Ads 'R Us
Mark Greene explores how the commercial engine behind advertising is shaping our culture, and why it’s so hard to put on the brakes…
“Never bite the hand that feeds you.”
Or so the old adage goes.
This is one of the things that makes being a pastor or a prophet difficult: if you’ve got bad news to deliver it’s usually to the people who pay you. But will they thank you for your honesty or throw you into a pit? The old adage also explains why there is so little criticism of advertising in our media – ads pay the bills. If you want to carry on driving your Z3 BMW and wearing Armani you are not likely to attack the advertisers who pay millions for 10% of your broadcast time and 25% of the pages of your publication. Advertising revenue is keeping everybody in the media - apart from BBC employees - in jobs.
So, on the whole, the media stays silent about ads. Despite the fact that virtually every thinking human in Britain has serious reservations about what advertising is doing to our kids and our teenagers, not to mention the rest of the human race. We know thin is ‘in’ and we know that the idea didn’t come from Rubens. We know thin is ‘in’ and we know that there is an epidemic of bulimia and anorexia among young women. We know the ads make a difference. We just can’t do anything about it.
What the recent 100 Greatest Ads Fest on Channel 4 treated us to was a virtuoso display of soaring feats of imagination – selling mashed potatoes using Martians, tea using chimpanzees and telephone calls using Maureen Lipmann. It also quashed, once and for all, despite the eulogies of The Sunday Times, any possible pretension that ads have a claim to be true art. True art transcends time. It has the capacity to be at once highly particular to its own era but also to make universal timeless connections. Your average 500 year old Michelangelo retains more capacity to work wonders than any of the Double Diamond commercials. However, as an exercise in nostalgia, or the mysteries of public taste – can the Guinness ‘Surfer’ ad possibly be the greatest ad ever? – the programme was entertaining enough. Still, being Channel 4 and totally dependent on ad revenue, it never explored any of the vital issues that advertising raises: just how is it affecting the way we in the West make decisions and perceive ourselves?
Now far be it from me as a person who spent ten years being fed by the well manicured hand of one of the greatest ad agencies in the world to snap my incisors at such a generous benefactor, or to suggest that all ads are bad, or that if money is the root of all evil then advertising is its fertiliser. Far be it from any of us to get stuck in a knee-jerk reaction to creative communications that dismisses all forms of imaginative advocacy as evil. Far be it from me not to acknowledge that advertising leads to product improvements and better value for money. And heaven forefend that our critique of ads should only go so far as asserting that advertising creates needs we don’t have. Oh, that it were only that. The core problem is far more complex. The acid in much of contemporary advertising is not that it creates needs we don’t have but that it fraudulently promises to meet real needs we do. Needs for a sense of personal worth and identity.
Here is what advertising can do.
When Sainsbury’s launched their own brand cola, one TV programme went out and conducted blind taste comparisons between Coke, Pepsi and Sainsbury’s. Interestingly, about a third preferred the Sainsbury’s brand over the other two. They then asked the ones who preferred Sainsbury’s Cola whether they would drink a Cola from Sainsbury’s. They said not. The reason: “it’s naff.” Now the judgement about naffness had nothing to do with the actual attributes of the product, it had to do with its image. The point is that in today’s Britain buying a can of Cola at 35p represents a social risk. If you’re seen with a Sainsbury’s can – what kind of person are you? You’re naff. If I’m drinking Sainsbury’s Cola what kind of person do I think I am – I’m naff, an anorak-wearing, train-spotting, Barry Manilow whistling nerd. Now this is not news to parents with children over the age of 7 who have already no doubt discovered that clothes or rather brands make the man. What this means is that a person’s sense of core identity is bound up with the logos they display. This goes beyond materialism which might be defended as finding security in material good and shifts into consumerism which is finding identity in the display and conspicuous consumption of particular goods. As those insightful social commentators Rolling Stones put it in ‘I can’t get no satisfaction:’
When I’m watching my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
how white my shirts can be.
Well, he can’t be a man cause he doesn’t smoke
the same cigarettes as me.
Now this is self-evidently not just a problem for teenagers, it’s a problem for everyone. And it explains why many people who are not particularly interested in cars or good at driving them buy expensive cars that go 100 mph faster than they can drive legally, offer levels of comfort they don’t need for the length of journeys they take, are not necessarily more reliable than their mid-priced counterparts and cost a fortune to insure and service. They do not buy them for the performance benefits of the product but for its social and self-image benefits – what it says to others – social image; and what it says to themselves – self-image. The brand becomes a sign of success to others and to themselves. There is, after all, virtually no good objective reason to buy a Mercedes Benz as opposed to a Ford Granada – except the conspicuous display of wealth, the purchase of a sign to the community of your success. Now when a brand has acquired the power to confer identity or a sense of worth on a person it has become a god, an idol. After all, only a God can confer worth. As John Griffiths, a brilliant Christian adperson put it: “Brands are the new religion.”
And indeed we see this shift from talking about the benefits of a product to offering a philosophy of life in a whole host of campaigns. Take the old Peugeot 405 campaign: Search for the Hero. Against the backdrop of heroic, mainly male feats – heading a ball when you have a head wound, plucking a red-coated little girl from in front of an advancing juggernaut, etc, the M people soundtrack tells us that ‘you’ve gotta search for the hero inside yourself until you find the key to your life.’ What is the connection between the search for inner heroism and a mid-range executive saloon, you might wonder? What has driving one of these got to do with saving the world, you might wonder? Except on the whole we don’t ask those questions because we’re swept away by the music and the brilliant visuals – yes, the keys to a Peugeot will give me the keys to my life. Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that before?
Or take their new campaign: true colours. What has driving a mid-range executive saloon got to do with giving a man the courage and confidence to expose the long scar on his scraggy torso to his accepting girlfriend? Ah, of course, this is a car that expresses your honesty, your ability to be authentic, real, open. Or take the Renault Scenic – apparently designed for daring counter-culture people who emigrate to India and open guest houses, leaving their yuppie friends affectionately dismissive over a bottle of Chardonnay. Of course, most Renault Scenic drivers do things like that, don’t they? Naturally, high sales of Renault Scenics will be accompanied by a sudden wave of white, reformed yuppie emigration to the Indian subcontinent.
Now I’m not whinging about the fact that ads carry values – they will do, inevitably. All communications do. The issue is that many ads imbue objects with values they cannot possibly deliver. They present objects as solutions to a fundamentally spiritual problem – the yearning for purpose and identity.
Now there isn’t much we can do about this aspect of advertising except be aware of it, and ask ourselves whether we’re buying things because they do what we want them to do or because the logo makes us feel good about ourselves. But, about the ubiquity of demeaning pictures of semi-naked women and smutty puns on the advertising hoardings I walk and drive past with my young daughter and sons, about this invasion of public space with filth, we could always complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (address below). But when you read their reply you might bear in mind that it is the advertising industry who pays their salaries.
Are they, I wonder, really prepared to bite the hand that feeds them?
This article first appeared in Christianity & Renewal and is reproduced by kind permission.
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