Silent Sponsors
“Dad, was that your commercial?” - Lisa Simpson
“I don’t know.” - Homer Simpson
Most practiced observers believe that tonight will be the end of the Stanley Cup finals. Tomorrow night will is the beginning of the NBA finals. Since I almost never watch baseball on television, the end of the hockey and basketball seasons also ends my limited exposure to television commercials. TiVo, combined with the easy availability of most programs on DVD or on-line, has insulated me from television advertisements almost completely. Sports programming is the only remaining gap in my defenses.
It’s gotten to the point where I’ve grown so accustomed to not watching advertising that when I do watch a program live, I usually turn the sound off. With the sound, the cloying images and scattershot soundtracks make my brain feel like it has been battered with a cudgel. Music is my preferred alternative, but even silence is better than the crap the television networks bleat out. I don’t miss the game announcers much and it makes the commercials bearable and even entertaining.
The majority of the ads on the sports broadcasts I watch consist of a series of impossibly fast visual cuts. The soundtrack, be it a little jingle, narration, or something else, is what ties it together. If you take away the sound, the entire ad, all thirty seconds and 900 frames of it becomes a disjointed hodgepodge of mostly unrelated images and exaggerated emotions.
They’re strangely anachronistic as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a commercial with an interracial or homosexual couple, for example. If one of the actors is playing the buffoon, it will still invariably be a white guy. That’s an artifact of political correctness, but it serves as a healthy barometer for larger things. As long it is overwhelmingly white guys playing the buffoon, you can be sure that it’s still white guys really running the country.
Some of my favorites are the ones where an attractive yet non-threatening person speaks directly into the camera. I’m not talking about celebrity pitches either, just random actors who can be made to look normal enough to get commercial work. The actor speaks directly to you about the prescription drug or the home security system. Each one is paid to make a personal connection, to relax the depths of your mind by reminding you of some familiar situation or person in your life.[1]
With the sound turned off the ads are revealed for the absurdities that they are. What you’re looking at is a person (albeit an attractive, stylishly dressed person) walking in front of something, or sitting on a couch, or eating dinner, nothing more. You are at home, watching television on a Thursday night, but for that person it’s ten-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday in Los Angeles or New York. That’s the gap the actor and the commercial try to bridge.
The job is to connect, personally with you, (Yes you!) through that camera lens. Whilst you’re sitting on your couch, the woman in the home security commercial just went through forty-five minutes in a makeup chair and tried on three different pajama sets to get the look just right. As you wonder what time you ought to go to bed, the guy dressed as the wisecracking, beer drinking roommate is actually a vegan yoga enthusiast who played Hamlet in college. Once you start down that line of thought, it’s impossible to take the ads seriously ever again, no matter how ironic or knowingly they present themselves.
Try it some time. Watch the commercials with the sound off and really pay attention. Look for the impossibly ecstatic face that just bit into a slice of pizza. Then remember that it took a whole slew of takes to get that face perfectly orgasmic and that the actor probably spit out all of the pizza.[2] Watch a gargantuan vehicle drive down a street that has no cracks or potholes to pick up kids from a soccer practice that managed to leave their uniforms spotless and their cleats devoid of mud. Etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Some of the products you see are probably decent items, others are likely garbage. The ads are a poor way to differentiate though. When I do watch them, I try to keep my perspective slightly off kilter so I can more easily detect the slight of hand and see the seams in the craftsmanship. It’s not profound, just a bit of fun where there otherwise wouldn’t be, and new ones await me come football season.
[1] Or a familiar situation or person you’d like to have in your life. Aspiration is the heart of advertising.
[2] Assuming it wasn’t plastic.
