Eric Schlosser, "Kid Customers" (222)
One. Why did kid advertising explode in the 1980s?
Busy parents, both with jobs, felt guilty for neglecting their children, so the 1980s began the reign of Consumer Parenting, in which parents bought their way out of parenting hell. Kid problem? Just buy something and the problem will go away.
The second force is that companies realized that brand loyalty was imprinted at an early age, so get them while they’re young. I'll call this the "Joe Camel Effect," the way ad characters seduce children into the product's world, sometimes for life. Imagine if Hello Kitty sold cigarettes. Or if Rainbow Dash sold bacon cheeseburgers. Evil would take over the world.
The third force is the Nag Effect: Make children whine for something, create "leverage" and "pester power."
Marketing professor James McNeal points out that companies make their product icons and mascots similar to parent figures, omnipotent, benevolent, necessary agents for living.
Many marketers get inside kids' heads, penetrating their very dreams to mine data. Before the age of 6, the majority of dreams are about animals, so let's not be surprised by the sheer numbers of animal figures used to promote cereal like Tony the Tiger.
Ronald McDonald has become a benign, fun-loving patriarch, an ambassador of good food and laughs as he escorts millions of children into McDonald's Utopia.
Of course, the biggest way for companies to control young, malleable minds is to target children through use of the TV.
Essay Assignment
Develop a thesis that analyzes the complicity between parents and companies to create a substitute for real parenting.
Brainstorm for a thesis that addresses the above writing prompt.
Julia Corbett, “A Faint Green Sell: Advertising and the Natural World” (229)
One. How did the consumers’ relationship change as reflected in advertising?
In the early 1990s, there was a green boom to buy products that were biodegradable and recyclable but the fad ended and was replaced with the worship of nature or the idea that nature was a worthy aspiration, that certain products would help us connect with nature. I’m thinking of Subaru and Jeep and Patagonia outerwear.
Corbett mentions beer like Hamms, but I’m thinking Corona at the beach.
Two. What is the form of analysis used in Corbett’s essay?
She intends to develop a “critical analysis of the symbolic communicative discourse of advertising, viewing nature-as-backdrop ads as cultural icons of environmental values embedded in our social system.”
What does this mean?
Images can be more powerful than words in establishing strong visceral reactions in the consumer. These reactions are about the awe of nature and the myth of connecting with nature through the purchase of a “nature item.” Further, we read that a lot of ad images give us “distorted, inauthentic, or exaggerated discourse” that gives us a twisted and fake sense of what it means to connect with nature.
Three. Why do ads have such strong cultural power and psychological influence?
Because they are “repetitive and ubiquitous” so that they soak our brains and inculcate messages that become mythic doctrines. This is especially true if we are mindless consumers with no critical thinking skills.
Four. What is the thesis in Corbett’s essay?
She argues that the “green in advertising is extremely faint by examining and developing six related concepts”:
- Business is “brown” or anti-nature so that “green ads” are an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
- Advertising commodifies the natural world and attaches material value to non-material goods, treating the sacred of nature as a thing that can be bought and such a lie is a profane lie. The apotheosis of a consumer good is achieved by elevating it to something that exists in Edenic Nature.
- Ads portray our relationship with nature in a corrupt, anthropocentric, narcissistic manner. In other words, we are the lords of nature.
- Ads portray nature as innocent and idealized without the real majesty and sometimes terror and horror that are part of nature.
- Ads depict nature in a way that makes us connect with it in a phony, unsatisfactory way so we buy more and more products to fill the vacuum. We call this impoverishment through substitution.
- Ads dominate and overshadow alternative, at times necessary subversive messages about nature.
Brown Advertising
A consumer economy is based on constant growth and this constant growth, which is about taking infinite resources, is at odds with a sustainable planet.
Nature as Commodity
Nature becomes property that can be bought in the mythos of advertising. We don’t run out and buy nature. Rather, ads work on us in more insidious ways, tapping into already existing desires and channeling those desires to the advertised object.
When we give higher meaning to an object, for example, a Subaru becoming equivalent to the rider of the Subaru becoming one of Nature’s High Priests, we call that apotheosis.
Volvo becomes the apotheosis of safety.
BMW becomes the apotheosis of reproductive success.
Sea turtles become the apotheosis of the Return to Paradise.
A Monster drink becomes the apotheosis of commitment and discipline to one’s training routine.
L.L. Bean clothes become the apotheosis of leisure time with friends in the pristine outdoors.
For the Pleasure of Humans
We are barbarians in the way we devour nature for our selfish ends but ads make us feel like entitled barbarians. We are the lords of nature. This world is for us, to us, and by us. We are the alpha and the omega. Nature without us is irrelevant.
Ads will show truckers, fishers, divers and recreational enthusiasts who think they are one in nature but in actuality they are mindless hedonists, seeking pleasure for themselves through their toys.
Another message from truck and jeep commercials is that humans can conquer the frontier of nature, that technology rules over the natural world.
The attitudes described above are ignorant and narcissistic, the mentality of a mindless consumer with no critical thinking skills.
Nature as Sublime
Ads distort nature, making it appear innocent, pristine, and accommodating to human endeavors. This is a child’s narcissistic fantasy.
In ads, the people in nature are always beautiful and clean, but talk to a real camper and you’ll find they’re covered with bug bites, bloody thorn cuts, poison ivy rashes, sweaty, stinky clothes, and, if in a tropical setting, jungle rot in which the feet decay from too much moisture.
There are also many casualties in the natural setting. Scorpions, spiders, snakes, carnivores and such can all kill the human species. Floods, typhoons, malaria, earthquakes, tornadoes, dengue fever, lice, parasites, Ebola and other magnificent manifestations of nature also kill millions of people a year but this truth is rarely conveyed in a commercial.
A Natural Disconnect
The more we try to connect with nature through being consumers of advertised products, the more disconnected we become from nature, compelling us to buy more and more worthless consumer products so that we are trapped in a vicious cycle.
We absorb media messages in our unconscious, what is called the “sleeper effect.” Soaps and detergents with labels like “mountain air” and “springtime fresh” become associations with nature. In fact, these products have NO CONNECTION to nature but advertising has taught us the contrary, that an artificial smell is somehow more natural than the human body or clothes in the absence of cloying artificial chemicals.
Advertising Does Not Stand Alone
Advertising dominates oppositional voices about nature.
Companies tell us that plastic is this amazing thing when in fact smaller voices have a contrary opinion.
Essay Writing Option page 245 Reading the Sings Number 4
Adopting the perspective of Laurence Shames (“The More Factor,” p.90), write an essay in which you argue whether the “faint green” advertising Corbett describes is an expression of the American desire for “more.”
Brainstorm for a thesis that addresses the above writing prompt.
Comments