the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
the age of advertising ~ April 9, 2002 - 9:16 p.m. eeek! diaryland has this thing, they run ads for other people's diaries when you're logged on and writing in yours and stuff. right now there's a banner at the top of the screen for a diary called waxpoetic that says My soul leaks out from my eyes. ewwww... there's some mental images you just don't need. no offense, I haven't even looked at the diary. now I guess I'll have to check it out, just because I've spent a couple of paragraphs talking about it. the power of advertising. I worked in the kitchen today, and I was talking to some people about advertising while I was chopping veggies. I'm fascinated by advertising, the art and science of marketing. I'm struck by it when I see something really effective. an ad that provokes an emotional response from me in spite of the fact that I'm aware that it's designed to provoke an emotional response from me. or something really creative that speaks to something other than your average joe schmoe mainstream-white-male demographic. I saw something fascinating at a phil and friends show a couple of years ago. over by the vending booths was a group of drums that looked like pringles cans, and a sign from the pringles people inviting folks to step right up and use their drums. and of course, people did. some brilliant ad minion at pringles corp said "hey, hippies play drums!", and lo and behold, kids were staging a free pringles commercial at a phil and friends show. not knocking the hippie kids for playing free drums, nor even pringles corp for providing them. I'm just saying, it's fascinating. what really fascinates me, and this is what I was talking about today, is the way in which you can pick up on what dominant themes are playing on the surface of our cultural consciousness by watching advertising and seeing the patterns in who they're marketing to and how. what messages they're sending. and the last couple of years I've been noticing some really intense patterns in mass marketing. a lot of the advertising lately seems to have messages about clarity, breath, heart, spirit, living well, true things... I think our culture is experiencing a shift, I think more and more people are starting to wake up and look around them and to realize that there's more to life than what they've known. they're looking for something true, something real, something with heart. seeking a path. I think that this is something that's been building for a long time, but I think it's finally large enough that ad companies are starting to market to it. this is where a lot of people get confused about what it is that I'm saying. I'm not saying that advertising is a positive thing or that the heinous corporations that run our country are somehow involved in something beautiful and benevolent. they're not. what I'm saying is that advertising is a cultural indicator. it tells us something about the kind of messages we, as a culture, are likely to respond to at any given point in time. and I think it was a year and a half ago that I saw a coca-cola commercial, of all things, where a group of people were sitting on a rooftop at dawn. and as the light of the rising sun broke over their faces, they glanced around at each other without a word, sharing these blissed-out smiles, and turned their eyes back to the sunrise. then the words appeared on the screen: share something real. coca-cola paid some people a lot of money to find out that that is the message that we, as a culture, want to hear. these are the things that give me hope.
(((rings))) |