-standard English voices (Wales, Newcastle, Liverpool but hardly ever Birmingham there’s only Lenny Henry and nobody else) waxing lyrical about it like the most common-sense inarguable adviser-friend. Yeah, by being the adviser-friend, they can’t be accused of punching down on me, but behind that sock-puppet telling me my that mum has my very best interests at heart, and who really loves me more than as a mere biological relation but who really cares for the inner me much more than anything involed with passing the DNA along, there is a, what Williamson called a “referent system” that is using or comporting itself through that image as a vehicle, as 30 second something to pretend to be a “first” but to be a “second” and to transport the evil passenger or demon of images (here we fall back to Packard by-way-of Descartes) to transport or to hail me to “permission” to have my car upload every detail to the algorithmic cloud. Althusser called this “hailing” or “interpellation” to give the sense that it was really “me” being called and that I should answer and feel that I can really gain from the argument. So, with this car insurance public service message, “Mother knows best” (MomCorp, for those Futurama fans), and the love-for-really-me, turns or converts into something just a little more worrying: So, you get the “latent content” (the meaning of the advert or the dream and thus “dreamvert”) taking place behind the “front” or the manifest content. The Romans called this the “Frons Scenae” where you do all the background changeovers to present a miracle at front-of-stage. I hate the term “suspend disbelief” but it will do. Anyhows….
…The challenge I would thus set in this thread, and which could either be an cool rethought or retargeted image or a sequence, would be to reverse that process and to thus be the Wizard of Oz’s Toto-dog that pulls back the curtain to reveal the thinking and putting into action:
How could you rearrange your comp or timeline, without naming names, to send out a reverse message or massage? What could you do to hack your own message to do something strangely different, in terms of ReallyNice&GoodCorp? If Advertisements are “waste making” as Packard argued, then how could one reverse the message/massage and reverse entropy?
Again, I grew a brain and do not believe in the simplicity of Vance Packard but I kind of like the “thought experiment” of having thought-provoking or provocative “anti-advertisements” that instead of doing all that stuff described above, take the new thing that’s being introduced and tell the viewer/reader to throw it away and stick with the old or to reveal something strange taking place.
Cheers
Tony
*There’s this crappy paperthin theory about equilibrium-disequilibrium-equilibrium where everything is fine in the beginning of a story, then something disrupts that heaven and then there’s the long journey back to heaven, which is the end and the perpetual peace that follows. Roger Thornhill is not in heaven and equilibrium at the opening of NBNW, as he is twice divorced and is not a patriot. The film, NBNW throws Roger so thoroughly into danger so that he will eventually find his perpetual peace under the flag of the USoA and with the ring on his finger, instead of being on the phone to his mum all the time like the kid that he still is. So, the opening is not a “equilibrium” but instead a “faux-equilibrium” or a “false start” and, again, many ads give you the impression that you might think that you are happy, but just take a look at this. Take that!, and you’ll never want again…
