What Happens On Da Laptop, Stays On Da Laptop

As consumers with limited cash to spend, we make choices every day between the thousands of services and products vying for our wallets.  And amid the fray & frenzy, those companies and services that offer security, insurance, or precautionary measures can easily be overshadowed by more tantalizing products.  Buying insurance of any sort seem less urgent than, say, purchasing a new album or a concert ticket, or replacing your empty tube of toothpaste.  You’re not actually getting anything for your money – you’re only paying to avoid things you don’t want.  So a major advertising maneuver for security services is to elaborate (and exaggerate) the damages and disasters that might befall you should you choose to forego their security.  In many respects, companies that deal in burglar alarms or flood insurance have it easier -- they can show frightening images of the concrete disasters that they promise to fend off.  But if you’re a technological security service, such as Norton by Symantec, it’s much more difficult to put a face on the digital villain.  They must figure out how to render technological dangers perceptible to the buying audience -- and how to make those dangers feel not only real, but imminent.

Norton’s 2011 campaign is creative and entertaining, and succeeds in an unlikely way.  Their series of advertisements consist of a yellow background, with different file names printed in simple type across the page – .mp3 files, .mov files and .jpg files.  The entire thrust of the campaign lies in the clever file names, which hint at deeply personal content of some kind – content with sentimental value, historical value, or just potentially embarrassing value, such as "TheMomentSheSaidYes.jpg" (sentimental), “GrandpaDoingTheRunningMan.mov” (familial-sentimental), or “FellAsleepOnTheCouch_AKA_FunWithMagicMarker.jpg” (blackmail-worthy).  These file names, while specific and personal at first glance, are also fundamentally generic – I mean, you may not have a .jpg of yourself with a magic-marker moustache, but instead you might have a .bmp file of that time you passed out on Widener Steps in your Halloween costume.  Norton hopes that you see the file names and grin, because there's a good chance that you have a parallel file somewhere in the labyrinth of your laptop. 

The punchline of the ad comes in the small black print in the bottom left corner of the page: “It’s not just data.  It’s your life.”  And that's the sentiment Norton needs to sell if they want to sell their product.  Norton is marketing aggressively in the intersection of our everyday mediascapes, technoscapes, and terrorscapes­.  The media files that are strangely precious to you (and integral to your identity!) are technological in nature -- and at the same time, they are under threat from menacing technological forces.  By subtly (and, in the tagline, overtly) suggesting that your life and personal history are constituted entirely of data like home movies, pictures, and sound recordings, Norton markets itself as a hugely desirable digital safeguard.  

When Cigs Are Good for the Soul

'Well the night does funny things inside a man

These old tom-cat feelings you don't understand

Well I turn around to look at you, you light a cigarette,

I wish I had the guts to bum one, but we've never met,

And I hope that I don't fall in love with you.'

-Tom Waits

Watch 'Em While You're High

Advertisers tend to know their target audiences – how to get their blood pumping, their mouths watering, and their Youtube search engines running. Commercials are designed to provoke an emotional or physical reaction in the viewer, and they're no fun when you’re obviously not part of the target audience (Magical Disney Family Cruises, Viagra). However, it can be entertaining to sit back and watch a commercial that's meant for someone else. Like earlier this week, I was mid-episode of Modern Family, suffering through one of those forced commercial breaks, when an Axe commercial came on that was definitely targeting dudes. It was funny, and I watched with smug detachment.

One of the most frequently overlooked, but substantially large commercial-viewing demographics is Stoners. The beautiful thing about Stoners is that (almost) every commercial is meant for them. When you’re high, a ten-second, digital close-up of microbes being demolished by some Febreeze-wieldin’ housewife can feel utterly profound. Raisin Bran looks infinitely delectable. The Bachelorette is literally the funniest show to ever grace reality TV. But while 99.9% of commercials may appeal to Stoners, they can be sorted into three distinct categories: Intentionally Interesting, Accidentally Fascinating, and Slyly Mesmerizing.

In recent years, the first category (Intentionally Interesting to Stoners) seems to be largely going out of style. In the seventies, I guess advertisers expected the vast majority of their viewers to be slouchily sucking down jays while they watched TV, because even Rice Krispies commercials were obscenely trippy. But Levi’s Jeans (our good ol’ fashioned American Co) might just win the prize for Best Commercial to Watch While High.

One slightly more recent example of Intentionally Interesting is the Carlton Blonde Beer commercial. However, if you’re of the Stoner variety that gets more-than-kinda paranoid, it may cause you to feel unduly anxious that the world is unravelling. The classic Sony Bravia commercial, (otherwise known as "the ball commercial,") comes across like the brainchild of a bunch of weed lovin' graphic designers with a penchant for indie rock. At the very least, it’s relaxing; on a good high, it feels spiritual.

Lately, the Accidentally Fascinating to Stoners category seems to be on the rise. These are commercials that are mildly interesting to the general public, but that feel terrifying, euphoric or intriguing when you’re high. For instance, there's the apocalyptic feeling that hits you when you're watching Pepsi’s Shaq Attack commercial. The plot goes like this: Pepsi-drinkers in various locales around the globe stare in shock and desperation as their Pepsi bottles drain mysteriously in front of their eyes, presumably into some invisible cosmic sinkhole. You're waiting in shoulder-tensed agony for a cataclysmic clincher -- so when the commercial ends with the suggestion, "Be Young, Have Fun," it feels like some kinda SICK JOKE.

In a similar vein, there's the Duracell Batteries Ultra Lithium commercial, in which a horde of pink bunnies morph en masse into an aggressive monster-giant comprised entirely of living, screaming bunny-faces. I'm pretty sure this commercial is scary to the average viewing-audience, but if you’re high, it could make you want to lie down in an empty bathtub, turn off the lights and cry/ write poems about the coercive mechanisms of capitalism.

Slyly Mesmerizing is perhaps the most sinister category -- a reminder that, yes, advertisers really, really know what they’re doing. Not only do these commercials seem perfectly unsuspicious to a regular viewing audience, they may even appear innocent to a True Stoner during rare moments of sobriety. But if you're peering at the commercial through weed-stained eyes and droopy lids, the subliminal messages come screaming off the screen. For example, one of Taco Bell’s recent commercials looks pretty regular – a dude at a fancy restaurant who really just wants a burrito – when all of a sudden, a dancing spiral of meat explodes into the background, twisting and gyrating, eight feet tall and oozing with delicious, rhythmic grease. Sure, it’s only up there for two seconds. But if you’re high, it's a mind-bomb that will explode half an hour later when you're careering through red lights on your way toward some Late Nite TB.

Of course, the exploitation of marijuana-induced consumer vulnerability is nothing new. The older Taco Bell commercials were even more shamelessly manipulative. For a list of great hypothetical weed ads, check out this article by blogger Tess Lynch at Good Health, where she invented a few perfect commercials for stoners. And Watch Responsibly!

Go Forth & Multiply Profitz

We're launching this blog with Levi’s Go Forth ad campaign – not because it’s an exquisite example of global marketing (which it is), or an unabashedly aggressive effort to co-opt national ideals (which it definitely is), but because I really enjoy the ads. I like them! When the Go Forth commercials come on in movie theaters, I'm racked with emotion in my seat in the greasy dark – anachronistic nostalgia, baseless patriotism. And yesterday, as I perused my October issue of Rolling Stone, the Levi’s full-page ad seemed so beautiful (all those fireworks and freedom) that I ripped it out and sticky-tacked it to my wall, where it joined the illustrious ranks of Pink Floyd and Kurt Cobain.

Here's why I like Levi’s latest advertising scheme – and it goes beyond my penchant for classic Americana imagery. With this campaign, the Levi advertisers are placing faith in the fact that American kids can still respond to un-ironic media, or that we still get sentimental sometimes. This campaign is to the ad-world as Springsteen is to rock-world – straddling the fine line between nostalgic cool and ridiculous, and ultimately hoping that the audience wants to be seduced. Of course, we’re all hyper-aware of being manipulated, so the campaign’s blatant appeal to our hyper-American emotions might end up being massively unsuccessful. But there’s no hint of the typikal postmodern message-encryption in their advertising; there's nothing to “figure out,” no cleverly embedded jokes. It’s a disarmingly straightforward idealization of frontier America, and if you watch one of their minute-long videos, the intended messages are clear: beautiful kids are fighting in the streets, revolution is in the air, fuck the Man, America is still a vast wilderness to be explored, and “Now Is Our Time.”

This strikes me as a super-optimistic campaign in the United States, hoping to access some dormant, irony-free patriotism in the hearts of American youth – but it seems even more improbable beyond America's borderz. I mean, Levi's Jeans Co hardly changes its tactics at all when marketing denim in China and India, which just goes to show that they're peddling "classic America" -- not jeans.

Whether or not the campaign succeeds in selling jeans, part of me hopes that somebody in every movie-theater feels shaken and stunned after the commercial fizzles out into the scratchy image of a sparkler, while Walt Whitman’s voice reverberates in the dark. I hope that one heart in every audience beats faster at images of fireworks and empty lots and multiracial makeout sessions, even if those feelings are trumped soon afterwards by the too-true reminder, “They’re pants.” It's hard to say how successful this campaign will be in the long run. But at least the advertisers seem to be exploiting patriotism over materialism, nostalgia over newness -- which, in the end, is placing a lot of faith in We the Consumers.

One of the (in)famous Go Forth commercials.

And another one, feat. Walt Whitman Himself!

This is what I found in my Rolling Stone mag.

And this is version number two (in Chinese).