Advertising’s Unreal World

Commercials take place in a cultural world that, referring to the iconic Coca-Cola ad that ends the Mad Men series, actually has been taught to sing in perfect harmony. That training took decades of conformity, and Madison Avenue is not eager to abandon it. Suppose, for example, most prescription pharmaceutical ads were banned. We would be spared many of the woke-est of today’s TV ads. It’s not just the drug companies, but their advertising, more than others, is now set in a uniform, vaguely feminized world, full of quiet walking paths, gardens and flowers, elderly bicyclists with big smiles, children’s bookstores with pastel furniture, and sympathetic book clubs of slightly older, endearingly unfashionably dressed women happily sitting in a circle.

In ads, you can show up on a tropical beach, laughing and dancing til dawn without a care in the world, even if you are a morbidly obese diabetic living with HIV. Life is sunshiny everywhere, as smiley as a “Have a Good Day!” button. I’m not naïve. Advertising has always been idealized. I just don’t remember the color schemes of the actors’ faces and even of the wallpaper ever being under such uniform, artificially upbeat control.

We’re talking about a values and belief system that casts actors heavily based on race and age; we had that in 1950, too. The favored criteria have shifted dramatically. On a more technical, Truman Show-level, ad agencies work with postproduction “houses,” today’s equivalent to film laboratories, adjusting the look to a precise degree that would have been science fiction not long ago. James Lileks was early on the case of the strangely turquoise and orange highlights in ads. They use other tricks to boost saturation of colors associated with the sponsor’s packaging. On a per-second basis, TV commercials are some of the most expensively fussed-over films made.

Films like Defending Your Life (1991) and shows like The Good Place were set in vague, upbeat surroundings like the ones in pharma ads, but they were satirical secular comedies about the afterlife. That sunny blandness was supposed to be a tipoff, a slightly sinister mask of conformity. But when the same imagery is filmed on the same studio backlot streets, for products like Wegovy or Rexulti, viewers are supposed to respond to warmhearted multicultural virtue signaling, overlooking natural skepticism about advertising’s unchanging bottom line priority: “It’s not creative if it doesn’t sell.”

In the Fifties, ads weren’t cynical. They were, like today’s woke ads, terribly earnest to the point of humorlessness; about instant coffee with taste strong enough to sustain marriages, or floor wax whose durability reflected well on high heels, or buffered aspirin that could turn off the pounding hammers of your headache. The needs were primal, understandable, even poignant: Hold on to your spouse. Hold on to your looks. Hold on to your job. This was the advertising industry parodied in Hollywood films like Lover, Come Back and Good Neighbor Sam.

In the Sixties and Seventies, with TV audiences increasingly skeptical toward ads, new creative directors used humor to amuse viewers and win back attention. Joe Sedelmaier became Madison Avenue’s top director right through the Eighties with funny ads like “Where’s the Beef” and the “Russian Fashion Show”. Commercials became more realistic looking, filmed on city streets with actors who didn’t look like models.

TV ads were relatively prim when I was a kid, but that sure changed. For a while, they were an odd mixture of mini-skirts and Women’s Lib. Feminism took hold of the industry for a while, but by the Eighties, the culture had turned from “I am woman, hear me roar” to Where the Boys Are ‘84. It was a dark time for advertising’s progressives. But the kernel of political correctness never went away. It hung on, and in the waning Bush years, it fought its way back to dominate the culture of advertising in the new age of wokeness.

Men were traditionally considered the main buyers of tires, gasoline, cars and trucks. Motorcycles even more, but they were only a mass consumer item from 1965-’90-ish. Today the only one of those ad categories still aimed specifically at male buyers is trucks. (Dodge—no longer a force in the market—still promotes itself as a male-oriented performance brand.)

Modern ads for trucks take place in an artificially augmented, unreal dream world, but it’s one where men are still tacitly acknowledged to be the ad’s main audience. Even here, weekend driving is less likely these days to be fishing with the boys, or moving cement blocks to a home expansion project, and more likely to be a sedate couples-or-family activity, like off-roading into the desert to visit grandma. Once they get there, they too seem to be set in an AI-generated paradise, where every room has white walls, designer furniture, big windows, and lots of candlelight. This is the only product category where the announcer’s voice is not only male but red-state-accented, gravel-voiced Amur-r-r-i-can, sounding like anywhere from Appalachia to Texas.

It takes a certain anti-genius to create a 21^st-century media world where young men no longer seem all that interested in girls, cars, or beer, at least as presented in Madison Avenue’s joyless ads. These days, outside of brash sports gambling ads, you’re not seeing many gorgeous barmaids, roller skating, carrying trays of foaming beer, or indulging in catfights or clothes-ripping. To be sure, the republic will survive, and—let’s face it—some comic use of female sex appeal in the cause of selling products always looked dubious or excessive, even back in the day, and not only to feminists or to cultural conservatives. Madison Avenue has no lasting alliances. If they can’t or won’t sell blatant cleavage, they’ll sell latent trans. Or vice versa. Whichever way the wind blows.