My Take — On Advertising

The hidden danger of having jingles stuck in our head

I am a child of television. I remember what day of the week, what time and what channel, the Flintstones TV Show was on, back in 1960. I know … a waste of a good mind, but there it is. I enjoyed being diverted. I enjoyed other points of view. I enjoyed watching Wile E Coyote spend a lifetime trying to catch that damn bird and I learned from it.

Learned about persistence. About priorities in life. Learned that falling 10,000 feet from the edge of a cliff was likely to not end well. I learned real from cartoons.

And to fund this education, I endured thousands of hours of advertising commercials. Silly people in equally silly situations, extolling the virtues and shoveling inordinate amounts of sugar covered cereal into my mouth.

How riding in a car with rear fins the size of jet wings would be more effective in attracting the opposite sex … or conversely, eliminate low flying vermin that hovered above the freeways.

I got to watch The Marlboro Man, riding his horse; rich brown hair blown back by the wind. Fur-lined coat fitting snugly beneath a well-chiseled jaw, while streams of grey-white smoke chugged out of either nostril, like the exhaust from the Titanic.

I got to see how life imitates art, and art (commercials) molds life into forms that would eventually become susceptible to the urge to possess. To be like them. Tall and handsome, lithe and beautiful. Full-breasted or slender-hipped; in boots, on beds. Riding horses or Harleys, sleighs or Buicks as big as Grandma’s house, with muscled arm wrapped around slender shoulders, as the sun sets on another day in paradise.

I got to practice the English language. To bend and shape it like a pretzel, into phrases that would rock my socks.

I wish I was an Oscar Mayer Wiener That is what I truly want to be. Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener, Everyone would be in love with me

I believed.

I could feel my mind being taken over … slowly and painlessly at first, as the cells were being rewired to receive arcane messages from the fingertips of gifted pianists composing jingles. I began to smile more often at first.

Two-year-olds sitting three feet from a TV screen are more susceptible to suggestions — even from talking hot dogs. I remembered.

But at what cost?

What does the constant exposure of commercials do to the human mind?

Not being a scientist, nor having unlimited funds from some gigantic cereal company, I have had to settle for an in-depth analysis of my own mind, as a means of answering this question.

Do Commercial Jingles rot the brain?

Well, not literally at least. A grey ooze does not suddenly appear at age 16 or 25. Most of us are able to get through college, find a partner to marry and even have 2.5 children, before we begin to wobble a little and find ourselves slightly off course.

Distantly witnessing ourselves loading shopping carts with Sugar Frosted Flakes, Captain Crunch and the ubiquitous cheese puffs. Eating a steady diet of pre-packaged chicken nuggets; little round puffs of dough, filled with low-fat mozzarella and pepperoni made with nitrates, nitrites, BHT, TRT, ABC and assorted other chemicals that will no doubt, preserve our bodies for as long as those in ancient Egypt.

What commercials do is soften our brains, or more accurately our minds. Conditioning it, like the dough used to make Wonder Bread, so that when we hear the first note of a jingle, or the first overly loud initial syllable of an ad selling blue jeans, deodorant or laxatives — we begin to vibrate. Not our bodies, not like some B-movie trance, but us, the person within, the one making the actual decision to buy the product. We begin to oscillate like a tuning fork, getting into some sort of harmonic band of acceptance and instinctually reach for the phone, the wallet or the pen to sign on the dotted line.

But wait … there’s more.

Unlike a smart bomb that can zero in on the latrine being used by a terrorist leader somewhere in Lower Franistan, a commercial and the technology behind it, is not that exacting. Commercials and their complementing music, massage the mind, making it more pliable, more receptive, more amenable to the intrusions of those on the emitting end who have a message to deliver.

Buy our cheese-filled pizza crust

Drive the Ultimate Driving Machine

Make America gr …. sorry, didn’t mean to get political

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony …

Commercials are the bow of an ice breaker that loosens up the fertile fields of the human mind, removing built-in mechanisms of discernment, analysis and differentiation. They suggest that we, the consumers, have an inherent responsibility to fuel the economic machine. Buy without too much restraint, in order to keep the money flowing, the land thriving, and the economy humming along. And if, as an unintentional by-product, the consumer becomes a wee bit susceptible to persuasion, albeit of the generally benign type, that it’s a fair price to pay for that yummy microwavable churro, or the squishy yellow, crème filled thingy, with a shelf-life of 32 years.

Sunny Boy, Sunny Boy, two for a nickel, boy-o-boy.

Yes, folks, that one was brought to you from the depths of my unconscious mind, circa 1958. Little fruit juice filled ice packets that were made with real fruit juices and could create stains on your Tee shirts that would never come out.

I remember these things with the exactitude that still scares me and yet, I cannot for the life of me remember my first words spoken, the exact location of my first kiss or what my father’s hands felt like, all those years ago.

Commercials are not bad.

Those who make them are not bad, per se.

Those who put them on television so that we can watch free TV, are not evil or malicious.

They’re simply shortsighted. Kind of like Mr. Magoo. They can only read the bottom line.

We are well past the years of possible introspection, where maybe 95 sugar-filled varieties of children’s breakfast cereals, would be considered a bit too much. The stock prices and decades of profits have caused that train to leave the station long ago.

No, commercials are here to stay … unless we do something a little more drastic than using the Mute button whenever one comes on the air. Maybe not buying something for, let’s say, 12–18 months, might suggest to someone up the “food chain” that we’d like something different, please.

But as far as the commercial incursions into our sub-conscious, we might consider the following.

1. Listen with prejudice. Know what’s happening behind the catchy tunes and talking potatoes. Resist.

2. Look for telltale signs of prior persuasion. Our hands involuntarily moving towards the cupboard where the chips are, or suddenly finding your credit card in your hand, without realizing you took your wallet out.

3. Leaving the house at odd hours, to check out the new Toyota Camry at the dealership down the street.

4. Finding multiple boxes from Amazon on your porch, from companies selling talking toasters, reusable paper towels or small nuclear-powered barbecues that will literally keep firing up for the next 75 years.

We can change our habits. We do it all the time. The key, is knowing what’s behind the jingles, loud music and talking fruits and making a decision to resist.

Good luck and thanks for stopping by. Here’s another article you might be interested in. Read — share — enjoy.