Archive for the ‘ads’ Category
lorem ipsumism: ballard and ads
Rick McGrath is very good today at Ballardian on JGB and advertising. I especially like the bits about the lorem ipsumy dummy text. Here’s Ballard as quoted by McGrath:
The pages from the ‘Project For A New Novel’ were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical and Engineering News — I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them.
Dummy text – full-dummy or semi-dummy – is such a tantalizing concept and resource. Bouvard and Pécuchet’s copybook, automatic writing, collage, madmen cutting up letters to send to the coppers, flarf, the porn novels that come out of the machines that Julia works in 1984, even in a sense FID when taken to some sort of logical extreme all partake of the vertiginous promise of the lorem ipsum. It’s something like Barthes’s reality effect, that barometer (“Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ [and not its contingent contents] which is then signified”) sublated to the level of text itself, while at the same time resisting this sublation as it never feels banally real in the manner of the fictional detail.
As Rick McGrath says elsewhere in his piece:
Designed to be viewed from moving cars (Ballardian in itself), billboards offer the advertiser the benefits of a very large message, but the disadvantage of greatly reduced viewing time. Three to five seconds is the average length of time an individual has to scan a billboard, and this feat has to be accomplished in moving traffic. In order to compensate, successful billboard ads rely on strong, simple visuals and to-the-point messages. No one is going to drive around the block for a second view. It immediately becomes apparent that ‘Project For A New Novel’ breaks these rules by its sheer volume of words and complex, unbalanced layout — as well as the fact it seems to make no sense, offers no brand, no benefits, and no indication of how to respond. But that may be the point, as ‘Project’ is a quasi-surreal piece vaguely reminiscent of the ‘cut-up’ technique used by W.S. Burroughs. This same technical problem was identified by Ballard’s friend and Ambit editor, Dr. Martin Bax, ‘Most of the text you can’t read because when you see things on billboards you don’t read the small print, so the text is deliberately blurred — you can only read the headlines and some remarks.’
But of course that’s cheating, making it too small to be read at speed. It’s cheating because it makes the text into a mere image. The true lorem ipsumist aim is to actually get someone to read the stuff, to convince ourselves to read it, not out of sadism or masochism, but because one has a sense that something’s there if you could just figure out the right way to read it. And we’re not talking divination here. We’re talking in fact the exact opposite of divination.
the mystical physiology of advertising
Interesting article in the NYT about an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs on French TV advertising. But one thing in it has left me intrigued and confused. The guy speaking in the following paragraph is the “chief creative officer for Havas, the country’s second-biggest advertising agency”:
Or as Mr. Séguéla formulated the situation: American commercials go from the head to the wallet, British ones from the head to the heart, French, from the heart to the head. That accounts for why, as in a classic French commercial for Canal Plus, the French pay television station, a man describes a movie about emperor penguins in Antarctica to a woman who pictures hundreds of Napoleons sliding around the ice. Or why, in an ad for Air France, sexy models use clouds as pillows, clearly not dreaming about low fares and on-time departures.
Could be that I’m that I’m again taking throwaway langauge too seriously, but I’d love to understand what all of the head-to-wallet, head-to-heart, heart-to-head stuff really means. The idea that there are national trajectories to ads, or even to the little plots that constitute ads, is too attractive not to wonder about for a bit…
impossible is nothing: adidas’s socialist art
What a strange world we live in. Adidas has made a series of TV ads for the China market that look, well, properly socialist. That is, they seem to me to be the sort of things that an actually-existing-socialist state might make, if they still existed and had hotshit marketing firms on hand to help out. A logical, if very slick, development from the sort of posters the commies liked to do for sporting events and the athletic ideologies of communism.
And the towers of people – people as architectural elements – are particularly interesting and strange in the adidas ad.
Of course, of course, it’d be easy to describe these as more nationalist than socialist. But almost all Olympic themed ads are nationalist – and these are different. Easy test: could you imagine the same ad being made for the American market? For the UK? No, but it’s trickier to say why not…. Some options I’ve come up with:
1) Americans don’t go in for a sense that our athletes are somehow built by society, that they are products or embodiments of the collective. It breaks against the libertarian self-made myth that we love our jocks to live out. (I remember – but cannot find in the usual repositories – an ad that I think Home Depot did a few Olympics ago that would be fruitfully paired with the one above. Working-class athletes in minor sports doing their humdrum jobs only to train, night after night. I think it may even have had something to do with some sort of program that Home Depot had to employ poor Olympic hopefuls. Or was it FedEx? But you see the point – bagging your boxes of nails and mousetraps, not diving into a sea of countrymen….
2) Westerners don’t like to be portrayed as a gray mass of depersonalized semi-individuals. Sports ads more typically revolve around the fantasy that you have been magically been brought into the game – that you somehow are A-Rod or Beckham or whatever. Look how easy they make it for me:
3) A little more complex, but we tend to figure “nationhood” through emblems, scenes, symbols, and physical / topographical elements rather than as a mass of people. Masses of people as nation is a bit scary, and sends the wrong message.
Anyway, it’s an interesting piece of work, this add, and deserves to be filled-away in everyone’s drawer of hauntological repetitions with a big difference….
“Nous n’avons pas signé de contrat avec Castro”
Rue89 clears it all up: Castro has not signed a promotional contract with Adidas. He just likes their gear.
I’m not sure I’d be opposed to Adidas simply becoming the exclusive footwear/sportswear supplier of sporty communists worldwide. It’s maybe a New Jersey thing, deep rooted, but I’ve got a few of their “training suits” in my own closet, I must admit. Though I try not to wear top and bottom at the same time, as that’s a bit too much, unless you’re Castro I suppose.
act now to save our chubby children
MoveOn.org’s latest ad is tailor-made to fuel the usual semi-automatic exchange of fire about “hating our troops,” “loving our troops by hating the war,” and the rest of the dreary playout. But you don’t have to be a right-winger to think this ad is awful. Could the organization have come up with a clearer materialization of the class gap that undergirds any ideological question in this country? Is it possible to show more clearly that the sides of the struggle have formed, that that the game is played between the right and the wealthy center?
(I’m afraid that Obama is yet another vivid materialization of the situation… But let’s hope for the best as we take what we got…)
Alex, I’m afraid, will never fight this war. Not in eighteen years, not ever. He and his mom have been cast as relatively well-to-do (see the hardwood floors, and her BKLYN yummie mummie-ness, and the antique-ish chair in the corner), and the well-to-do will never fight wars again, not in America. There are, however, lots and lots and lots of people with more immediate reasons to worry about what is going on – among other things, their kids are there now. It’s a bit like one of those Save the Children ads, except recast with chubby American kids. “What would happen if the food supply ran out? What would become of young Timmy here? Where would he find his daily bag of Cheez Doodles, his four liters of Mountain Dew? What if, in eighteen years, Timmy can’t afford his snacks?”
It would be an offensive ad, of course. But really, not much more offensive than this one.
(Actually, there is probably a simple fix. Think of how much more sneakily effective an ad would be with a different mom and kid, this time from the sticks, and he’s seventeen, and he wants to enlist because he’s a patriot and there’s shit all else to do in Nowheresville, the plant closed long ago, and now there’s just the hotdog stand at Walmart etc etc. But he can’t enlist, or mom doesn’t want him to, because rather than actually defending the country, he’ll be sent into some quixotic imperialist meat-grinder, come back scarred psychologically like his cousin or in little pieces, and for what??? Wow, that’d be fucking amazing – make that ad MoveOn. Or just Obama – you could be properly dialectical for once, and do a turn on the “against our troops” flag wavers. And then we can talk about my consulting rates…)
Obviously, the well-to-do have just as much reason, and perhaps even a greater duty, to resist the war. But it might be helpful to think through the gut reaction semiotics of your response, what it signals about you and your investments, and what it tells others about where your head and heart really are.
“profitable without necessarily being crass”
I.A. Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924/1926):
The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent. It is true that some serious artists are occassionally tempted into poster designing. It is, however, doubtful whether their work pays. But the written appeals which have the soundest financial prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly represent the literary ideals present and future of the people to whom they are addressed. They are tested in a way which few other forms of literature are tested, their effects are watched by adepts whose livelihood depends upon the accuracy of their judgement, and they are among the best indicies available of what is happening to taste. Criticism will justify itself as an applied science when it is able to indicate how an advertisement may be profitable without necessarily being crass. We shall see later under what conditions popularity and possible high value are compatible.
And the very next paragraph blurs the logic of poetry itself into the logic that has to be that of the less cynical ad writer, who fancies himself or herself to simply an engineer constructing the conduits that facilitate the efficient meeting and mating of individual choice and the offerings of the market.
The strongest objection to, let us say, the sonnet we have quoted, is that a person who enjoys it, through the very organization of his responses which enables him to enjoy it, is debarred from appreciating many things which, if he could appreciate them, he would prefer.
The bad poem, then, is bad because it at once erodes the capability to receive a better poem, and with a better poem, better attitudes and expectations about life and the world. Lots to say about this, but for now, see the relevance in light of this?
ads denied the product (hdtv)
The task before us, it has just occurred to me, is deeply analogous to the problem faced by those who make ads for high definition television sets and services – ads that will be seen on the very low definition sets that they wish to replace… The problem, of course, is that you can’t really show the virtues of the product that you’re trying to sell – the high d become low d on the viewer’s set.
They try metaphor, jokes and metaphor…
Denied the ability to present the thing itself, at other times they present instead the viewer, the viewer’s engrossed apparatus of sight. Didn’t Deleuze, in his work on the cinema, call shots like this “affect images”? If we cannot see what they are seeing, we can at least see them seeing what they are seeing, and feeling what they see….
One of the more sophisticated tricks is simply to suggest that you actually are seeing the new image – to hyperbolize what is already possible in order to give a sense that the change has momentarily arrived…
…but of course, this can lead to conceptual distortion and the problematic suggestion that it’s not the set that needs changing but simply the programming available for it. If we stuck with what we have no, but filled it with neon-piping and just the right sort of chiaroscuro, perhaps we might save ourselves a trip to the electronics store after all.
It is odd. Obviously, I’ve not seen every hdtv ad ever made. But one would think that someone would figure out that it would be far easier (wouldn’t it?) simply to demonstrate the deficiency of the screen that the viewer has rather than to suggest, indirectly, what the viewer does not yet have. Hold a page of text in the middle distance, and ask them to read it. Fill the screen with a painting, and ask the viewer to examine the brush strokes. But, on the other hand, it is also easy to understand that the promise of the new and better, even if it remains invisible, only promised but not yet delivered, would have more hold that the exposure of what’s missing now.
It is our problem as well – how to relate to the apparatuses of communication and representation, how to deal with the fact that they may well be ill-equipped to represent what needs representing.
More to come…
nervous country
What is somewhat interesting about this video, to my ears, is the absence of Tennessee accents. Why can’t they find any real drawlers for this vid? Just the one guy with his pool table and his rack o’ rifles? You gotta love, though, the Tennessee GOP pressing the takeaway as: “What I love about my country is the great number of afghan immigrants! they’re so entrepreneurial!”
Also, this, god…
of course, terrorists don’t strike at 3 am
Orlando Patterson in the NY Times:
Not so this Clinton ad. To be sure, it states that something is “happening in the world” — although it never says what this is — and that Mrs. Clinton is better able to handle such danger because of her experience with foreign leaders. But every ad-maker, like every social linguist, knows that words are often the least important aspect of a message and are easily muted by powerful images.
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.
The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.
Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.
(You can see the ad in question here… It doesn’t seem to want to embed…)
creative destruction
Sisyphus just gave me a little present in the comments below:
She’s right, it’s terrific. And it’s of the same sort as the Sky Movies one below, harnessing adbustery rage in service of brand renewal and the like. But even better is the sense that it’s also some sort of self-expression on the corp.’s part of frustration at its own ineptness – 2005, when the Gap began to die after a good run.
Except more of these to come as things slow to a halt. Citigroup analysts being run over by their own Hummers, Walmart visualizing the clusterbombing its own Chinese sweatshops, etc etc, United Healthcare wishing prostate cancer on their own headset-wearing guardians of the meds, all in 30 second spots.
socialism… recycled
“have you been to the edge?”: photo caption contest
Need more interactivity, hereabouts. Donc a photo for you to caption:
The NYT explains what the image is here.
What are you waiting for? Get captioning, or I’ll make you watch the Gorbi Pizza Hut ad too.
To hell with it, I’ll make you watch it anyway:
and so it begins…
I think this is actually a good sign. Someone feels that the “threat” of universal health care is worth spending money to combat…
2012
Rather hilarious stuff today coming out of the release of the 2012 London Olympic symbol logo brand that perfectly illustrates the hooker’s art of marketing come-on and shake-down today. Check out the trajectory of the BBC report:
“It is an invitation to take part and be involved.
“We will host a Games where everyone is invited to join in because they are inspired by the Games to either take part in the many sports, cultural, educational and community events leading up to 2012 or they will be inspired to achieve personal goals.”
Great! I’ll book my tickets and start packing my sneakers.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “We want London 2012 not just to be about elite sporting success.
“When people see the new brand, we want them to be inspired to make a positive change in their life.
Excellent! I was an OK ballplayer back in the day, and this non-logo brand has really inspired me to get out on the field and, yep, make a positive change in my life. This is going to be great. Do you have any hotel suggestions, or can I stay in the athletes’ condo complex village?
Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell said: “This is an iconic brand that sums up what London 2012 is all about – an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country.
“It takes our values to the world beyond our shores, acting both as an invitation and an inspiration.
I definitely feel invited and inspired! For a second there, I thought you meant I had to be British… And I couldn’t understand wtf the logo brand was meant to be until someone explained it to me (see the 2-0-1-2 in the crazy blotches?) but, look, I’ve got the message. This is my logo brand, and my games, and I am set to act accordingly.
A London 2012 spokeswoman said: “It is not going to be a free for all. There would be conditions to qualify for it.“It is not about giving it out to people so that they do not pay for it. It is about an emblem that could be a stamp of endorsement that really fits in with the legacy of the Games.”
Huh? Wait…. What?
(For more silliness, check out these branding videos here. There’s a lot more to be said about the hideousness of this design and what it means, as well as the “insidery” inclusion of us in the process of making this thing, such as it is, but I’ve gotta get back to work…)
ads without products, products without qualities
On his IHT blog, Daniel Altman wrote the other day about the strangeness of the big banks’ global advertising campaigns.
If you’ve seen the ubiquitous ad campaigns by HSBC, UBS, Morgan Stanley and others in the world’s airports, highway billboards and television broadcasts, you might be asking the same question. Each one takes a slightly different tack. HSBC says it understands local customs. Morgan Stanley says it knows how the whole world works. UBS says no matter where you do business, the relationship comes down to the bank and you. But their ads often come off as platitudes or truisms. Even if you did business in countries around the world, how would you choose between them?
Economists have always had a problem with advertising that doesn’t seem to tell you much about products. The feelings that these banks are trying to inspire might not even correspond to their services; there’s no way to know until you see what they’re actually offering – which isn’t in the ads. By trying to mobilize customers using feelings that may echo around the world, they’ve sought a one-size-fits-all solution. That approach could be successful, if there’s really a global business class to be targeted. If not, have they simply become too vague to be effective?
Economists have trouble with ads of this sort, of course, because economists have trouble with the aesthetic. Rare is the advertisement that simply fills you in on the utility of the product at hand. The Adidas ad doesn’t really explain the benefits of the shoe – but rather inserts you in an interesting or exotic situation that auratically adheres to the shoe.
I’m not telling you anything new here, of course. But then again, two questions. First, without using the word “aura” (because we’d like to find something more specific and helpful than that), how do we describe the “something else” that the ad brings us instead of the utility of the product for sale? Second, is it possible that whatever this “something else” is that we’re trying to name, it has something deeply in common with what art has always brought us in addition to its informational content? What does this “something else,” in other words, have to do with the aesthetic?
This one (and it is one of the most brilliant ads I’ve ever seen – I can watch it again and again) crosses a nascent geopolitical conflict with an aesthetic tension – a tension, actually, between two unreconcilable aesthetics: the collectivized bodies-as-machines of the Chinese against the pouty individualized hotness of the Americans. (Isn’t this, in a sense, the work that international athletics almost inevitably performs? Jesse Owens’s sole black body against the Riefenstahl logic of Hitler’s review platform etc… War by other means – by means that come closer to the aesthetic register than any other…)
But whatever we make of either ad, it’s tough to make the leaps from the represented content to the qualities of the shoe itself, unless we’re going to take the “Adidas fits all feet – whether lockstep commie ones or open-toe hypermarketed capitalist ones…”
Back to the banks. I still haven’t learned to take pictures on vacation of the interesting stuff that I’d actually like to look over again from the comfort of my home rather than posing the baby again and again in front of tourist sites that she can make neither heads nor tails of, but, yes, I was at Charles de Gaulle yesterday morning and it was absolutely plastered in just the sort of HSBC ads that Altman is describing above. I have no pictures, so we’ll have to go with a few clipped from elsewhere.
The first one seems to be from CDG itself, the second from HSBC’s NYC campaign, which interestingly highlighted the internationality of the city itself rather than the bank. (In other words, the EU ads are geared at the weirdness of crossing the German-French border on with no stop for passport controls, while the NYC campaign is isolated on the strangeness of crossing the Queensboro Bridge.
The television ads available on Youtube and the like are more helpful, perhaps in getting at the quiddity of this campaign. (You have to wait a bit to get to the punchline of the first…)
Leaving aside the tactical question that Altman asks – whether this is effective as a paradoxically global campaign about the bank’s respect for locality – I am interested in the contents of the ads themselves. What is the relationship between these quasi-fictional situations – these condensed little parapraxes, the petite romances, the perverse detournement of other aesthetic products (such as, in the case of the first, a film about Che Guevara). Think about how surprisingly close – even though there’s still a great distance, of course – the operative fixation of these ads comes to the preoccupations of works like Kafka’s or Woolf’s or Joyce’s. They work, at once, metaphorically (we can understand how to get along with the Chinese, whether in a restaurant or abstractly, via the markets) and literally (through the entertainment value of the vignettes…), which is, in the end, not far off from the model of the work of literature itself…
(Sorry – I have to pull up a bit hurriedly and short here, as I accidentally posted this before it was done, and I’ve got to run…)
