Hot Trends to Watch in Advertising
1. Distortion and amplification.
A recent surge in ads featuring disgusting noises and computer-distorted images started to swing with a cola ad a few years ago in which an ugly kid on a beach, sucking the last drips from a bottle through a straw, deflates his head and chest and ends up sucked into the bottle by his own self-created pressure vacuum. I suppose the repulsive display sold a lot of soda, because the gag has been repeated to pitch milk, orange juice, cat litter, fast food, you name it. Loudly amplified slurping, sucking, chewing, swallowing, and other bodily sounds must put some ad exec's preteen son into absolute ecstatic frenzy; the agencies just love the effect! The visual distortions are even easier to understand: everybody's got computers that can stretch photographic images in various obscene ways, and playing with toys is the primary psychological motivation for nine-tenths of all computer use.
Coming soon: George W. Bush sitting on a porch, and against the ambience of a Texas sunset and quasi-triumphal music, sucking Al Gore's brains out of his head with a straw jammed in Gore's ear, while Dubya's eyes bulge out of the sockets. As Gore's head collapses, Bush will smile up to his forehead and remark, "I'm a reformer with results! Drink more liberal brains and vote for yer pal George Dubya Bush!"
2. Grungy young people.
Now that the grunge movement is dead, the rear-guard of popular culture has finally caught up, and the phony hippies of the late 1980s are now the ad population of the moment. This trend began with the Gap's zombie kids singing crappy 60s pop songs (see, it's ironic pop-culture redux), but has now spread to ridiculous lengths: grungers in elevators blowing up the musak by eating tortilla chips; grungers using computers; grungers as CEOs. What this trend represents is, oddly, not a trend at all, but the permanent representative task of all secondary pop culture (advertising being the basic form): narcissistic self-repetition. If an image or a slogan caught attention once, it will catch it thousands of times; i.e., milk it, milk it, milk it. Grungy kids today represent grungy kids of the past, who mimicked a kind of grungy idealization of grungy kids of years past.
What to watch for: If Al Gore trails in the polls in late September, the campaign will trot out a spot featuring badly lit shots of Big Al walking along a wet street in frayed bell-bottom jeans (the Gap, $39.95) and a velour shirt (Old Navy, $28.99) with a string of love beads (Bead Shack, Arlington Mall, $12.00)
3. Advertising more advertising.
A typical ploy of e-commerce advertising is to send you to the site through advertising on another medium. The big issue for making the web profitable had been at first how to get people to deliberately choose to go to your online advertising, given the huge number of other options available to computer users. Why, after all, should a user spend time downloading pictures of your company's sport-utility vehicle when they can spend that same time downloading pictures of naked people? A current Nike campaign involves high-speed jump-cut movements, with a bit of the feel of video games, in which the viewer of the ad is referred to directly as the one going though this experience. The sequence ends abruptly, and a notice appears telling viewers the rest of the film can be seen on a web page. I can only presume there are people so committed to Nike's goal of enslaving third-world children to sell overpriced sneakers that the desire to see the rest of the ad compels them to log on and watch. It's that kind of dedicated consumer that advertisers want.
New development: John McCain has attracted Nike-esque enthusiasm with his anti-politics. The Senator, best known for his irascible demeanor and contrarianism, still manages to get voters to join his cyber-campaign in droves. They log on and donate money for McCain to spend on advertising. If nothing else is accomplished, this at least directs more much-needed cash to the agencies that shill for him. Look for McCain to air spots in which he begins stump speeches, only to end them in mid-sentence, with the crowd in fever pitch, and say "continued on McCain2000.com."
4. Ugly people.
Actually, this is a waning trend, drenched in the ideology of the "persecuted white male." If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that the persecuted white male is actually an oppressed blue-color male. If you haven't been paying attention, you just saw a bunch of ugly guys on TV. They sold and drank beer, they drove cars, they bought furniture, they danced, they slept, they tried to sell stock, but mostly they just populated ads. Agencies must have thought they looked like ordinary folks, salt of the earth - you know, morons. Their days are numbered with few digits.
What we'll see: Bill Bradley.
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