I always enjoy the commercials around the holiday season for their shamelessness. Never is the tendency to equate money with love more nakedly displayed than during the "holiday shopping season." Of course it's a given that if you want your kids to love you it is vital to purchase the right gift. It's the true meaning of Christmas! Don't be a Scrooge -- do you want your kids to grow up to be serial killers?
The funniest bits, though, are the romantically-themed ads. Jewelry ads are particularly heavy-handed in this regard. The best example I saw this year featured women at a cocktail party swooning over the ring that their friend is wearing, with the buzzline "he got it at (insert name of company here)." Then we pan over to a wife looking in disgust at her husband, who presumably didn't get her ring at (company name.) Now she can only gaze in envy at the superior number of carats displayed on the ring finger of her rival and curse the day she married her pathetic excuse for a husband. Meanwhile said husband sits hunched forward, drink in hand, muttering the tagline through clenched teeth, his voice shaking with a mixture of avarice and barely-contained rage.
Don't let this happen to you!
All well and good, but I was sure I'd found the best example ever of this kind of manipulation in the ad that featured a woman kissing a man who was holding the keys to his Beamer over his head in place of mistletoe, with the caption "better than mistletoe." Here, I thought, was the most straightforward presentation of the message "our car will get you laid" (also "women only care about your money") that I had yet seen. But that was before I heard the ad on the radio that said "Our car will get you girls."
So there it is. Maybe advertising has reached a point of diminishing returns, where they've run out of clever ways to imply the basic messages that are used to sell everything. Just as the death of double entendre in music has led to pop hits like "Back That Ass Up", maybe we will soon see a world of ads that actually say what they mean:
"You are unattractive and nobody likes you. Our product will change that."
"Drinking our beer will lead to exciting and fullfilling sexual encounters with shapely, desirable women."
"Buying insurance from us will prevent bad things from happening."
"Shopping at our store will lead to a temporary cessation in those crushing feelings of loneliness and self doubt so common in worthless individuals such as yourself."
"No woman ever said no to a diamond this big."
I for one can't wait.
Dude! You totally have a new career path staring you in the face!
Posted by: KING COMTE I at December 29, 2004 01:33 PMfrom the movie "Barcelona"
“Fred: One of the things that keeps cropping up when I read is this thing about subtext. Plays, novels, songs - they all have a subtext, which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?
Ted: The text.
(Awkward pause)
Fred: Okay, that’s right. But they never talk about that.”