by Penny, Laura
Ads are a much bigger business than PR. Total U.S. ad spending grew alongside the nineties’ boom, increasing from an estimated $128 billion in 1991 to $247 billion in 2000, when every product, from soup to hair gel to golf balls, ran some bogus millennium-themed promotional campaign. Ad spending dipped by about 16 billion clams in 2001, doubtless due to the effects of prolonged ad-free September 11 coverage. In 2002, spending inched back up to $237 billion. In 2003, onward and upward, the revenues went, to $245 billion. Projections for 2004 are more and better, hovering around $263 billion. U.S. ad sales represent about half of the global market.
In terms of both revenue and spending, PR remains a much more modest affair. An industry trade group, the Council of Public Relations Firms, estimates that global PR revenues were approximately $5.4 billion in 2002. However, PR revenues have been growing steadily since the mid-nineties, precisely because good PR is so much cheaper and more cost-effective than a big, splashy ad campaign.
Advertising and PR make one thing and one thing only, and that is shit up. Making shit up is not to be confused with outright lying, though lying is sometimes involved. Making shit up is more like painting the lawn green when the queen comes to town. The grass may well be green to start with, but it ain’t that green. Ads present something tangential to the truth—something more interesting or enjoyable or photogenic or sentimental than the truth. For example: Yes, that company makes a car. It exists and it is available. I can indeed purchase that Chevy Tacoma, or that Nissan Xterra. But there is a hitch. In the television ads for the Tacoma, where the car tears over rugged, rocky hills, and the Xterra, where the car zips and zags over sand dunes, there are disclaimers that read, “Professional Stunt Driver. Closed Course. Do Not Attempt.” The product is real, but the situation pictured is as phony as a chocolate doubloon.
SUV ads are particularly odious. The notorious gas-guzzlers are invariably shown speeding through the glorious natural world that their emissions threaten. One recent SUV ad shows a young man at the reading of a will. The executor announces that he has received a large parcel of swampland. That’s not a family fuck-you from beyond the grave, though—the next scene shows an SUV tooling around the bogs, wheels churning up the muck. Yee-haw! cries the dude, while, off-camera, the surrounding marshland flora and fauna suffer multiple embolisms. The swamp ad is but one in a genre; ads also depict SUVs plowing through the forest, the desert, the mountains, the tundra, and the ocean surf.
In an ad for the SUV to end all SUVs, the gargantuan Hummer H2, some sweet little kids gather for a soapbox derby race. There are shots of a young boy cobbling his entry, a soapbox Hummer, together. The kids line up on top of a hill in their adorable little cars. The race begins, and all the kids’ cars trundle along the track to the jangling chords of The Who’s “Happy Jack,” but the rugged young individualist in the homemade Hummer can’t be confined by the pedestrian rules of the road. The kid in the Hummer barrels straight down the hill, finishing ahead of all the chumps who stuck to the prescribed course. The charming, twee look of the ad appears to be cribbed from the wonderful movie Rushmore, but the message—that one should barrel past others in a tank—is pure hubristic Hummer.
Allow me to share with you a highly unscientific survey of the advertising I have seen during my prime-time sessions of random channel flipping: Apparently, Burger King has a new chicken baguette sandwich that gets its flavor from fire-grilling, not fat. The low-fat angle is part of a more widespread fast-food makeover, but this is not the first time that Burger King, perpetrator of the Croissan’wich, has tried to peddle their grease by pretending it’s European. Hair products and cars also claim continental styling, whatever that means. Suffice it to say that the sandwich itself looks about as Parisian as Des Moines, and, unlike the car ads, there is no disclaimer to warn you that the actual sandwich will contain one half the color and freshness of the advertised sandwich, though I know this to be true from my own dining experience.
Next, the trim silver-haired lady in the Celebrex ad plays golf with gay abandon, insisting that joint pain isn’t going to make her play nine holes when she really wants to go for the full eighteen. She’s feisty, but the ad is not the rapturous ode to joy that Celebrex ads once were. The manufacturers had their knuckles rapped by regulators for making excessive product claims, so the old ads—the ones with seniors Rollerblading and doing tai chi and a chorus that trilled, “Do what you want to do, go where you want to go”—have been yanked. The Celebrex ad ends like all drug ads end. The voice-over warns of the side effects, lists the contraindications, and then encourages you to ask your doctor.
More car ads, endless car ads, bumper-to-bumper pitches for cars, cars, cars. One for the Mitsubishi Endeavor starts with the sleek black behemoth streaking out of a tunnel, under an overpass, toward the open road. Guitars yowl. Then the camera cuts to the interior of the minivan, to a happy young family, and the music changes, to a snippet of the SpongeBob SquarePants theme. Don’t worry, aging hipsters—you can breed and rock, at the same time, in the same affordable vehicle. Next, we have soccer uniform–clad girls and freckle-faced towheads in plaid shirts experiencing the full-day relief of prescription Strattera. As the ad cuts from footage of the little ADD-lings behaving at school to shots of them behaving at the dinner table, the voice-over warns of side effects. The disclaimer notes that Strattera has not been tested on children under six. Guess you’ll have to find other meds for the baby.
Next we have a spot for the Honda Pilot that features a husband who has been raised by wolves, one in a proud tradition of ads based on the premise that men are dumb. In many ads, men are so boneheaded they cannot even be trusted to buy toilet paper on their own. Then McDonald’s hops on the hip-hop tip, with their latest rapped ad and their tag line, “I’m lovin’ it.” A GE ad compares their new smart washer-dryers to a marriage between a computer geek and a supermodel, and then flashes the many insignias of their umpteen diversified brands. Meet Blue Cash, says American Express, to funky pizzicato flutes. Wendy’s “unofficial spokesman” stalks snackers, supposedly of his own free will. And then, lip-licking, liquor-pitching sirens appear, misty and writhing with, um, thirst.
The late, great comedian Bill Hicks said that ads were porn, according to the Supreme Court definition: sexual content with no redeeming artistic merit. When he saw the Doublemint twins, he certainly wasn’t thinking of gum. This brings me to the Coors twins. For those of you in the cloisters, this classic ad features a song about all the good things in life, like watching TV and drinking beer, and hot, wet, identical twins in as little fabric as the law allows. The difference between the Doublemint twins and the Coors twins is a difference of degree, not kind.
Even the most lunkheaded Yankee ad has production values and professionalism going for it. Canadian advertising is its own little earnest, mid-priced world of awful. Most Canadian ads have the dingy, amateurish mien of cable access footage. There are way too many dairy board ads. I think I know about eggs, thanks. McCain’s, a humongous Canuck food concern, is responsible for a panoply of terrible, low-budget ads for its various edibles, from fries to cakes to pizzas. In one for frozen juice concentrate, a dreadlocked guy plays a merry tune on drinking glasses while a hippie chick saws on a neon-green violin. It ranks among the most uncool attempts to be cool I have ever seen.
Advertising desperately wants to be and purvey cool, and often does so by serenading us with our own music collections. This also smuggles junk into our brains in a Trojan horse of sweet melody. Molson, of all the hockey haircut beers, used the Smiths’ mope-pop classic, “How Soon Is Now?” to push their frat-boy suds, even though Molson guzzlers tended to shove pasty Brit-pop fans into lockers. Companies like The Gap, Volkswagen, and Apple plundered the playlists of indie rock snobs in search of catchy tunes, and nothing was too obscure or political to push product. When my activist pals and I were editing footage of lefty protests in the ancient early nineties, the soundtrack question was not which band we should use, but which
Clash song. Now “London Calling” is the call of the Jaguar X-Type. Scottish rock darlings Mogwai are featured in a Levi’s ad. Nissan is moving minivans with a few bars from Modest Mouse. Some artists have even learned how to game the promo system. The ubiquitous Moby made the transition from obscure vegan electronica guy to U.S. magazine celebrity by selling every single song from his 1999 album, Play, to advertisers. This is a deal with the devil, though. Once it is plundered by advertisers, a song will be bound forever to beer or shampoo, or, in Moby’s case, countless movie trailers and TV shows, American Express, and a couple of different, competing cars.
Advertisers’ zeal to use song titles as slogans sometimes leads to shotgun weddings. It was all well and good to use Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” in the movie Trainspotting, since we were still in the realm of junkiedom, but its use as an anthem for family cruise lines is a thing passing strange. Sure, it’s an upbeat number, but your average Carnival cruiser would call 911 if they beheld the writhing specter of Iggy circa 1977. Another famous failed example of this is the Reagan team’s request to use “Born in the U.S.A.” as their official campaign song, a request the Boss justly denied.
Try though I may, I cannot think of one television ad, of the hundreds of thousands I have seen in a lifetime of couch potato sessions, that I would really like to see again. I am also enervated by the fact that ads are always louder than programming, and that ads tend to run simultaneously on the major networks, so as to discourage fleeing channel flippers. Advertisers have let out a mighty hue and cry over the popularity of digital video recorders, like TiVo, which allow viewers to skip over their masterpieces entirely. In fact, even though ad skipping is one of the main reasons why TiVo devotees love their TiVos, the company recently agreed to run pop-ups to help make up for all the fast-forwarding.
My objection to advertising is not merely aesthetic. Each and every shill is a tax-deductible cost of doing business, and thus a double insult. The billions that companies spend to convince you that you are a smelly, yellow-toothed porker translate into millions fewer for the public purse and drive up the price of products. A pair of Nikes only costs a few bucks to make, but it costs a lot to get Michael Jordan to invest those shoes with the holy Nike aura.
My mystical language is purposeful: Advertising attempts above all to sanctify mass-produced crap with a halo of uniqueness and beauty, or deliciousness and comfort, or coolness and Xtremity. Ads determine not only what we buy but how we perceive ourselves and even what we do. There is, for example, mounting evidence that we may be making ourselves ill with our ad-induced scrubbing. While we scour the world to a sterile gleam and mock the mammal scents of our continental friends, research tells us that kids in slightly grimy houses have a lower incidence of asthma than those who live in immaculate surroundings. And antibiotic hand washes only accelerate the development of more resistant bugs, a process already well under way thanks to the mass prescribing of antibiotics.
When you pay the piper, you call the tune—which means that ads also determine the content we consume. Thus, Bill Hicks never got to do his last set on Late Night with David Letterman, although he had previously appeared on the show eleven times. He performed his monologue for Dave and the audience before the taping began. But at the last minute, his performance was unceremoniously dumped. Hicks had a bit about pro-lifers, and one of the show’s sponsors was a pro-life organization. Hicks was so incensed that he wrote a letter about the perils of truth-telling in the “United States of Advertising” to The New Yorker writer John Lahr. “Look at 90 percent of what’s on TV,” Hicks wrote. “Banal, puerile, trite scat.” Letterman, a big fan, was contrite about the way the producers handled the situation, but Hicks died of pancreatic cancer, at the age of thirty-two, before the show could book him again.
Sponsors are not often so flagrantly censorious, as ads usually influence content further upstream. Networks generally feel compelled to pitch all programs to the lowest common denominator, or to the most desirable demographic, the eighteen-to-thirty-four set, so as to satisfy advertisers. To see the way that network advertiser dollars produce programming pabulum, watch an episode of Six Feet Under or The Sopranos, made by the commercial-free HBO and compare it to your standard-issue schlubby-guy-married-to-a-beautiful-lady sitcom, or one of the countless cop dramas that are copies of copies of Law and Order, or any of the cheap and venal reality shows.
In the same way that most of us consider ourselves excellent bullshit detectors, we generally think ourselves immune to ads. Some shrewd marketing pros have caught on to this resistance, or resentment, and insist that PR is the new brand-building force. Ads are obvious and ubiquitous, but PR cloaks itself in credibility. PR is the stealth form of advertising—a far more subtle art. Its stock in trade is the semi-science and pseudo-research that so often end up in the news. One nice example of this sort of press-release-friendly research is the Credibility Index, produced by a consortium of top PR firms. This is a ranking of occupations according to trustworthiness. Supreme Court justices, teachers, ordinary citizens, and military officials get high trust ratings, according to the survey. Public relations specialists, like the nice people who conducted the research, rank third from the bottom, just ahead of Hollywood phonies like entertainers and talk-show hosts, and well behind other alleged fibbers, like politicians and CEOs.
PR specialists are nothing if not diligent in their attempts to work their way up the Index. This may explain why they bandy about the word ethics so freely. On one of the countless websites that do PR for PR, a slogan reads, “Ethical PR: Not an Oxymoron!” When you have to say that sort of thing with an exclamation mark, perhaps your image-making business has an image problem. Both the American and Canadian public relations guilds stress the importance of ethics for the public relations practitioner. The first line of the Public Relations Society of America Members’ Code of Ethics Pledge reads, “I pledge to conduct myself professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.” The predominant model of conduct in most current PR-school literature is journalism. PR counselors, like reporters, must disseminate factually accurate information in a clear and compelling manner. The big difference is that journalists don’t engineer the events that they report on. Sure, journalists and their editors choose to cover the corrupt company or the dog show, but they generally don’t fabricate stories from whole cloth, Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass notwithstanding. PR is unabashedly a full-service operation: They produce the event and report on it.
It takes PR to turn the mere fact of a new product or a new policy into a bona fide event. And it takes PR to hand the first drafts of reportage to the media. PR is like having your very own personal reporter, writing The You Times, where the news, even if it’s bad, even if it’s not news at all, still makes you look good. And if you’re a big PR firm like Burson-Marsteller, then you are writing The You Times for folks like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, those responsible for the Bhopal disaster, the Saudi royal family, the people who produce bovine growth hormones, and Exxon after the Valdez spill.
There have, of course, been spokespeople and promoters since the dawn of time. The word propaganda comes from the efforts of the Catholic Church, under Pope Gregory XV, to propagate the faith in the wake of the Reformation. Publicity materials and handbills were used by manufacturers of soap and patent medicines in North America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But public relations and advertising as established, lucrative professions grew huge over the last century, expanding alongside media technologies like radio, television, and the Internet. Advertising got a head start: The first ad agency in the United States opened in Philadelphia in 1841. By the 1890s, J. Walter Thompson, the oldest North American ad agency still operating, was billing a million dollars a year. By the turn of the century, Coca-Cola’s advertising budget was up to 100,000 dollars a year, and newcomer Pepsi hit the market in 1902, starting the glorious century-long advertising bonanza that is the Cola War.
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bsp; The Publicity Bureau, the first PR firm in North America, also opened at the turn of the century, in 1901. The Boston office practiced a sort of proto-PR, helping clients look good in the muckraking dailies of the time. It’s difficult to determine the parentage of an entire profession, and this goes double for a field like public relations, since a couple of early PR men laid claim to the title “Father of PR” when doing their own PR. The two most serious contenders, though, in terms of sheer influence and longevity, are “Poison” Ivy Lee and Edward L. Bernays.
Lee was a reporter who got into the nascent publicity biz in 1903. He counted Bethlehem Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and American Tobacco among his clients. He also implemented the Rockefeller family makeover in 1914; after thirteen women and children were killed in a labor protest at a Rockefeller mine in Ludlow, Missouri, and the robber barons took a beating in the press and public opinion, Ivy did damage control and rehabilitated their public image. After first spinning the massacre into a blow for “industrial freedom,” Lee’s strategy was simple: Actions speak louder than words. The Rockefellers’ subsequent actions—oodles of cash for philanthropic initiatives, the pursuit of political office—have made the Ludlow mine disaster the obscurest of labor history footnotes, and the name Rockefeller synonymous with dynastic East Coast wealth. The rich guy on The Flintstones was a Rockefeller; Jay-Z, one of the most successful East Coast rappers, probably didn’t dub his posse the Roc-A-Fella crew to invoke strike-breaking incidents of yore.
