Have Yourself a Cynical Little Christmas--From the Advertisers
Oh, sure. There are still some holiday chestnuts in the advertising game. You’ve got your heartwarming, joy-of-the-season pitches, your guilt-tripping life-isn’t-complete-without-it product pushes, your frenetic 50%-off hard sell.
But when it comes to good old American manipulation, many a television advertiser is giving the gift of irreverence this Christmas.
Here, for example, is the very symbol of Christmas itself, Santa Claus: In a “Got Milk” spot, Santa munches a brownie left for him but can’t find a glass of milk to go with it. Peeved, he heads back up the chimney, taking the family’s Christmas tree with him.
Have a nice Christmas, kids!
And here’s Santa in a commercial for the e-tailer Shopnow.com. With the crowds abandoning malls to shop online, Santa is reduced to living in an abandoned bus and working a street corner, where he charges 25 cents to sit on his lap. “It’s a little slow this year, but you can’t dwell on what was, really,” says Father Christmas.
For a generation raised on TV, images of happy families and twinkly sleigh scenes won’t sell. So this season, advertisers are winking, nudging and sometimes laying the irony on thick.
You’ll find it across the dial--in commercials for retailers, e-tailers, the high-tech and the no-tech. The ads not only poke fun at our sacred national ritual--buying stuff--they even sometimes poke fun at the notion of Christmas advertising.
“We’re cynical about Christmas because of all the manipulation we see in commercials,” says ad man Jeff Goodby, whose agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, created the milk holiday ads. “We’re all feeling that Christmas has lost its innocence. Advertising reflects that.”
Goodby thinks a second before realizing the irony in that. “I guess advertising has created all this cynicism and now it’s reflecting it back.”
Goodby’s agency also created a holiday spot for TiVo, which makes a digital TV recorder. The ad has Santa facing off against his elves in a snowy football game. “I’m coming through you, Pork Chop,” Santa snarls across the line of scrimmage. “Bring it on, fat man,” replies his little colleague. Nothing like a little hostility for the holidays.
For sheer unalloyed irony, there’s also the Sweatermen, back for a second holiday season in new ads touting Amazon.com, the online retailer. To a jaunty, accordion-fueled beat, a sweater-clad chorus of extremely average Joes sings ditties as nutty as a pecan roll. “I didn’t have to wrap your gift, I didn’t have to leave the house,” they warble. “In fact, I never saw your gift, I did it all by mouse. . . .
The Sweatermen ads absolutely scream cornball, circa 1966. That was the idea when a couple of San Francisco ad guys, Tom O’Keefe, 37, and Matt Reinhard, 33, started dreaming up the campaign last year. The two set out to re-create the retro look and feel of the cheesy holiday TV specials of their youth (Mitch Miller, Glenn Campbell, Andy Williams, et al). They found their stars in church choirs and men’s glee clubs. They got the stage set just right, with hokey snowflake props and gaudy backlighting straight out of color TV’s unfortunate early days.
“It’s hard to do advertising that makes your mom feel good while at the same time [conveying] humor that people will think is kind of hip,” O’Keefe says. “We wanted to have fun and also say, ‘Let’s be honest, we’re all aware this is advertising.’ ”
Right, lameness as hipness: how ironic.
(There’s always just plain lameness, of course: In a commercial for Preparation H, the hemorrhoid medication, a fidgety mall Santa can’t sit down. “I should have used Preparation H,” he laments.)
The image of the Jolly One takes its biggest lumps in a now-canceled ad series promoting Sonystyle.com, the electronics company’s Web site. In a style befitting Quentin Tarantino, the eight linked commercials tell the story of a couple of grimy hayseeds who blindfold and kidnap Santa, then physically abuse him. “We have Santa,” read the ads’ tag line. “Shop at Sonystyle.com or there will be no X-mas.”
Apparently this was supposed be funny. A spokeswoman said Sony reconsidered the ads (which can still be seen on the Web site Adcritic.com) because consumers might not appreciate their “irreverence.”
We may think we remember a simpler time, but complaints about the commercialization of Christmas are generations old, says Stephen Nissenbaum, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Christmas and selling have been running stride for stride.
Before 1800, Christmas in America wasn’t generally celebrated in the fashion we know today: an indoor holiday centered around family and gift giving. “It was more like a combination of Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve,” with aggressive panhandling and outdoor singing (wassailing) by the poor, says Nissenbaum, author of “The Battle for Christmas,” a 1996 tome that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Many of our modern Christmas customs--especially exchanging gifts within the family, within the home--were aggressively promoted by the Knickerbockers, the conservative aristocratic group of New Yorkers that included Washington Irving.
A seminal moment in the Knickerbockers’ campaign was the publication of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (“ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”) in 1823. The story promoted the domestic and commercial aspects of Christmas as “timeless and traditional,” when, in fact, they were just becoming popular. Says Nissenbaum, “There was never a moment when Christmas was a family holiday when it wasn’t a commercial holiday.”
As Lucy notes in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “Everyone knows Christmas is run by a big Eastern syndicate.”
Early Christmas advertising may have been respectful--even reverential--toward these “invented” customs, but Nissenbaum finds something ultimately very traditional about even the snarkiest of today’s TV ads.
“We live in a post-ironic age,” he says, “but we’re still using the same symbols we’ve been using” for about 200 years. “You’ve got to know the symbol to make fun of it. [Ultimately] we’re keeping it alive for another generation.”
Yes, some values never go out of style. Consider this holiday commercial from BlueNile.com, an online jewelry seller:
Scene: Two women meet for dinner. “Out of nowhere, he just asked me to marry him,” confesses one. She thrusts her hand, adorned with a diamond engagement ring, across the table. Her friend is amazed. She holds her friend’s hand in her own, inspecting the rock. She clings to it, entranced. She can’t take her eyes off of it--nor let her friend’s hand go.
The tag line: “This moment made possible by a man who knows his diamonds.”
The Christmas spirit? Apparently it now includes raw envy.
