A Life Less Throwaway. Tara Button
ab-sol-ute-ly perfect. We all had one last passionate debate with the client about the shoes the model was wearing and then the photographs began. They flashed up onto a big computer screen where we could examine them, and more minute adjustments were made. Several hours later, we wrapped, congratulated ourselves and went back to the office to pick our final picture.
Once there, however, none of the shots were considered ‘just right’, so we ended up expertly knitting three different photographs together in Photoshop. Later, the retouch artists began the work of making both the perfect-looking car and the perfect-looking person (who had already been rigorously perfected) look more perfect.
A month later, the poster was finished. It looked, unsurprisingly, rather perfect. It went up on billboards all over the UK and the whole campaign was considered a success.
Why am I telling you this? It’s not to relive my ‘glory days’ in advertising, I promise. It’s to show the strategising and conscious effort behind every tiny detail to create an advert that’s as seductive as possible.
Ads like this are designed to weave a fantasy world around the product and (at a subliminal level) make us want to be, or be with, the people in them. They seduce us by getting bits of our brain that we’re not even aware of to think, ‘I want to look like that. I want to feel like that. I want that life.’ But the truth is that it’s a very cleverly constructed lie. No one looks like that, not even the models in the ads. To look like that, you’d have to pay the 50 or so people at that shoot to construct every split-second of your life and somehow Photoshop you as you walked along the street.
That day, in that room, I had a moment of clarity. Of all the things to spend your life doing, rush around for, lose sleep over, spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on, why advertising? What even is this?
WHAT EVEN IS THIS? A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF ADVERTISING
At first advertising was simply a means of sharing information. One of the first written adverts we know of was created 5,500 years ago by a Babylonian chap who inscribed into a clay tablet what cattle and feed his master had for sale and what the prices were. It probably made for dull reading, with no catchy end-line or joke to make the buyers feel better about the prices.
Times moved on. Before the printing press was invented in the 1400s, town criers gave out the news, sometimes accompanied by a musician, so the first advertising jingle was probably played on a lute! During the 1700s and 1800s, paper ‘bill’ ads were plastered on every public wall available, including cathedrals. These ads became increasingly eye-catching, with varied graphics, fonts and etchings. They showed everything from elaborately dressed women keeping themselves clean with Pears Soap to boastful bulletins informing people of a recently arrived cargo ship full of ‘138 Remarkably Healthy Slaves’.
In 1941 the first television ad was shown, during a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. It presented a map of America with a Bulova-branded watch face superimposed over the top. A deep male voiceover announced proudly, ‘America runs on Bulova time.’ And that was it. Ad over.
If only all advertising breaks were that short. Now in America, of the five hours that the average person watches TV,2 approximately 1.2 hours will be adverts.3
This has led me to the terrifying realisation that the average person is watching over three and half years of adverts over a lifetime! If a pal called you up and said, ‘Hey! Let’s spend the next three and half years watching commercials,’ you might well question their sanity. But this is what many people are choosing to do. To me, three and a half years sounds like a prison sentence, but in this case the prison constantly asks for your money and gets irritating songs stuck in your head.
Digital ads are now the new town criers, and they don’t even play the lute. We now see and hear an estimated 362 ads a day and over 5,000 ‘brand exposures’ from logos and other branding devices.4 It’s no wonder that this has massively affected our behaviour. Even if we claim, as many of us do, to ‘never pay attention to ads,’ the sheer number of them, coupled with the activity of our ever-curious brains, means their messages sink in somehow, shifting our ideas of what’s important and how we feel about things.
Mindful curation therefore can’t just be about being mindful of the objects we allow into our lives, but also has to be about being mindful of the messages and content as well. This needn’t mean a media blackout, rather that we should aim to identify the sources that nurture us and give us the information we need to make good choices. To everything else we can say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
Rather creepily, there are thousands of people now working on ways of getting more ads in front of our eyes every day. In the future, who knows, there may be a way to beam adverts directly into our brain. With home appliances becoming part of the ‘internet of things’, don’t be surprised if in a few years’ time, your fridge starts giving you suggestions as to what you might like to fill it with.
If we want to stay mindful, we should be on the lookout for anything that sneaks ads into our homes or heads via the back door. Our homes need to be a sanctuary if we are to stay sane in the next millennia. So, in the words of one of my favourite Harry Potter characters, ‘Constant vigilance!’
THE SEDUCTION OF SYMBOLISM
The biggest change that I’ve seen in advertising, and something that particularly affects us when we’re trying to practise mindful curation, is the switch from useful detailed information to help with making choices to symbolism and manipulation. You may have noticed that in many ads today, you might not even see the product, just an idea with the brand’s logo on it.
For example, when Levi’s invented their jeans in the 1870s, some of their earliest adverts showed two horses trying to rip a pair of jeans apart. The line went ‘They never rip’ and the advertisement then went into detail on the quality and construction of the jeans.
In comparison, a Levi’s advert in 1998 showed a hamster called Kevin running on a wheel to heavy metal music. A little boy speaks over the top:
‘Kevin loved his wheel, but one day … it broke.’
The music stops and the hamster wheel stops working. The light fades in the room as night falls.
‘Kevin grew bored …’
We see the sun rise and Kevin standing still in the cage. Then a pencil pokes him through the bars and he falls over into his sawdust.
‘… and died.’
The ‘Levi’s Original’ logo then appears and the ad ends. 5
At the time, this ad caused quite a few complaints, but what I find interesting is just how far away the ad is from the product it is advertising. A depressed hamster has nothing to do with jeans and yet Levi’s wouldn’t have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to run this ad unless they thought it would increase sales, so what’s going on?
What this ad manages to do very well is create a powerful reaction of shocked laughter/disbelief at the same time as we see the Levi’s logo. This is classic subliminal messaging. When we next see the Levi’s logo, maybe in a shop or online, that feeling of heightened activity in our brain will return as an echo in our mind. We probably won’t remember the ad, but we will feel a slight thrill – a thrill that will make us far more likely to remember the brand, pay attention to the jeans and buy them.
The ad may also be saying that Levi’s are for people who love to move or who can’t bear to be still and bored. They’re for people who want to ‘live’. That is a sentiment that might resonate with many, and it might even make them feel a closeness to the Levi’s brand, but it has no basis in the reality of the product.
I believe that this shift from talking about the attributes and quality of a product to the symbolic qualities of a brand goes hand in hand with why the quality of products has fallen. At some point, companies realised they just needed to sell us an idea, and if we bought into the idea, we’d probably