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

[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?

The commercial milieu has taken beautiful music, natural bodily rhythms, and the gift of the word to coerce, cajole, convince, seduce, hypnotize, harass, harangue, taunt, tease, and, well, terrorize us. No more appalling than the new batches of ads that denigrate children (wife tells husband that now that the kids are gone they can eat the good soup, or man berates woman for teaching baby billy bob that a pretty car is more appealing than a hemi truck), 21st century TV commercials use as well as replace appeals to what we want/need to be with pejorative appeals to what we must be or else.

And these new creations, slipped not so subtly in between the more clever ads that make innocent, innocuous fun with music–like “*675309” in an ad for rollover

minutes–or make funny—like the party with the missing milk even after the Damien clone warns them–are indicators of what we have become: no more then automatons of consumerism, no more a cruel and callous people, self involved and self-aggrandizing, no longer just prodded into being better people by way of materialism, we are wrangled, roped and corralled into the caves of the Morlocks. As Ginsberg admonished, “Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture,” so let’s face it, we are not, folks, the consumers. We are the consumed.
And as we Eloi are admonished by the Time Traveler to do, so must we be fair in our thinking about commercials as an inevitable, as an imperative. Yes, we can not elude the onslaught of ads on TV anymore than we can un-crack a Foster Farms egg, un-strike a Diamond match, or un-burn a Pres-to log. We cannot evade advertisements that make up more than 50% of our popular magazines, that adorn our streets and highways, that flash with a strobing repugnance harsh enough to trigger an epileptic fit in our cyberspaces.

Commercials are money and money is power and power is not going to get relinquished in order that we go back to the days of simple barter and trade systems of the simple supply and demand survival days. I accept this. Just as I accept that viewers are targeted and tethered to a set demographic. Just as I accept the inevitability of redundancy eclipsing what could be poetic, effective repetition, what should be more than what Joyce distinguished as improper art, what could, without shame, transcend the obscenity of the representing of that-which-is-to-be-desired-and-possessed. Just as I accept that without sponsors, without creative ad genius there would be no TV. And I love TV. So to those who say I shouldn’t watch TV at all if I don’t like the encroachment of advertising, which is progressively coming to take over more and more air time (during, say, the a.m. news, when every one byte of info is suspended while every one equally timed commercial is aired, giving us a schizophrenic news-ad-news-ad session), I say no way am I giving up the Kramer’s giddyups on Seinfeld, Lucy’s chocolate factory stint, or Opie’s coochie choochie face of bliss and mud stains as he hugs with his chubby little arms and grubby little hands his Paw.

So I don’t know about you, but when that maddening hypnotic moaning of the Morlocks’ commercial break obtrusively sounds and that seductive stabbing of an appeal to terror alarm resounds, I ain’t going without a resistance, mouth agape, single pastel pretty file lined up to the door. I’m hitting the greatest defense mechanism made since Alka-Seltzer, Pepto Bismol, and Prozac. I’m pressing the MUTE panel on my AT&T remote and going back, peaceful and content, to my Laura Schudder’s natural peanut butter, 100% Canadian maple syrup, and Farmer’s Market banana sandwich. And for dessert (at 10 a.m., yes), I’m having me a Paul Newman’s Crispy Rice Bar, topped with Soy Dream ricecream. Screw Atkins, I ain’t buyin’ it. None of it.

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