Watch More! Do Less!

When last I watched something on Hulu, I was treated to an advertisement for Hulu Plus, which almost seemed like a thematic sequel to the commercial with Will Arnett that ran during the Super Bowl. I didn’t mention that one in my post reviewing the Super Bowl ads, but I remember now just how puzzled I was by the message that it presented. Arnett played a space alien who presented himself as a member of a vast conspiracy among people in entertainment and broadcasting, observing with malicious glee all of the people around him who remained glued to television programs on their mobile devices while they sat in cafes or just walked down the street.

Obviously, the ad was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but to simply watch it, it’s hard to see any acknowledgement of the joke. I would expect that an absurdist portrayal of the would-be criticisms of a brand would show the salutary kernel of truth under the surface, but I don’t see that in the Will Arnett Super Bowl ad. Instead, it presents the criticisms of television viewing habits in an over-the-top way, but it also presents those actual habits in an over-the-top and markedly negative way. Arnett explains the evil plot that is modern television, and everyone around him sits in utter obliviousness, staring obsessively, vacantly into their screens. There is no point of contrast; there’s nothing that encourages viewers to both laugh at the absurdity and recognize the appeal of the product.

With the new commercial that I’ve seen run on Hulu itself, the company seems to have stripped the joke out of the equation altogether, leaving only a negative portrayal of their own product. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Either Hulu is engaged in some bizarre campaign of parodying itself, or my values are so hugely out of step with those of much of the culture that these advertisers see certain images as edifying while I see instead as disturbing.

That dichotomy is seen in the images of the new commercial alone, but it’s really driven home by Hulu Plus’ latest tagline: “Make the most of everything.” The ad shows a man on what I presume to be a Stair Master at a gym. I can only guess at the machine he’s using, because we don’t see it. The shot remains tight on this face and upper body, perhaps deliberately restricting our visual awareness of the fact that he is even doing anything. The man holds the handle of the machine with one hand while holding a mobile device in front of his face with the other. And as the camera lingers on the image of his distracted, staring expression, the voiceover says, “Make the most of your workout.”

How? I assume he means by doing the exact opposite of what this man is doing, seeing as he doesn’t appear to be aware of the fact that he’s working out at all. Now, I’m no fitness expert, but I’m pretty sure that if you don’t feel anything and you don’t have to concentrate on your exercise in any measure, you’re doing something wrong. The visual presentation really doesn’t give me the impression that he’s making the most out of his workout by adding television to it. It gives me the impression that he’s not getting much out of either activity.

“Make the most out of your lunch break,” the voiceover says next, at the same time that the scene changes to an image of a woman in business attire sitting on a bench outside and staring at an iPad on which she is watching an episode of Lost. The expression on the actresses face is marvelously discomforting, and it can’t be unintentional on the part of the advertisers. I wonder what the director said to her. Perhaps, “Try to look as if you’ve just dropped acid and you’re watching a dragon tenderly make love to a unicorn on a bed of rainbows.” They even have her raise a fast food beverage cup into frame and clumsily place the straw in her mouth without so much as moving her eyes. It’s an exceptionally unsophisticated image.

Nobody should look as rapturously mindless while watching television as Hulu has the subjects of its ads look. This is doubly true if the person is outside at the time. With the professional woman as with the man at the gym, the camera stays pretty close, but by all appearances it is a nice day outside. And yet Hulu’s concept of making the most of a lunch break on that day is to focus completely on an escapist fantasy and to never, ever glance for a moment at the sun. There’s no joke behind this as with the alien conspiracy ad; they’re actually saying that.

When I started to notice the popularity of watching television on DVD, I thought that there was something very positive about the changes to the way we consume media. At the same time that I miss the unifying experience of knowing that the rest of the country is watching the same thing at the same time, I considered it a worthy trade off, knowing that programs themselves were coming to be seen more as things to be sold directly, rather than just as means of delivering advertisements, and thus as things to be controlled by them. I liked the idea that Mad Men could make money because it was appreciated by its audience, and not just because it sold products. I realize, though, that that idea isn’t entirely accurate; the advertising is still primary, and it still affects the progress and direction of shows.

Now, not only does secondary advertising still hold sway over good media, the idea of entertainment as a product unto itself has proven to have a dark side. With companies now profiting not just from the consumption of their media but from the consumption of media in general, there are advertisers whose jobs have come to be to sell us on the very idea of watching television and movies, and to try to convince us that it’s better for us if we consume more, even as much as possible.

It’s only natural that a company tries to present its product as eminently beneficial to the consumer, especially in contrast to its competitors. It’s just less familiar, and quite unfortunate that in the cases of products like Hulu Plus, the major competitor is the entire outside world. Consequently the vision of such products’ ultimate benefit to your life is a situation in which you no longer have a life at all. “Make the most of everything” is a powerfully, and dangerously disingenuous slogan. With the haunting images of media addiction presented by such products as Hulu Plus and Digital Copy, about which I’ve written before, a far more fitting tagline would be, “You may as well not leave the couch.”

Life, Googled

I saw a television advertisement for Google yesterday. Not for any particular service offered by Google, just for the Google brand as a whole. I find it kind of strange that a powerful company with virtually no competition for its major services would run advertisements in the popular media simply promoting its own name. But I suppose it’s aimed not at encouraging people to use Google, but at encouraging them to use Google for everything. I’m taking the fact that they’ve seen fit to run the ad as a good sign that Google does still have competition and people are not yet flocking to it for all their worldly desires.

Yet the style and content of the ad does give the impression that that’s precisely what they are promoting. It consists of a lengthy montage of web searches, e-mail messages, videos, status updates, and so forth, and clearly the main idea is that every facet of life can be served by a Google application. It’s a familiar style of advertising – one that tries to saturate the viewer with beautiful or inspiring imagery to make them desire a more intimate connection with the world being depicted on the screen. And the consumer is meant to come away from it thinking that the given brand will help them to obtain that closeness.

I have two pieces of commentary to bring to bear on Google’s application of this advertising style. One observation is general to the commercial, and one is specific to a brief part of it that I find objectionable.

My general criticism is that the advertisement as a whole falls flat in its effort to inspire me with a barrage of imagery, drawn from disparate corners of human experience. It’s a type of content that I’ve considered effective elsewhere, for instance in the 2008-9 Discovery Channel “I Love the World” campaign. There’s a straightforward reason why I consider the Google ad to fail where that one succeeded. Google’s montage presents every scene as being two steps removed, rather than just one.

The images included in its montage are fairly familiar, on the whole. They are simply of people talking, or of significant but commonplace daily events like a child’s first bike ride. These things are perfectly accessible without a technological medium, and yet when I see them on the television screen, it is perfectly clear that they are being channeled through something external to both me and the person being depicted. Where the visual is of a Google+ chat session or the like, I find myself looking at a screen upon a screen, and that leaves me quite far from the reality of another person’s life. And where the scene is not affixed to a separate little box, it is a poor quality image, shaking as someone films the event on a handheld video camera.

The Discovery Channel ad was similar in basic intent to the Google ad, in that it was offering a mode of access to other events, experiences, and parts of the world through an intermediary, whether television media or computers. But two things differentiated the Discovery Channel visuals: They were professionally produced and they depicted experiences that were clearly remote and uncommon. Thus, I enjoyed crisp, almost lifelike views of African tribal ceremonies, and skydiving, and undersea exploration, and I got the impression that the Discovery Channel was capable of bringing me closer to things that I could not easily or quickly access on my own.

By contrast, the Google ad reminds me that the use of some of their services might actually put additional barriers between me and the people or circumstances I wish to access. And if what I’m trying to access is just people roughly like me and experiences similar to those that I’ve had, I can step out my front door and gain access to something of the same kind without Google’s help. And personally, I think I would be better off doing so in many cases. As so often happens, I worry that I’m practically alone in that thinking. I worry that most Americans have eschewed any breaking point on this subject, and that they think it’s actually preferable to use a technological middle man for everything they used to do for themselves.

That brings me to my particular gripe with the scenes depicted in the Google ad. At one point it shows someone Googling the phrase, “How to be a better dad.” Have we really come to a point where we think that even that is the sort of question that Google can resolve for us. I know some people think that widespread access to the internet means it’s no longer necessary to memorize any factual information whatsoever. Are we now at the point that retaining ethereal information, standards of personal behavior, and methods of character development are also considered obsolete?

There are some things that you don’t Google. I don’t care how sophisticated their algorithm becomes; no information that can be posted to the web takes the place of experience, practice, and acquired wisdom. Anyone who would Google the phrase “How to be a better dad” has no business being a dad. After all, he seems to be under the shockingly erroneous impression that effective parenthood is easy, and that the problem of child-rearing can be resolved with the click of a mouse, as opposed to, say, rigorous study and earnest commitment.

It troubles me to think that Google is encouraging people to lean on their brand to resolve fundamental human questions for them. Just so that I can beat them to the punch, I would like to recommend against Googling the following phrases, in case their next ad suggests that a web search will provide the answer to any of them:

“How to live my life.”

“How to believe in the one true faith.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Should I commit suicide?”

“Do I have a soul?”

“What is justice, Polemarchus?”

If at any time you have Googled one or more of these phrases, go outside and talk to somebody.

Super Bowl Ads

I’m the sort of person who likes to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. However, my enjoyment of advertising is not limited to that occasion, on which it has acquired a reputation for tremendous entertainment value. I find advertising terribly interesting, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from analyzing it – what I think works and what I think doesn’t, and moreover what I think the persons responsible for the advertisement are saying about their target audience and society at large.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl last night, as I don’t have television, and haven’t for quite some time. I did, however, take a look at a handful of the commercials online today. Of those that I viewed, I found the spots for Groupon and Living Social to be the best, both on point of humor and evident effectiveness. That was remarkable to me, because these are the newest companies represented, and indeed the newest kinds of companies in the current market. Concordantly, it seemed to me that they both produced commercials very specifically geared to a new generation of consumer.

Whereas the other spots that I sampled seemed fairly ordinary and non-adventurous with their content, the Groupon and Living Social ads seemed to be taking chances that might have alienated certain viewers, but likely not those that could be expected to utilize their services. The Groupon ads both made use of the same premise, masquerading as public service announcements for several seconds before effectively disregarding the plight of the whales and the Tibetan people in order to laud a deal related to each of them that the spokesperson had acquired through Groupon. The campaign runs the risk of being accused of insensitivity, but I think it adeptly walks that line without crossing it. The gamble at play here is, I think, an understanding about the social character of highly modern consumers, and I think the Groupon ads do a good job of identifying their target audience as the sort that would be likely to take an interest in social and environmental issues, but not in a humorless way. I take the makers of these spots to be assuming that the persons they are seeking to reach do not take themselves too seriously, and can laugh over their own causes, that they will both give those causes their attention and set them aside when it’s not an immediate concern, in order to take a nice whale-watching trip, or have a Tibetan meal. It may in fact be a jaded perspective, or it may be a livable and realistic one, but in any event, I agree with the implicit claim that it’s characteristic of the current generation.

Living Social goes another route, and puts itself at risk of being accused not of a deficiency of sensitivity, but of an excess of it. They present a burly, reclusive man at the start of the thirty second spot, and show him discovering Living Social and being exposed to a wealth of new activities and products, which change his appearance until, in the final reveal, he approaches a classy bar dressed as a woman. I imagine that there must be some amount of tenuousness when the idea has been presented to portray transvestitism positively during the nation’s most-watched sporting event. But anything with such a large audience is likely to have a diverse set of viewers, and Living Social did a fine job of zeroing in on those of them that would be likely to use their service, namely young, urban, open-minded consumers. The ad strikes me as a skillful act of selective alienation, with the makers of it recognizing at the outset that they were not going to reach everybody, and so making an ad that would be appealing only to the emergent market that their similarly nascent business is trying to tap. It is probably the case that only people who are okay with alternative lifestyles are likely to utilize Living Social.

I think it is interesting that the youngest companies have done some of the best jobs at trying to appeal to the youngest consumers. They do not have entrenched models for their advertising, and they may well have hired young firms to craft the commercials for them. It makes good sense that what is new in the marketplace of goods and services would mesh best with what is new in the marketplace of social ideas.