A nation under siege ... by product placement
Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” shot to the top of the bestseller lists in 1957 with its documentation of how Madison Avenue influenced our purchasing decisions by subliminal means -- “beneath our level of awareness,” as Packard put it.
Commercial persuaders are far more pervasive today than they were in Packard’s day, but they’re not all hidden now. Many are obtrusive and intrusive -- in your face, every day.
Various key moments in sports events, for example, are no longer simply reported, they’re “brought to you by” some commercial outfit (“The AT&T; Wireless Starting Lineup,” “Our Nissan game summary”).
Granted, sports is a form of entertainment. We have not yet gotten to the point where Dan Rather says, “This report on the latest terrorist bombing in Israel is brought to you by Kleenex.” But given what Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, calls “the increasing acceleration, the omnipresence, the increasingly brazen nature of commercial messages,” we seem to have reached the point where something very much like that is no longer unthinkable.
What worries me the most about this is that it further erodes public trust in the media.
Indeed, Miller attributes the “corrosive, mass cynicism that is now a feature of American society” to the increased commercialization of our culture.
“This ad-saturated environment tends to foster a culture of smirking disbelief, a ... knee-jerk skepticism that makes people untrusting of anything they hear from anybody,” he says.
Everyone knows that advertising is the art of exaggeration, manipulation and -- often -- outright deception. Or, as Miller puts it, “advertising is a form of propaganda.” If people come to feel that virtually everything they see is an attempt to manipulate them, that society has become just one big infomercial, they’ll come to be even more skeptical than they already are about what they see in the legitimate media.
My other concern is the effect all this has on children. They, too, become more cynical, more materialistic -- and less discriminating -- under this incessant commercial barrage. When 13-year-olds like my son buy tennis shoes or a stocking cap, it’s the name brand that matters; price, convenience, even quality seem irrelevant to them.
Madison Avenue , never slow to pick up on cultural trends, knows how to exploit that. So more and more ads are directed at kids. This gotta-buy, gotta-have barrage is directly connected to the lack of idealism we see in so many young people today -- their sense that education is only important as a means to a better-paying job.
Not-so-quiet desperation
I’m not naive. I realize that, in the immortal words of our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, “The business of America is business.” I also realize that we are the only nation on the planet to have elected as its national leader a former advertising huckster, our 40th president, Ronald (“At General Electric, progress is our most important product”) Reagan.
But we’ve now gone far beyond anything even Silent Cal and the Great Communicator might have envisioned. As audiences for prime-time network television shows continue to shrink, advertisers are growing increasingly desperate. That’s why we are now besieged by more advertising, in more venues, than ever before.
At my neighborhood ATM, I was subjected to a video commercial urging me to watch Connie Chung on CNN.
A couple of weeks ago, Nike pasted 3-foot-square advertising decals on sidewalks in Manhattan -- “a creative way to connect with our consumers,” Nike called it, until city officials called it something else: illegal defacing of the sidewalks.
When “La Boheme” opens at the Broadway Theatre in New York on Dec. 8, the audience will see, on a rooftop in the set’s Paris skyline, a gleaming sign for Montblanc -- the Swiss-made pen, not the French mountain. On the right side of the stage, on a tenement building, will be a large ad for Piper-Heidsieck Champagne.
Sometimes, the advertising is not just annoying; it distorts reality. Did you happen to notice all those commercial billboards in the center of your picture during the World Series? Did you see any of them when you went to a game, in person? No, you didn’t. Those signs, which appeared to be painted on the stands behind home plate at Edison Field -- to take one example -- were virtual ads, digitally inserted in the picture.
Meanwhile, product placement in movies has been growing by Jeeps and Mounds ever since E.T. began nibbling Reese’s Pieces 20 years ago. The products are almost co-stars themselves now -- Ray-Ban sunglasses in “Men in Black”; Nokia, Lexus and the Gap in “Minority Report”; a Wilson volleyball in “Cast Away” -- and television is in the process of taking product placement to new levels of exploitation.
“Survivor,” “Sex and the City,” “Push, Nevada” and “American Idol” are but a few of the shows in which the traditional wall between entertainment content and commercial messages has been breached. As the Washington Post noted about “American Idol,” “it was nearly impossible to judge where the show ended and the ads for corporate sponsors Ford and Coca-Cola began. Coke cups were in every shot involving the judges during auditions for the show; during the show itself, contestants were shown riding in a Ford Focus and the Coke logo was omnipresent.”
Of course, it shouldn’t be surprising that so-called reality shows are the leaders in product placement.
The commercialization of America -- and the cynicism and materialism it fosters -- may be the ultimate reality in our culture today.
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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com
