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

[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.

It is no longer just our fear of catching something we could suffer from, fear of losing something we worked hard for, fear of not getting something we need to survive that the big money markets appeal to. It is now necessary—because we are becoming immune to the ordinary ad, are building up a resistance to the ambiguous and euphemistic twisting of language and therefore aren’t buying enough—to tap into (or, if it’s not there, to create) a new level of fear with a new strain of virulent and viscous advertising ploys: to find and exacerbate, to exploit, or—when they have to—to generate in us absolute terror.

Plain old one dimensional appeal to fear strategies have nothing on this new subspecies, with its manipulation of auditory, linguistic, and musical elements. So for God’s sake, get ready, people. You are a single smiling mom

sitting with your kids in front of a blue movie flicker in a dark but cozy living room that is furnished nicey nice with overstuffed couch, oversized fluffy doggie pet, happy snuggly under homemade afgans children eating warm homemade popcorn from an overflowing bowl. 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.
Continued in Part Three

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.