Advertisers Have Got Us Covered
This story will expose the terrifying ways in which advertising is invading every square inch of American life. But first, a word from our sponsor.
Just kidding . . . for now.
But ads are definitely sprouting up in lots of unexpected places, including elevators, restroom stalls, gas pumps, hotel room keys, ATM screens and bananas. Yes, bananas. Ask Jeeves, an Internet search engine, recently bought space on 100 million bananas and apples in the form of those little stickers that normally say Chiquita or Dole.
Perhaps the most noticeable new venue for ads is the personal automobile. Companies are paying drivers to wrap their cars in vinyl billboards like the ones that turn city buses into giant cans of soda.
One auto ad honcho is Keith Powers, a former jeans company executive who says he got the idea while traveling through Vietnam last year. He noticed scores of pedestrians wearing dust masks to filter out air pollution and toyed with the idea of putting ads on the masks.
Instead, he came to his financial senses and returned to San Francisco to start Myfreecar.com, which offers motorists $350 a month to transform their vehicles into rolling 3-D commercials. For companies seeking to stand out from the crowd, billboard cars offer “one of the only forms of advertising that cannot be switched off, tuned out or lost in a quicksand of other advertisements,” declares Autowraps.com, one of Powers’ competitors.
As one driver explains: “People have to pay attention to me because I’m a car on the road.”
To test that theory, The Times (well, actually not the entire staff, just one reporter) recently rode shotgun in a Jamba Juice VW Beetle driven by Carissa Green, 32, a choreographer and dancer who signed up with Myfreecar.com in January. Before we even got out of the parking lot of her Hollywood dance studio, some guy wandered over and started asking about the car.
But on the road in other parts of media-saturated Los Angeles, spectator curiosity was harder to detect. Although Green says that people constantly honk, wave and give her the thumbs-up sign, on this trip most pedestrians and drivers seemed unfazed. Nevertheless, some heads turned. And when the car pulled up to a Jamba Juice shop in Beverly Hills, the employees rushed out with a camera and had their picture taken alongside it. Even a couple of customers grabbed cameras and posed next to the car.
However, what Green really likes about the gig is the monthly check that covers her car payments, a godsend for a struggling performer.
“One month, you have plenty of money, but the next, you’re digging through the couch cushions looking for change,” she says. “This gives me one less bill to worry about.”
Advertisers also seem pleased. Oakland-based Dreyer’s Ice Cream hired nine Beetles through Autowraps.com in May and received “so many calls from consumers that we’ve added another 11 cars to our ‘Sweet Fleet,’ ” says Dreyer’s spokeswoman Diane McIntyre.
Of course, the novelty will eventually wear off, and companies will turn to some other gimmick to capture consumer attention. But space might not be available.
Madison Avenue seems to be snapping up every last snippet of blank real estate on the planet. There’s even a company that wants to sell ads on the bottom of shoes, according to Powers.
“What’s next? Paying people to have ads tattooed on their foreheads?” asked one exasperated critic in a recent Associated Press article.
Uh, actually, that’s already been done.
Last year, a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco offered free lunch for life to any customer who got tattooed with the company’s logo. Forty people promptly engraved their flesh with the eatery’s sombrero-clad mascot.
“Advertising has always been like this,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University. “It aspires to total domination of the environment.”
In the early 1900s, outdoor ads were so pervasive and unsightly that legislators began drafting laws to restrict them, he notes.
“We seem to be returning to those bad old days, and even outdoing them, because of technical advances,” he says.
Indeed, one company has actually figured out how to turn beaches into ads. It created a giant roller to press 4-foot-by-12-foot images into the sand, over and over. ABC used it to beach blanket billboard an entire shore with promos.
Technology is also fueling the sandwich-board car phenomenon. Although a similar concept existed during the 1970s, when Beetle Boards of America sold ad space on Volkswagen Bugs, it had limited appeal because the artwork had to be painted on. In contrast, today’s cars are draped with removable vinyl sheets that don’t harm the car’s exterior. In addition, global-positioning trackers are installed in the cars so advertisers can monitor the exposure they’re getting. When Green’s VW was sidelined in a repair shop for a few days, she got a call asking why the car was idle. (Drivers are required to travel at least 800 miles a month.)
Miller sighs.
“When I see cars and buses and whole neighborhoods that have been turned into an advertising spectacle, I can’t help but feel a little depressed,” he says. “It’s undignified and not the sign of a great people or a great culture.”
Then what is it a sign of?
“Rampant commercialism and desperate greed,” he replies.
“But,” he adds, “the media are also full of advertising, so it’s hard to mount a sustained critical discussion of it.”
Right. And we’ll have more on that point after this brief commercial break . . . .
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Roy Rivenburg can be reached at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.
