They scream across your TV set demanding your attention; gaudy, flashy things with irradiating or stolen music and impossibly proportioned people designed to promote products. These are the commercials.
They are on nearly every channel and may be the defining media present on television, if not in American society itself.
I’d like to take a look at a few commercials and analyze the ideas behind them, and how they attempt to sway their viewers.
Coca-Cola: An invading army aping fantasy video game characters in both style and design are assaulting a castle full of anthropomorphic cat-people.
How much money does Coke have to spend on ads? This commercial is entirely computer-generated; watching it is like watching money burn. Does Coke even need ads now?
Pepsi has lost the soft-drink war and surely word-of-mouth and brand-name recognition is enough to get people to buy Coca-Cola. Commercials are just masturbation now.
This commercial is playing on World of Warcraft’s success, and follows in Coke’s proud tradition of having strange beasts make, drink, and get incredibly messed up from soft drinks.
I can’t help but think that anything that makes dragons go insane and shoot fireworks out of their mouths is not something that should be put into human bodies.
FiberOne: A husband and wife talk about fiber bars and the oafish, doofusoid husband is being obtuse. He is unable to tell the difference between FiberOne bars and candy bars. The wife smiles smugly.
For any situation to appear interesting to a human, (i.e. you, me and everybody else) there needs to be conflict. Because commercials are so short, they need to create drama very quickly. The easiest way to do that is to find something that is inherently full of conflict. This is a battle-of-the-sexes commercial.
Before the ‘70s, these commercials usually portrayed the woman as the “fall guy” or loser, but since then it has become increasingly hard to show women as being stupid compared to men in commercials because it is sexist.
The problem is, in order for the battle of the sexes to work, one of the characters has to “lose” or be shown to be inferior. This leads most modern commercials to put the woman on top, but this is no less sexist because men become morons or nerds who need the always-sensible woman to guide them through life.
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I say that this is offensive, and in 50 years we may very well view these trite and banal advertisements to be just as offensive as those old “Buy her a Hoover” magazine ads of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Antibacterial Soaps: These ones always bothered me. Not because I have a specific commercial in mind, but because they always say the same thing: “Kills up to 99.9 percent of bacteria.”
This may or may not be true, but pay close attention to “up to.” That means that it doesn’t always kill that amount, but that 99.9 percent is the upward bound of what it might kill.
The other problem is that 0.1 percent that isn’t killed. This is because some bacteria are resistant to antibacterial soaps, and after using soaps and lotions for a long time, the efficiency of those soaps drops because the 0.1 percent no longer has any competition.
They pass their resistance to the next generation, and now you have 100-percent-soap-resistant bacteria that very well might be resistant to serious antibiotics.
This mindset is dangerous. Our bodies are capable of fighting off most bacteria. Antibiotics need to be used sparingly so when we do encounter something our immune systems can’t fight off, medicine can.
Remember, commercials have only one purpose: to get you to buy products. They are not for distributing information, nor are they for entertainment or comedy. If they are entertaining or funny, it is in an effort to trick you, to sway your opinion or to make you waste money on something you likely don’t need.
Don’t be fooled. If commercials could force you to buy their products, they would.
Think about what commercials say and how they say it. What do the methods they use reveal about how advertisers think about you? Is it good?
