FlamingText

Making Up Your Mind: Pt I

It’s all good fun to have a laugh at the corny aesthetic of Cold War era. Ever since at least the early American New Wave period of the late seventies and early eighties the gee-whiz, Father-Knows-Best, plastic-is-good-for-you visual style has been used as a shorthand for everything that is square and white-bread about America.

While skillful pop subversives like DEVO and others may have for a time successfully adopted the visual language of fifties-era advertising (or some twisted futuristic mock-fifties) as a means of lampooning the excesses of consumerism and the penchant for mindless conformity characteristic of the Reagan era (partly to counter the Reaganites’ own tendency to re-cast the fifties as a fabled golden age of American wholesomeness and prosperity) the tropes of this style were quickly co-opted and de-fanged by others, thanks largely to the miracle of irony-inversion. (*) As soon as Nick at Nite starting using this device in ads like their “How to be Swell” commercials to promote sit-coms from the fifties, the potential for irony was lost. Ditto for Austin Powers and the Mod Sixties. Once something appears on a limited-edition Taco Bell beverage cup, it’s no longer subversive.

   So while the Sugar Swings ad in the previous posting may be hilariously kitschy by today’s standards, let us not get too carried away congratulating ourselves over how much more sophisticated we’ve become, lest we dislocate our arms whilst patting ourselves on the back. For while it is true that subsequent generations have come to view the claims made in advertising with increased skepticism, it is also true that PR messages like “Sugar Swings” are still very much a feature of the modern media landscape. Even though modern PR campaigns are often not visible in the form of full-page ads sponsored by “Sugar Information Inc” running in the most popular magazine in the country, it is worth noting that the organization which sponsored those ads, the Sugar Association, is still very much a going concern. The Sugar Research Foundation changed its name to the World Sugar Research Organization, Ltd. in 1968, but its mission of “educating health professionals, media, government officials and the public about sugar’s goodness” continues today. The fact that you don’t see many ads like that one featuring our Watusi-happy Mary simply means that the sugar producers and growers represented in the Sugar Association have found other, less overt means of getting their message out. You may not have known you were hearing such a message, but you almost certainly have heard it in some form.

   Here’s an example: The Truth About Splenda. While purporting to be a public-service type message about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, you can see down in the small print at the bottom of the page that this website and the associated PR campaign is the work of the Sugar Association, and that the image of the innocent child being menaced by some ominous out-of-focus cookies * is more or less in line with the “protect the Children!” message of the 1965 ad. Here’s a quote from the "Fact Versus Fiction" page about the popular artificial sweetener:

Despite all the slick Madison Avenue advertising, the fact remains that Splenda is actually a chemical compound that contains chlorine. The more chlorine atoms, the sweeter the taste. Consumers deserve to know the truth about the food products they are purchasing for themselves and their families.

   That last sentence is certainly an admirable sentiment, but as it very specific in its application to a product that happens to be a rival to the product which the Sugar Association was created to promote, it probably shouldn’t be taken as a blanket endorsement of unlimited consumer information about all food products at all times, any more than it should be read as a blanket condemnation of slick Madison Avenue advertising. That is to say, the statements issued by the Sugar Association regarding artificial sweeteners may well serve the public’s interest in this instance, but it is reasonable to infer that there is another agenda aside from pure altruism behind making such information available. That agenda goes to the heart of what modern PR is all about.

Next: Part II!

Posted by flamingbanjo at October 11, 2006 05:24 PM