How Advertisers are using our debt, big dreams, fear of failure, and incredible productivity against us
“I have failed.”
“By all commercial, capitalistic standards I am a failure.”
Visa
The ad above, described below. From Ispot.tv (bolding my own):
A hairstylist set up a mobile business where he rides his bike from client to client. He’s cutting a new path by cutting his clients’ hair where they are — in the comfort of their own home, on their front porch or even on the basketball court. He’s able to keep working wherever with mobile pay so client’s can use their Capital One Quicksilver Visa card to quickly pay and go.
“I am a failure because I am not a self-made entrepreneur leading a creative trade/tech/media/artistic/restaurant company.”
These are the thoughts I noticed creeping in as I watched episode after episode of the rebooted Jersey Shore, Jersey Shore: Family Vacation.
As successful comedian Nate Bargatze would say, “I like what MTV’s doing right now.”
As I watched hour after hour after hour of Snookie blacking out, Ronnie pouting, Jwoww not acknowledging her hypocrisy, The Situation stress eating about going to prison, Vinny not eating so he can be a stripper, Angelina yelling, Gina doing whatever Gina does, and Pauly D coming up with catchphrase after catchphrase, a certain negativity overcame me.
I couldn’t quite tell where this negativity was coming from.
But then I heard it, among the dizzying amount of commercials MTV runs, a subtle tone, one that got louder and louder the longer I listened.
Ad after ad seemed to say:
YOUR GENERATION MUST HAVE A WELL PAYING JOB THAT is CREATIVELY SATISFYING AND is YOUR DREAM AND is ALSO COOL.
I’m not sure our parents’ generation thought this way.
Whether their society told them a house, spouse, kids, and job are all you need to be happy, or if they too felt pressured to become The Person They Were Meant To Be doing the Thing They Were Meant To Do, I can say that I certainly feel the pressure of the latter.
House, spouse, kids, and job are just the start.
The Burnout Generation
I want to analyze some specific commercials that convey this all-or-nothing, must be “living the dream” ideal, but before we can, we need some context as to why this type of messaging is being used on Millenials.
“How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation” is, alongside “The Cruelty Is The Point”, probably the most insightful article I read in the past year.
Some insight into me, the most life-changing books or articles I’ve ever read all share the following 4 qualities,
1. Socio-Psychological in Nature,
2. with an almost unnecessarily provocative title,
3. that I start off somewhat skeptical about,
4. and within the first five minutes think: holy shit this is the realest shit I ever read.
That formula applies to this article.
I understand if you’re skeptical of the concept but, like step 4 above, I encourage you to give it at least 5 minutes. I think you’ll be hooked.
Former professor and author of the article Anne Helen Petersen, referring to conversations she’s had with recent students:
When my class left our liberal arts experience, we scattered to temporary gigs: I worked at a dude ranch; another friend nannied for the summer; one got a job on a farm in New Zealand; others became raft guides and transitioned to ski instructors. We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job…
It wasn’t until after college that I began to see the results of those attitudes in action. Four years postgraduation, alumni would complain that the school had filled with nerds: No one even parties on a Tuesday! I laughed at the eternal refrain — These younger kids, what dorks, we were way cooler — but not until I returned to campus years later as a professor did I realize just how fundamentally different those students’ orientation to school was.
…these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. I told one student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interests her and what kind of work she doesn’t want to do — a suggestion that prompted wailing. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.
I hesitate to quote something at such length, but I think it’ critical to what comes next, largely in part, because I have been strongly influenced by it.
Like all great writing, “How Millenials Became The Burnout Generation” gave me words for what I felt that I hadn’t found myself.
Get That Money Young Buck, Get That Money
I do not like the narrator’s tone in this thirsty ass Diet Coke commercial. Stop getting off on the manual labor of young people.
Also, some stray observations:
- There’s no way this kid is keeping that hot plate set up under wraps. RAs are born snitches.
- He probably has to flip cheese sandwiches because he’s drowning in student loan debt.
- And yet the commercial effectively makes him look cool.
No hate to anyone actually making hot, tasty sandwiches out of their dorm or hustling Sunday dinner plates on Instagram but much hate to the game.
Much hate to Coca-Cola and the pervasive mindset that you must be productive all the time, that the fact you have to have a side hustle to survive is somehow “cool”.
Microsoft
Where do I even start with this commercial. It feels like it wrote it’s own critique for me.
“I think a company is the coolest thing you can build”
Translation: do you get paid for your hobby or passion? It’d be a lot cooler if you did.
“I have it on all the time.”
Translation: you are not doing enough if you’re not working all the time.
“I like to do four things at once”
Translation: be even more productive than doing just one thing at a time all the time. Everyone needs a side hustle in the gig economy.
“I can paint, I can mold, I can code”
Translation: you probably can’t even do one of these things.
Honestly, props to Adam Wilson.
He is living his dream.
His mostly unattainable, mostly promoted as the only path to happiness, dream.
All the things that Microsoft choses to have its brand ambassadors say out loud, Apple does without words, and for that reason, might be the best, most effective company at selling us the Creative as CEO dream.
Apple
Just show the most famous creative people in the world using your product, interspersed with not famous people, and the kids will feel seen.
The Inferiority Is The Point
Now, my smarky takeaways might just be the result of me projecting my internalized self-doubt onto advertisements.
But even if that’s the case, that’s the point.
Advertising wants you to feel just bad enough, give you just enough sense of urgency, strike the perfect pang of anxious emptiness, to prompt action, action it hopes, in the direction of its product.
And that’s a great point, Inferiority, I’ma let you finish, but first…
An Aside.
Selling Utopia is Not New, Sort of: A Much Too Brief History of Advertising in the Last 100 Years
Advertising has come along way since “Lemon”.
It is now a self-aware, self-deprecating, meta commenting, soul-eating monster.
It’s almost quaint to look back on what it used to be, what the medium grew from.
VWs “Lemon” ad is the stand-in for the entire transition from modern (post-WWI) to postmodern advertising. A transition that can be argued to have started with World War II and an era that can be said to have been in full swing by 1960. In other words, the end of the modern era began with World War II.
The modern era, as reflected in advertising, can be crudely summarized by the following.
Modern Advertising
1919-1945/1960
Defined by:
- describing the, often technical, benefits of a product
- A products low cost or high quality
- A euphemism about how great the product is
- but not entirely implying it will make your life and soul complete
Examples:
World Wars tend to change the worlds in which they happen.
In 1949, William Bernbach, along with colleagues, Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane, formed Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), the Manhattan advertising agency that would create the revolutionary Volkswagen ad campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.
After World War II, society headed in the direction that would eventually bring about the 1960s and a postmodern era.
Postmodern Advertising
1960-2010
Defined by:
- selling a larger idea
- use of irony or meta-commentary on product
- linking larger idea to a product
- often, very tangentially
Even the Lemon ad was still selling the quality of its product: the text below the image talks about how this specific, individual car didn’t pass the rigorous testing standards that VW employes, and then goes onto describe those testing standards.
But people got it.
The ad was referencing the rumors or perception that VW Beatles were not well built cars.
It’s arguable that we have now reached a new era of advertising.
An era that began with Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”
Old Spice
Much like the transition from modern to postmodern, this transition from postmodern to, if you will, hyper-postmodernism, is marked by new qualities mixed in with older, trailing qualities from previous eras.
Hyper-Postmodernism Advertising
2010-Present
That is, some ads in our current era will still tout the quality of a product (modern era) or use irony (postmodern era) but now they might now mix in:
- meta commentary
- more extreme irony
- tangentiality to the point an ad may not even mention a quality of its product except for a tagline
- self-awareness
- the selling of extremely broad concepts of Happiness, Completeness, Goodness
Back To The Lecture at Hand
In other words, ads now are really weird and barely related to their products.
Dr. Pepper
This “Man Cave” Geico ad is just selling us a couple who is so bad at compromise they live with a bear but Geico is the one thing that can bring them together.
Geico
Remember, Geico sells insurance. Nothing in this commercial is about insurance, except for about 5 second of dialogue near the end.
And while those are silly examples, this newer, even more abstract advertising movement is capable of selling broader, more abstract messages, more subtly than ever.
Advertisers have gotten so good at advertising, they’ve learned so much since “Lemon”, they are now very skilled at creating 30 second Utopias.
A product is never as great as when it’s in its own commercial, in a world where there are no problems, except importantly, the problem their product is here to solve.
Look at how happy this couple is to share 1 car and work opposite shifts what the fuck.
Nissan Versa
The treatment on the image is a faded, glowy instagram haze, backed by an inspiring, soul-influenced song that is very positive, very “Glory” from Selma.
And sure, Amazon echo guy is a doctor (because amazon echos deserve doctors as owners), but he is going to work at night and is so happy about it that his wife says, “have fun at work”.
Amazon Echo
If I ever get to write this blog for a living I will still not want my wife to say “have fun at work” in the morning.
These ads know we’re overworked and underpaid, and they still show us (living vicariously through the couples) as happy and energetic while using their products.
We’re not supposed to be mad that we have to work so hard to get through life, like Nissan Versa couple, or that we have to work overtime to pay for college, like Diet Coke guy, we’re supposed to think it’s cool.
Nothing, we’re told, is as cool as constant productivity because now we all have giant holes in our souls and wallets and both must be filled or we’ve failed as adults, we’ve failed at entering the real world.
To over simplify yet again:
Our grandparents needed new pants because their pants had a hole in them.
Our parents needed new pants because flared-bottoms were no longer the fashion.
We need new pants because we are incomplete without them.
An Ending, A Hedging of Bets, and a Warning
Sure, there are absolutely still ads that just tell us the qualities of a product.
Cultural changes are messy, jagged, and often incomplete, effecting different lives in different ways. That’s partly why culture – and how it effects our lives – is so hard to see from the inside.
But the largest companies in America (Apple, Amazon, Visa, Coca-Cola) run ads speaking to larger and larger ideas while they simultaneously (due to advances in technology) create worlds that look happier than ever.
Every ad has varying levels of modern, postmodern and hyper-postmodernism, just as each person’s outlook is shaped unsymmetrically by the different values, beliefs, and norms of preceding generations.
This idea of the Successful Creative isn’t in every ad. And the Successful Creative archetype isn’t as important, or triggering, to others as it is to me.
But whatever your passion or trauma, advertisers are trying to figure out how to sell things to you and they have more data, more tools, and more capital than ever before.
The stakes are bigger, and if we don’t pay attention to them, we will find ourselves trying to buy our way out of unhappiness and into generational debt.