Left Field

Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

In a recent issue, Journal of Advertising pondered this fact: “Despite its sophistication, subtlety, vast resources, and ubiquity, advertising faces enormous challenges to the objective of influencing sales, not least of which is that many consumers simply do not believe advertising claims.” The magazine mentioned a recent study that showed roughly two-thirds of consumers saying they doubt the claims in ads.

Two-thirds of Americans don’t believe what ads say. This is a staggering admission. No wonder the ad industry is in a frenzy of looking for new ways to put ads in front of us. We can hardly escape from advertising any more, whether it’s the seemingly endless barrage of sixty-second ads on a major network program, or the quickie pizza ad that irrupts in your text messaging. I’ve gone from trying not to look at ads, to studying them and feeling fascinated by them in a horrified kind
of way.

People who live in ads—I’ll call them adizens—don’t inhabit the same planet as you and me. They live in a happy little Pleasantville—not a ’50s Pleasantville like the one in the hit movie, but a post-millennial Pleasantville where the products and services they buy help them conform to a fictitious world of today. In 2006 Pleasantvillians have great sex lives and great bodies and great taste. They dress well, sleep well, get lots of plastic surgery, never worry about insurance or global warming. They wear headphones all the time, so they can listen to music 24/7/365.

Not only that, but Pleasantvillians are willing to make complete fools of themselves in order to enjoy their favorite product. And Pleasantville isn’t just for whites only. If you study the media catering to black, Asian, and Latino audiences, you can see the same message being pushed at people of color.

A big theme for Pleasantvillians is personal empowerment. Their purple prose about “feeling free” when they use a deodorant or other personal product sounds hypnotically alluring—until you blink your eyes and remember that the rest of us live in an America where personal civil liberties are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. “Let’s go somewhere new,” one TV ad tells us, “let’s learn to fly, let’s all be kids again.” This kind of ad language might have meant something in the sixties or seventies, when the country was really trying to go somewhere new. But let’s face it, it’s a little harder to go somewhere new in today’s Pleasantville.
The auto industry has given up selling cars with sex. These days, car ads sell escape into Pleasantville. That gleaming new automobile, with all its space-age tech, promises to sweep you away into cartoony-looking clean green country landscapes where there isn’t any urban sprawl or suburban overdevelopment. Perish the thought that the new car might whisk us away to the devastated Ninth Ward of New Orleans, or the killing fields of Iraq or Darfur.

Then there is pharmaceutical advertising, which virtually saturates the media. In Pleasantville, the adizens get to do prescription and over-the-counter drugs all day long. The archetype adizen is “Bob,” the smiling guy who takes Enzyte, claimed to increase penis size. There’s big money here—$100 a month for Enzyte, $150 for a bottle of diet drug Leptoprin. How did this happen? Starting in 1997 the FDA decided to allow direct-to-consumer advertising in the media, in which people were urged to ask their doctors for drugs. Says NewsTarget.com: “Many doctors still shake their heads over the Claritin campaigns which had patients demanding Claritin, even though they had no clue what Claritin claimed to do.”

Even the HIV drug ads in the AIDS media, though their hype has been toned down as a reaction to widespread criticism, still rely on a certain Pleasantville “ask your doctor” shading to get interest.
In the real world, in our sanest moments, most Americans are aware that the ultimate perfect storm is coming—when World War III meets global warming. We may be afraid to admit it, and we may not agree on what to do about it. But in our hearts, we know that we’re not adizens. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of us don’t believe the ads?

Author of fiction bestsellers and provocative commentary, Patricia Nell Warren has her writings archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at pnw@patricianellwarren.com.

Pleasantville 2006