FlamingText

The Worse You Feel the Better We Do

  I found this great magazine ad from the 1920s for Listerine. The header reads: "You wouldn't care to meet Marvin." Underneath is an illustration of a handsome, square-jawed young man sitting on the beach in a stylish robe, smoking a pipe. At his feet are a beachball and a little red book entitled "Popular Men." The ad text follows:

Money. Charm. Ability. In all New York there was no abler man in his field. Yet people called him "the prince of pariahs."

   Men thought him a great fellow -- for a little while. Women grew romantic about him -- until they knew. People welcomed him at first -- then dropped him as though he were an outcast.

   Poor Marvin, yearning so for companionship and always denied it. Poor Marvin, ignorant of his nickname and ignorant, likewise, of the foundation for it.

   Halitosis (unpleasant breath) is the damning, unforgivable, social fault. It doesn't announce its presence to its victims. Consequently it is the last thing people suspect themselves of having -- but it ought to be the first.

   This is followed by several more paragraphs concerning the seriousness of this ailment and its causes, accompanied by assurances that "Intelligent people recognize the risk and minimize it by the regular use of full strength Listerine as a mouth wash and gargle.”

   There is a very similar ad from the same year done in the same exquisitely-rendered style depicting a well dressed and fetching young socialite feeding a caged bird under the caption "The one true friend she has." The gist is more or less the same. She's got looks, wealth and charm, but everybody shuns her because of her halitosis.

   Advertising and PR have come a long way in the past hundred years. For instance, ads used to have a lot more text (the preceding represents about half the text in the ad) and a lot less subtext. There was a time, long ago, when people evidently took the time to read six paragraphs of ad copy whilst casually flipping through the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. Simpler, more innocent days when copy writers could simply openly declare that failure to buy their proffered wares would result in social ostracism, rather than having to imply that this was the case through the elaborate dance of sparse, loaded verbiage and cryptic visual signifiers that we now recognize as advertising. The intervening eighty years have seen enormous refinements in the methods applied towards those ends, but at heart the underlying psychological appeals haven’t changed much. Fostering an insecurity and then immediately offering up its remedy still remains a wildly popular approach. You go with what works.

   Some of the changes that have occurred since then have paralleled advances in psychological research. * In spite of the gains made in the art and science of selling, advertisers have faced problems of diminishing returns on several fronts. The first and most obvious front is the ubiquity of advertising: It’s possible that one reason that Harper’s Bazaar readers in the twenties took the time to read six paragraphs of ad copy had to do with the fact that they weren’t exposed to hundreds of ads every single day from a dizzying array of sources. Advertising has been something of a victim of its own success, with more and more products vying to get their pitches heard over the barrage of messages aimed at an increasingly numbed and unresponsive public.
*.

But there’s another kind of diminishing return to contend with: Finding new maladies that can be elevated to the level of "damning, unforgivable, social faults" and alleviated for a fee. The easy targets were claimed long ago: Underarm odor, halitosis, acne, etc., all with resounding success: There is probably not a television-watching commuter alive who doesn’t have at least a momentary thought about deodorant when they raise their arm to grab the strap on the bus or subway. The blast of breath-freshening spray before knocking on the door for the Big Date has become a cliché in its own right. And try to find a teenager who doesn't know what Clearisil is and how it is used. But since then the manufacturers of face-saving products have had to work harder and harder to come up with things that are wrong with us to which temporary fixes are readily available. I’m not sure I’ve ever lost interest in a woman because I suspected she had a dandruff problem, but I am sure that without the benefit of advertising, the term “problem dandruff” would be a complete non-sequitur to me.

   In the wake of advertising's inexorable advance I see an unbroken continuum of escalating hygiene demands placed on an increasingly beleaguered public stretching all the way back to "You wouldn't care to meet Marvin" and continuing on into the present day, where I am daily reminded of new miracle advances in medical science that will kill the invasive fungus under my toenails before I even have any and make my teeth shine forth with the blinding luminescence of 800 Watt halogen bulbs.

   Which is how I find myself at the current juncture, wherein approximately two months ago the idea entered my consciousness, seemingly unbidden, that perhaps it has now become normal and therefore expected for men to shave their nether regions. The appearance of this odd thought coincided perfectly with the arrival of new products on the market designed specifically for this use (because, honestly, you don’t want to use the same razor on your face that you just used to shave your asshole), although I did not at first make this connection. So apparently the campaign to convince young women that the proper model for their own genital appearance is to be found in hardcore pornography has proven so successful that the purveyors of this advanced depilatory technology have now set their sights on the irresistibly vulnerable neuroses of men.*. Besides assuring more attractive, hair-free genitalia (Hello, ladies!), the new products also promise an “extra optical inch.”

   Not since Certs breath mints informed us that every mint contained a “glistening drop of retsyn” *. has there been an advertising phrase as brilliantly constructed as “extra optical inch.” The ad copy writer who came up with it deserves a big imaginary raise.

  I look forward with great anticipation to the fresh neuroses that advertising will be implanting in my subconscious mind twenty years from now. I am left scratching my head in befuddled amazement as I contemplate the myriad glaring physical defects from which I might unknowingly be suffering in the interim. All the while aware, of course, that all this head-scratching might in fact be warning me of the onset of problem dandruff...

Posted by flamingbanjo at July 12, 2006 06:31 PM