TS: aspirational marketing vs. earnest marketing

I think the most weirdly effective aspirational marketing thing I've seen in the past few years is the art for those Lavalife subway ads -- they do a really good job of mentally selling you on a hipstery Sex and the City meet-cute aesthetic.

The first thing I thought of when you described the "earnest" ads are the ones for various pain relieves where the people depicted in the commercial "haven't got time for the pain" so they take Tylenol to get on with their workaday life.

Focus groups must have responded poorly to "I work at the DMV, it's miserable enough without a headache."

That's about as information-rich as you can get, but I can't say that's an era I miss.

I guess there's a category of getting kind of meta and ironic about the aspirational thing -- e.g. those cellphone commercials where the two dads are strapped down watching their families eat up minutes. (No-minutes guy's wife hates him!) The real gem in that series, though, was the one where the losing guy was like "hey, where did he get a Cobb salad?"

People are susceptible to appeals to their insecurity in all kinds of arenas, and not so susceptible in others...but expectations for mothers are both COMPLETELY CRACKED and also very broadly aimed...lots of men don't covet trucks, for instance, or power tools, or to be more clean shaven, or whatever, but appeals to one's prowess as a mother cover a huge swath of women who are liable to be very vulnerable.

I think they're very Aspirational, by saying "it's dog-eat-dog down there in the underclass, isn't it, Bunky? Buy our credit protection and avoid the Pinks and the Normals." (xpost!)

And thus is born the dick-enlargement ad.

I actually think this distinction - rather, the acceptance of this distinction - is insidious!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRzvYEXyZyM

god this is totally one of my pet peeves. but i disagree, i think you CAN co-opt it and ads have been doing it like crazy since the 90s. it's the banality of absurdity.

(discuss)

what, you don't do this Ally. You and your friends are lame.

Yeah.

I think this discussion is kind of like "which flavor of manure do you like to rub all over yourself" because while the artistic qualities of certain ads have been noted, and FFS we have CANNES AWARDS for pretty TV spots, it does not change the fact that the nearly inescapable barrage of marketing everywhere we go in the modern world is a terrible awful thing. Making people feel like shit and holding their self-esteem hostage to material consumption is no better than making people feel like shit unless they donate to the church. People who talk about branding and marketing and "target demographics" might as well be talking about guns and ammunition and "stopping power," to me. I didn't always feel this way about it but lately my animosity towards marketing has just been growing at a geometric rate, not sure exactly why but that fucking Belvedere vodka one might have a lot to do with it.

If we have to have ads, I would prefer a couple of animated potatoes shrieking about sandwiches to anything that actively tries to engage the comparative-fitness sizing-up parts of my mind. The complete disconnect between adverts and any kind of reality (cf. "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC," 20somethings driving Jaguars, "Earthlink is blazing fast") is sort of its own bad joke at this point, but they're still insulting my intelligence because somebody believes that somebody is going to believe this - and then I feel bad because I'm thinking about how the hell some Marketing VP got sold this shit in some pitch by an agency who could care less about this quarter's numbers and doesn't even realize that his company's $$$ is being spent to improve Q ratings of Justin Long and John Hodgeman, not marketshare.

I think you answered your own question anyway right at the start! They're both the same thing, they prey on the same emotions, but one is more blatant about it and a little easier to ignore.

It's not that people are already whole and coherent, and advertising just commands them to be something else. The issue is that people aren't born whole or coherent, and need something to give them ideas and options for what they might want to be -- ideas that would traditionally come from the people around you, or institutions like the church or the army or academics. Advertising and consumption have replaced a whole lot of that, along with television, which is so tied up with advertising that they're often somewhat indistinguishable.

Kind of a problem, yes.

1 = "No it's not embarrassing to be on dialup! No seriously, lots of people use dialup!"

2 = More importantly, they might be pitching toward low-income people for whom just getting decent dialup will itself feel like a step up into the world of well-adapted doing-well folks. (I.e., "I'm getting internet access like every middle-class person around.")

What do you think of ads like the Dyson vacuum ones, where nobody is ever shown actually using the product?

"NEVER LOSES SUCTION -- WHAT?! OH, ABOUT 125 DECIBELS, DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT, USUALLY NOT A HEALTH HAZARD."