#64 Ad It Up
The month of October is about to end, and looking back in reflection, I find that, per usual, October was packed and loaded with an insane amount of supposedly thrilling American sports events, as well as a healthy ‘stay in your house’ dose of rain, cold, and even more rain. So it’s not a huge shock that looking back, more often than not, I found myself stuck to my couch on many an October weekend, watching college and professional football, and of course, the major league baseball playoffs.
I learned three things this year from my annual ‘Pathetic October Couch Potato Binge.’ The first lesson is that more often than not, a highly touted and hyped sporting event does not live up to its potential. The second lesson is that Taco Bell thinks it can use my sense of patriotism or my frugality, to lure me into their restaurant for a free Taco, and they are right! But the third lesson I learned was that the networks have finally loaded my back with too many straws, and thereby broken it, and my response is that I’m officially calling off my allegiance to televised sports, until next October, that is.
What happened? Let me advertise, I mean add it up for you. The problem with televised sports is that advertising has ruined every facet of every moment of every game for me. When I was growing up, I accepted the fact that between every inning of a baseball game, or after a change of possession in football, the networks would take a break so the local and national sponsors could attempt to garner my attention with some slick ad for a new car, an old beer with a new look, or some sort of razor that I was too young to need, but old enough to yearn for, as a sign of my own maturity.
But today, when the program comes back on, the ads don’t go away. Every time a game is interrupted by a replay or statistic, I have to first listen as Joe Shmoe and his equally bland and afraid of being the next Don-Imus co-announcer, thank a special sponsor for ‘making said replay or statistic available to me.’ And the networks don’t just let these sponsors ‘bring me events,’ they actually run these sponsors’ ads before and after ‘their’ event, often in lieu of a relevant moment of the actual game.
When the game is being sacrificed for the contractual obligation to a sponsor, then the game is no longer as important as loyalty to the sponsor, which leaves me, the viewer, feeling like a stay at home mom with three kids who has a husband who tells her he loves her only when he’s drunk, and returning home from an affair with his mistress.Even the Aflac Trivia questions, which I used to enjoy, are somehow marred by their relevance to product placement and an attempt to make me think about health insurance, rather than the trivia question. Aflac even went so far this year as to build their advertising campaign on inside jokes based on their own ads, which for me, insinuates that the corporate execs at Aflac, in charge of advertising, genuinely believe that I have enjoyed and remembered their ads from past years enough to find their narcissistic attempts at self-reflexive double entendres funny. Duck You, Aflac!
And don’t even get me started on Fox’s record setting advertisement in the categories of ‘most often repeated’ and ‘most likely to cause me to buy a sniper rifle and pick off FOX executives as they leave the office and thereby begin my career as a death row inmate’ with their “There’s ONLY ONE OCTOBER!” advertisement, featuring the most annoying man I’ve never met, who is the perfect ‘vague composite of all American demographics’ ever hired. And worst of all, this man literally screams at me to do what I’m already doing: to watch The World Series on FOX, the only network that can air it!
As I sat on my couch, all day this past Sunday, watching the ‘historic’ first ever NFL regular season game in London, as well as game four of the World Series, I began to realize that it’s not just the quantity of nor the invasiveness of advertising in our world that makes me want to throw my remote control into my television. The biggest problem I have with advertising runs a bit deeper, and it can basically be summed up as follows:
I don’t just hate advertising, I feel insulted by the lack of ingenuity and effort put forth in ninety-nine percent of all ads that I see on the Internet, on TV, or hear on the radio. Modern advertising is based on three concepts: Repetition, a pathetically self conscious attempt at retaining the perfect level of responsibly bland and inoffensive attitude towards as large a demographic as possible, and using the vaguest possible sexual references, which are entirely un-sexy, to try and still use sex to sell their product. Oh yeah, and I can’t forget the fourth concept: Lies, sweet, unapologetic, impalpable lies that are so thinly veiled I think they should serve as an aptitude test for the right to exist in our society; Basically, if you actually believe a modern advertisement’s promises and lies, then you revoke your right to vote, receive government aid, and pretty much, to exist.
I’m sick of ads that tell me their product was ‘clinically developed.’ Where else do medical products get developed outside of clinics? And really, just what is a clinic, and what is needed for a laboratory to be certified as a clinic? Am I supposed to trust a drug more than I normally would because it was developed in a clinic? And even if this initial farce were accurate, why should I trust a drug that is supposed to cure me of stomach pains when right after I’m shown a happy, gray haired man lamely stroking his middle aged wife’s hand in a lawn chair, The ad loudly proclaims that said anti-stomach pain drug “often causes shortness of breath, indigestion, cramping, mild nausea, diarrhea, impotence, stomach pain, and in some rare cases syphilis, herpes, and the avian bird flu”?
I’m tired of spokesmen who were paid millions to lie through their teeth and pretend not only that they vouch for a product, but also that they regularly use it. I just don’t buy the fact that Tiger Woods only uses American Express for his domestic and international purchases. I bet you anything that some assistant of his does everything for him, and the last time Tiger actually had to use a credit card was when he tried to start an open tab at a bar while attending Stanford University more than twelve years ago.
And I’m not just annoyed by advertising on TV and Radio. I can’t even safely surf the Internet anymore without dozens of so-called ‘pop up ads’ filling my screen space with half naked women promising me that they not only live near me, and can’t wait to go on a date with me, but that they find ‘me’ so attractive that they’re pretty much already committed to jumping on my lap, if I only take two minutes to click on their picture. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll be the first to admit that hot women are hot even when they’re lying to me through an advertisement.)
In order to avoid these erotically arousing advertisements from distracting me from research for important documents such as this rant, I had to download not just one, but two programs that work together to combat Internet spam, pop ups, and spy ware. Thanks to the onslaught of clever, self-downloading internet advertising, my computer now cannot safely run unless part of its valuable RAM is spent running two free programs; ‘Spy Blaster’ and ‘Spy Bot: Search and Destroy.’ These programs sound like nerdy sci-fi video games, but they’re actually free, well designed programs that I wholeheartedly endorse and recommend to all of my readers! (And I’m not a president or member of their company, and they did not pay me to write this…)
These days, the only ads that I find acceptable are ads for products designed to slowly kill me over time (read: beer, liquor, and junk food), ads for certain cars and sporting equipment, and ads designed to appeal to single men in their late twenties and thirties. I find these acceptable because these are the only ads whose sponsors are willing to risk their credibility with an offensive joke or stereotype that the average American can not only identify with, but possibly even laugh at.
But these ads are often pulled after demographic research reveals that they have offended a colony of one-armed Inuit’s suffering from a rare blood disorder that live in the outer banks of Alaska. Snickers, for example, after the Super Bowl last year, had to pull their quite clever advertisement because it offended some gay Americans. The ad was clever, because it was based on a pun that insinuated that car mechanics are, generally speaking, not flamingly effeminate men. And you know what? The last time the crew at Jiffy Lube changed my oil, I did overhear several of them talking about plans to watch the Oscars, how to better exfoliate their skin, and what they thought about Britney Spear’s right to raise her own children. Sure, a male auto-mechanic can be gay, meaning that he gets his rocks off with other men, but for the most part, I find it to be true that the average auto-mechanic is not overtly effeminate, per Snickers joke.
The American media has tied itself into a noose by slandering the image of any person or company that has dared to toe the carefully demarcated line that separates all that is supposedly decent from the unimaginable sins of sex, violence, stereotyping, drug use, off color humor, and honesty. And that is how we have arrived at the modern state of advertising. America has become the most insanely and hypocritically ‘in-denial’ society to ever try and feign a public image of Puritanism since, well, since the Puritans.
I don’t have to think very hard to remember a few of the scandals that have set up our Puritanical state; like the one involving Don Imus, or the aforementioned Snicker’s Super Bowl Ad. But the event that I render most responsible for our expanding false sense of morality and decency is Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show. The media completely shut down after they failed to safely censor America’s youth from a barely viewable 2.3 second partial nipple shot (mostly areola), that could only be clearly seen when freeze framed, and zoomed in upon.
But by 10 a.m. the next morning, all networks had officially put a moratorium on ever again allowing Television to admit that humans have a body, with functioning parts, many of which can enable arousal. They furthermore decided to ignore the fact that humans not only often get aroused, but actually enjoy the feeling of arousal (!), and we are therefore doomed to watching ads that feature old men and women skipping in parks in order to reference their reinvigorated sex lives after taking an impotency drug.
In synopsis, we Americans can thank our own self-imposed faux-puritan dedication to keeping our television ‘safe for children’ for the fact that all publicly broadcast television now officially ‘sucks!’ (I wonder if TV can even use the word “suck,” due to its strong correlation to the shameful act that is oral sex) And we can also thank the networks’ unapologetic loyalty to those who pay their bills for the fact that sports events now take twice as long to watch, than they should. And what have I learned from this experience? I’ve learned that if I show up to Taco Bell, on October 30th, 2008, between the hours of two p.m. and five p.m. I can have one free taco, simply because I’m an American. And so long as I don’t think about sex in any way, shape or form, while I’m ingesting this taco, then I am the perfect embodiment of the American Consumer.
