Free Cardiac Arrest With Every Viewing! The New Appeal to Fear Ad is Here (Part Three)
Free Cardiac Arrest With Every Viewing! The New Appeal to Fear Ad is Here (Part Three) by Roxanne McDonald
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[continued from part two] : Suddenly. Bang. With the blink of missing Daddy’s eye, a slamming, pounding, throbbing heartbanging background sound hits. Someone is at the door. You shriek to the kids, who are now paralyzed, to duck and cover cause we are all gonna be slaughtered on this sweet Wednesday night. But, no, ahhhh. The B.S. alarm system is activated. All is well. |
No. All is not well. Advertisers now take advantage of one of our five (or six) senses, our hearing, to coerce us into believing terrorist knock-offs are now making house calls. By simulating the natural diastolic-systolic action of the human heart, amplifying it, speeding it up, voila…even if viewers are not actively listening during invasive commercial time, they will stop drop what they are doing and take note of this new message to be afraid, no, to be terrified.
In this new appeal to terror subcategory is the bastardizing of sound effects to first inspire and incite through the ear but to appeal ultimately to the very viscera at the center of every single one of us.
But the agencies are not stopping at the terror generated by what would normally be at the very least an unnerving scenario. They are slipping this heart-seizing sound
pounding into ads for products we never considered we’d have to be afraid not to use. Voiceover messages about heavenly cream cheese are accompanied by pulsating heart beats, while the visuals feature merely baby blue and poofy white clouds and sky. A women’s deodorant stands—again baby blue—on an imaginary pedestal, montaged over a small gathering of quiet buddies of both sexes, while in the background a heart beats frantically. A cellular phone company ad employs a hip hopping rhythm, under whose guise beats a beat that goes, yes, straight to the ol’ ticker.
One well established vision center uses a schoolish young woman speaking a fairly straight and direct monologue about the importance of cheap, fast and available eye-ware, but plants a deliberate heartbeat backdrop in the mix, implying we must run to this gawkish young assistant ASAP, or suffer the possibility of heart failure.
And in the most remarkable of all non-sequitur uses of sound to oblige the kicking in of our phobic dread is a seemingly facile but highly deceptive ad: in clean lines, primary colors, and a variety of working class textures, carpet swatches and linoleum squares fill the screen as a nice homey voice describes the deals available. At the same time that the homemaker sees the array of domestic deals, a throbbing, urgent bounding sound of a heart beats so hard and loud we are sure if we don’t get that new brickled vinyl surely our sweat glands will burst, our bowels will shudder, our heart—and therefore our very life—will stop.
Granted, among this toxic mix are ads that abstain from using death rattles from the ER, and granted, they convey an effective message; serious and clever PSA’s use just language to convince us to care for our health by having top celebrities personify a stroke who says to us, “I’m cold. I’m calculating. I get what I want…. I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, young or old; I will come after you…. Nobody likes me. Nobody.” And while these public service announcements are just that, not selling us anything that will profit them monetarily, while these spots do manipulate language in a beneficent way, other ads in this neo-commercial-deconstructivist-Big Brother-Fear Factor turned Mad Max-Running Man culture not only misappropriate language, music and sound, they misappropriate to the nth.
Why in hell, for example, does a yeast medication ad have a ringing telephone? Why does some swipper swiper product have a sudden piercing teakettle shriek? And why, again I ask, is there a frenzied heartbeat in a carpet ad? Possibly because the Shakespearean convention of repetition—to keep the rowdy or the inattentive rabble engaged—doesn’t work anymore. Sponsors need sharper, more-piercing attention-getters. Though I still balk: do they have to jam the knitting needles of noise into our skulls? Do they not care that they are contributing to the erosion of peace and sanity with their cacophonies?
Free Cardiac Arrest With Every Viewing! The New Appeal to Fear Ad is Here (Part Two)
Free Cardiac Arrest With Every Viewing! The New Appeal to Fear Ad is Here (Part Two) by Roxanne McDonald
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[continued from part one] : They use, as many of us might have learned from Marshall McCluhan, Vance Packard, and our critical thinking class professors, studied techniques and strategies of the commercial industry to get us to join the pod people, to fork over the cash without so much as a resisting clearing of the throat…. |
So we can look like, smell like, taste like, drive like, be like, we accept the rigors of appeal to authority ads that feature our coveted Cindy Crawfords, our beloved George Costanzas (Jason Alexanders), our idolized rock hockey movie football baseball blues stars. We get real hungry, all of a sudden, when we watch that 5’10 model we were sure never ate more than water sit in front of us and gorge herself with a drippy meaty triple-stacked burger. We somehow believe if our quirky stocky malcontent can stand in an elevator holding a bag of pretzels that lures the babes, we can, too. We mentally grunt and whoop and thump our chests in anticipation of driving that new vehicle, which usually looks like a giant sneaker, that romps and races over mountainous terrain, through mud blasts, up cliff sides as the grand music of a top ten sex symbol cheers us on.
Paralleling this need for stardom is our need to stand up, stand out, so we are seduced by appeal to popularity ads that feature a once presidential hopeful getting turned on by a slinky salacious teen singing the praises of soda pop. We stack our humble closets with clothing that will make men turn their heads the way they do when the size five former nanny from Queens struts by. We stock our cabinets and shelves with bottles and bags and cans of stuff that will have women gawking and gurgling as we trust they will when we pose naked—but cologne-clad, of course—against a Greco-roman pillar that stands against a stormy Calvin Klein backdrop.
For us simpler, folksy folk, who crave the stolid confidence that convention brings, we buy into appeal to tradition ads that reward our behavior with a milky caramel like the one Grandma used to give us when we were good. And if appeal to wisdom actors have relied for decades on the rock to protect their families in case they drop dead, then we daren’t go with another insurance company, dare we? To bide with propriety, we fall for appeals to pity, allow ourselves to be sucked into the mud of appeals to prejudice, and succumb to appeals to fear advertising that indulges our compulsions, compunctions, obsessions–calming the clean-freak in us with room
deodorizers (now motor driven) that suppress the smells of what we had for dinner or of how hairy and therefore embarrassing our dog is, arming our septuagenarian parents with help buttons in case they fall in the basement bathtub while we are slogging away at our ten-hour day, satisfying after hours stress with the same chewy and long-lasting candy that—once a dramatic reminder of what it is to be loved by dear knitting Grammy–is now a panacea: pop one in, put your feet up, and you, too, can make the (manic) world go away as easily as if you had popped your daily paranoia/anxiety/over-amped with ADD pill.
It is this latter contemporary condition of being so collectively and individually undone by a speeding greedy culture, of being so enmeshed in a go faster do more get more do better than your best until you are a mass of mental messes that the commercial world is now clutching. (read more…)
Free Cardiac Arrest With Every Viewing! The New Appeal to Fear Ad is Here
Free Cardiac Arrest With Every Viewing! The New Appeal to Fear Ad is Here by Roxanne McDonald
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…Hey now, all you children Leave your lights on, you better leave your lights on…Cause there’s a monster living under my bed/Whispering in my ear There’s an angel, with a hand on my head She say I’ve got nothing to fear…. –E.Scrody/Everlast |
[Note:This is part one of a three-part article on noisy #@!&^%%commercials. I will update, disclaim, revise, and more later, so take it easy if you don’t like or agree with what you read….]
So I’m working on my Compaq computer, happy with the rain and a warm Kenmore oven, though not so much with the cheeky five a.m. Channel Five News. I work for a long time, long enough to drink a bowl of Sanka latte, take three Feng Shui’d bathroom breaks, have two meals of whatever Jimmy Dean meat and whatever Kellogg’s variety pack cereal I want, and smoke a bundle of Kool cigarettes. Multi-tasking away, I hear—though I don’t pointedly listen—how severe cold back east is so “incognito “ cold that your flesh freezes in three minutes; that a young woman, shackled in a police car, somehow manages to get her foot to the gas and run over her arresting officer; that some sports figure has been busted for drunk driving.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. These vignettes, re-run three or four times an hour, aren’t enough to stop my work, for like many of us, I’m so numb to the future that is here and now that I don’t even mutter or guffaw anymore. I keep working, waiting patiently till enough programming choices are available on this $100 a month cable service that I can remote-click to something soothing, the 9 a.m. Dick Van Dyke Show and the TVLand lineup that follows.
So great, huh? So nurturing, so comforting to have our latchkey childhoods back with “The Brady Bunch,” “I Love Lucy…,” the shows that do that soft slapstick shuffle, the ones with those empty, facile guffaws in a can, giving us a sense of nothing mattering, nothing even existing outside our cocoon of the plump pastels of Bob Newhart and his cooing passivity and everyman stuttery shuddering; of the scratchy blacks and whites of “The Jackie Gleason Show” and his jiggly jousty rants buffered by the simpleton kindness of Ed Norton; of the deep purples and tangy bright greens of the engaging silly, serialized shows like Batman with its smooth and macho heroics of the dynamic duo ushered into action by the paternal caring cadence of the gentle Commissioner Gordon. Ahhhhh.
Like many in today’s speed culture, I have been swept up in the challenge to defy a law of physics that asserts two things cannot exist in the same place at the same time: I chuckle and type to Andy of Mayberry and that absurdly adorable Opie that no kid has yet out-cuted—though Cosby’s Raven Symoné (playing little Olivia) comes
close—and whiz through a chapter during the foppy floppy gesturing of Derwood during one of his whacky witch wife’s spells, click away revising, and am about six pages in. I’ve let go of the peripheral grip of TV as the only thing of focus and am into my work. I mean into it. As if I had shrunk to the size of a stick figure drawing and climbed into the Microsoft Word document, moving the words like building blocks, stacking the appositives, kicking away the superfluous punctuation. I’m getting excited. My breathing picks up, my blood pumps. I am thumping away, thumping, thumping, chathumping, chathumping, chathump chathump chathumpchathumpchathum. My. God. What. Is. This. Ungodly. Feeling…? Son of a…it’s on TV!
Mel Gibson and Scott Baio in LA Sherrifs Commercial
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Wow! You gotta see this one! Mel Gibson and Scott Baio in LA Sherrifs Commercial It’s the Mel Gibson Commercial for LASSO! Pictured are Mel Gibson (not Scott Baio) and some guy that looks like Rudy Giuliani, but most likely he is a Malibu cop or Sherrif. |
Mel Gibson of recent Malibu DUI fame,
plays a tough cop as he grills Scott Baio in this commerical for the LA Sherrif.
You have gotta see this commercial! (read more…)
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