But not really

Now that I don't work in advertising every day, some amazingly obvious things jump out at me and I can't believe I didn't see them before. Like, what is the nature of advertising reality? The reality in which Axe wearers get laid in the shower and Air France flyers are all blissfully serene? When you see a woman jump up out of bed and do a frantic dance of joy because she's putting on Nivea face cream, what are you supposed to take away from that?

Obviously, you can't take it as a literal representation of the cream's effect or it would soon be drawing the attention of law enforcement. And I don't imagine that they're even promising that you'll feel like dancing. No, it will be like face cream. Maybe a bit tingly, but I'm not even sure of that.

So much advertising falls into this category: visualization of an exaggeration that everyone knows is an exaggeration, or more likely, a complete fantasy. In other words, no real promise of anything at all. Not even a statement about reality. And yet these are not movies. They're ads. And perfectly mainstream ones at that. Ads that someone thinks will be not just attractive fictions, but communicate a simple, persuasive product message.

Some questions:

• Why should this interest me in a product? If someone said, "This mint is like a forest in winter, but not really", I wouldn't consider it much of a sales pitch.
• Is it just association? e.g. "I'd like to be in a forest in winter. Let's imagine that...Ahhh...that's nice...oh look, mints!" But there's got to be more to it than that. If we were so free in drawing associative links, we'd soon all be schizophrenic.
• Could they just make up any old fantasy? Why is it somehow more reasonable to depict face cream as an MDMA trip rather than, say, like eating a nice brisket?
• How did mainstream advertising end up in this weird fantasy land? It's a pretty big ontological step to go from the reality-based fantasy of "Buy a Cadillac and your friends will think you're a big shot" to the untethered phantasm of "Buy a Cadillac and you'll feel like you're flying to the moon. (But not really.)"
• Is it like going to the movies, where we see Brad Pitt, we know it's Brad Pitt, we've previously seen Brad Pitt pretending to be lots of other different people, we've just read a story about how he and Angelina are in Africa working with orphans, and yet we still get taken up with his character and the story, as if they were real?

I'm not being crumudgeonly or faux naive. In general, I prefer advertising that's interesting and if that involves fantasy, no problem. We're all adults.  I don't expect or even want everything to be based on clear, concrete product benefits. But any ad that uses this trope is almost guaranteed to be boring. And the ubiquity of this particular style of in-between fantasy just suddenly strikes me as kind of weird. Maybe because it doesn't even register as fantasy anymore. It's just ads.

Comments

[kristin]

Hi there, I really enjoyed this post, it is a beautifully put open question. Maybe it is partly that people enjoy participating in the illusion. There is a certain amount of pleasure gained from simply imagining lovely "what ifs" - daydreaming. In a way maybe these fantasies (in themselves) are a form of currency in our culture. The Brad Pitt example takes it a bit further: I think people particularly enjoy watching the acting while also knowing about his "real life" - as another way to participate in the illusion/story. I totally agree that when you take a step back, the ad-world is totally surreal and bizarre. I wonder how it would appear to someone transported here in time from 1930? We must have been slowly conditioned to understand this type of fantasy-land! It must suit us somehow. Well that's some tenuous thinking for you, thank you for your inspiring thoughts.

[WoodsSusana32]

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