Monday November 05, 2007

YOU WOULDN'T HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY. The Anchoress complains that a lot of commercials make men look stupider than women:

The first commercial had the Stupid Spoiled Father stamping his feet and holding his breath (literally) outside of a Subway because he wanted the meat-and-cheese whatever. The Insufferably Sensible Mother said, “no, honey, we have to take Chris to his soccer game.” When Stupid Spoiled Father began whining and holding his breath, Superior Life Form Child said, “yeah, Dad, grow up!” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist of it. The whole commercial was appallingly insulting and had me muttering that if I did eat Subway sandwiches, I’d have to stop because of those ads.

The Anchoress seems to think the big ad agencies (and Sesame Street) have been taken over by radical feminists "who cannot stop defensively 'celebrating' themselves, like an old scratched record that can’t move past a skip." Other female rightwingers of the Jesus sort have expressed similar objections here and here and here. It might have something to do with Dominion, or synchronized cycles or something.

Let me explain something about advertising.

Advertisers have always seen the advantage in playing to consumers' desire for status. For a long time these appeals were gender-distinct; women were presumed to want to bake better cakes than the neighbor lady, and men to want to be richer and more masculine than Mr. Jones next door.

Then advertisers began to notice that women held purchasing power for families as well as for themselves. The great David Ogilvy said in the 60s, "The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife." Advertisers sought to appeal to her more directly, and not just as the quartermaster for her brood. When admen pitched her time-saving innovations like frozen foods, appliances, laundry add-ons ("Ancient Chinese secret, huh?"), and even beauty products ("Does she, or doesn't she?"), they began to emphasize that women could obtain benefits for themselves. If a housewife could produce dinner in minutes instead of an hour, the gain was all hers. If only her hairdresser knew for sure whether her blonde hair came from a bottle, that too was to her advantage. The female consumer was no longer enticed solely with improved status within her gender, but also with increased autonomy in the wider world.

So in their little psychodramas of salesmanship, advertisers were obliged to mix up their gender relations a bit. If your bread and butter relies upon telling a consumer how smart she would be to buy your product, you will eventually get around to saying that it would make her smarter than someone else -- maybe even, at times, her husband or boyfriend, since her status as a consumer does not necessarily put him and her on the same team.

Of course, you will also get commercials that portray men as smarter than their wives and kids (see the Verizon commercial in which the Steve Martinesque dad lies to his son, daughter, and wife), commercials that portray kids as smarter than their parents, etc. The market has more niches than the Longmen Grottoes, and there are many viable angles of approach to each. In fact, many of the ads that show men as dummies are pitched at the men themselves, especially when the acceptance of infantilism is part of the pitch -- which is what I think is going on in the Subway ad that so exercises the Anchoress.

That, comrades, is capitalism. Ad agencies don't get their strategies from Satan or the Democratic Party -- they get them from market data, laboriously collected and analyzed. And they employ them because they bring in money.

Conservatives often seem to miss, when raging about the stuff on their teevees, that it's really their beloved Invisible Hand that's slapping them in the face. They would rather believe it was Betty Friedan. If they stopped to consider how much of the damage they perceive to their "culture" is actually done by the free market, it would drive them mad.