Nationally Advertising Pedophilia

[Sepka]

Nothing in modern advertising is accidental.

Nothing.

Advertisers aren't all powerful. They're often even not all that smart. Some years back I sat behind two adverising executives on a cross country flight. They spent four full hours discussing one client (and this was a *major* IT client, so I have to assume they were major account reps), who was running a contest in an IT magazine. The contest was going to run for six months. The payoff, from the client's perspective, was that they wanted to collect information about people's networks and servers. You had to fill out a survey card to enter the contest. Well and good - that's fairly standard.

Their problem was that the client wanted to get a good-sized sample up front. For four hours, these two doofuses rattled on about how to get people to enter the contest early when it ran for six months. Four hours of intense headscratching discussion yielded the idea that they'd offer an early-bird prize to people who entered in the first month. That was a stroke of unparalleled brilliance for them both - you could just tell by the way they treated the idea. You might have thought they were the first ones ever to think of that.

I don't doubt the presence of the airbrushed figures in the ice cubes, flames, etc, but don't be too impressed by them. They're in there not because of any sober calculation, not because anyone really knows what effect they'll have, but because someone has vague, anecdotal evidence that they may have had an effect in a past advertisement. Modern advertising is as much superstition as it is science, possibly more. I've long been of the belief that most of the money spent on ad campaigns is wasted.

[pepsified thinker]

Maybe it's just me--filters of some kind here where I work?--but the image is no longer accessible.

I'm guessing the Little Debbies/NASCAR powers that be acted to pull it.

I googled for it and it comes up as a thumbnail sized pic, but trying to go to it leads to a dead end.

[JackRiddler]

No, it's not bad.

What I wrote above applies to the "creatives" making big-budget advertising. They would never fail to understand what Lolita implied, and if you anything from (like the McDonald's ads), it's intentional.

But I can believe some Woolworth marketing heinies coming up with names for bed models might call one Lolita and fail to get the reference. They're a different class of worker bee.

[JackRiddler]

@ compared2what:

No, it's not bad to post it, I do wonder if the Woolworth story applies.

Above I wrote about the "creatives" making big-budget advertising. They would never fail to understand what Lolita implied, and if you see anything like that from them (like the McDonald's ads), it's intentional.

But I can believe some Woolworth marketing heinies brainstorming names for bed models might call one Lolita and fail to get the reference. They're a different class of worker bee.

@ sepka:

Please note: I didn't say and do not believe advertising is all-powerful. They cannot brainwash you via a TV spot or a magazine page, if that's what you mean, even though they WOULD if they really could.

However, by being omnipresent advertisting does, sadly, affect us all as a form of mental pollution and blight. It distracts. It seeps into our thoughts by sheer volume. We pick up its idioms and often its values by osmosis, even if we have no idea in the end which commercial was for which product. (A very elementary lesson that they never seem to learn: they tell these little stories to get attention, then flash the brand, but the story often bears no connection to the brand and thus the brand doesn't stick.)

Sometimes it disrupts my train of thought by forcing a gigantic Angelina Jolie on me suddenly on the street, giving me a boner I didn't ask for and can't do anything about. Honestly, I resent that. And there are plenty of uglier things it forces on us all.

I have also noticed from experience with advertisers that they're usually -- perhaps necessarily -- of average intelligence (you decide whether average is smart or stupid, it's a mix of both).

I've also seen them praise each other ridiculously for coming up with duh-obvious ideas.

So I am also not "impressed" with the sexual and subliminal manipulation attempts of advertising, I'm only saying that, if produced by a professional ad agency, they are always intentional.

And yes, it's all superstition based on hunches couched in pseudo-scientific rationales, and from the perspective of the client most of the money is absolutely down the drain.

I watched the Annual Festival of Most Expensive Advertising Debuts, aka the Superbowl yesterday (I'm just another idiot, what do you want, Go Giants), and as usual it did impress me how totally wasted most of the money was if the point is to sell a product. For about half of the ads there was little chance anyone would be able to successfully associate the ad-story with the product half an hour after watching it.

But what advertising sells, aside from itself, is everything at once -- the full panoply of consumerist and patriotic values.

Also, since programming now consists of 24-hour advertising disguised as news and entertainment... well that does have an impact, I believe.

[FourthBase]

I remember a few years ago seeing Girl Scout cookie boxes with vaguely inappropriate, vaguely erotic photos and catchphrases on the front and back. It could have been a case of seeing things that weren't there, of having an overly cynical and active imagination. But then, if it had been grown women in bathing suits being sprayed with a hose and a caption that basically said "It's fun to get wet!" or whatever, the eroticism would be unquestionably intentional.

[FourthBase]

He'd fuck a hamburger?

[Avalon]

I'm perplexed by the McDonalds' "I'd hit it," regarding the double cheeseburger.

It is usually the taco to which the sages and poets liken a woman's vulva.

[posting tulpa]

He'd fuck a hamburger?

Hey American Pie was all the rage.....i think there was some fruity fornication with a desert in that one....

Advertisers are modern charlatans. I don't think I have ever been persuaded to buy something I didn't already want/need. Its truly a superstition as some one wrote earlier.

[compared2what?]

Well, glad not to have been bad.

It was really the point about what "Lolita" means in popular usage being indistinguishable from the viewpoint of a character whose assessment of her (within the framework of the book) is supposed to be one among many signs that he is, a priori, not capable of seeing her as she really is -- ie, as a child -- that I wanted to make.

Even HH has a little epiphanic moment in which he understands the truth of this, when he's waiting for the cops to come get him after shooting Quilty.

So, you know, it's a little distressing that the culture has so little trouble believing that a twelve-year-old girl is capable of the kind of sexual motivations he ascribes to her that her name is now a global symbol for: Young girl whose powers of seduction are so great that they render grown men helpless, and therefore not really responsible for succumbing to them.

Because that's just crazy talk.

[junojones]

Little Debbie, little Debbie,
I'm a comin' on home!
'Cause you make me wanna walk
Like a camel!

with apologies to Southern Culture on the Skids

[marmot]

Nothing in modern advertising is accidental.

Nothing.

Advertisers aren't all powerful. They're often even not all that smart.

Just some thoughts: I watched the superbowl last night and the only ads that really struck a cord with me were the E*Trade ones with the baby at the computer---they were so ingenious, so funny and creative, the only commercials that made me laugh out loud. The rest were outright dull or completely stupid. I don't even know how the bud light and pepsi ads got past the drawing boards. But then again, maybe they weren't meant for me, for someone that doesn't watch television save a few NFL games. But, all this money put into these advertisements and I have to wonder, wtf? Couldn't they have been made a little smarter, a little more funnier? I didn't get them? The only ads that really reached me were these: Third Quater Baby Ad and Fourth Quater Baby Ad

[philipacentaur]

Using images of children for advertising purposes is pretty low in the first place, all accusations of rampant nationwide pedophilia aside.

[JackRiddler]

compared2what:

Well, you asked if it was bad, silly. So I said so.

Yeah, I got distracted or I would have agreed with your compelling reading of Lolita, really the classic study of the unreliable narrator (except maybe for Pale Fire, but that was a more formal exercise - with Humbert it's all the more disturbing because you can't tell what's happening most of the time).

Thanks.

[jingofever]

Advertisers are modern charlatans. I don't think I have ever been persuaded to buy something I didn't already want/need. Its truly a superstition as some one wrote earlier.

From what I have read, advertising isn't so much aiming to convince you to make a purchase as it is trying to make you aware of a brand. So when someone gets hungry they will think Arby's, or Pepsi when they are thirsty. Association or some other blah blah blah.


Cooooooostanza!

[mentalgongfu2]

last summer the Des Moines Register ran a picture on the front page of one of its sections (can't recall if it was THE front page or the Metro/Iowa section page) of a young girl, 10ish I would guess, in a bathing suit in a waterfall of water. The girl was tipping her head back with her hands in her hair, chest stuck out, water splashing, and it looked to me like one of the typical poses one would see of an adult in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or a Playboy spread.

I immediately associated the picture with those type of scenes, and I called it child pornography. Co-workers to whom I pointed this out evidently did not see the same thing - they just saw a picture of a little girl playing in the water. The fact that I was the only one to see this caught me a little off guard and had me wondering if there was something purely in myself, and not the picture, that triggered the association, but after much thought I could not get past my initial response that it was a softcore child porno pic. Clothed, yes, but implying sexuality none the less.

Given the tangled ties of the Register with the Johnny Gosch story, I could not dismiss the feeling that there was something sinister going on and that the picture was run deliberately because of its visual implications. And as I agree with Riddler that an ad agency would hardly make an 'accidental' sexual association, I find it hard to believe the pseudo-sexual pinup pose in the girl's picture would escape the notice of the Register's editors. I happen to work in the newspaper business ,and although I'll admit things are sometimes done a lot more sloppily than we would like to acknowledge in public, a prominent picture like that is looked at by enough eyes that someone should easily have seen the possible inappropriateness. Then again, as I said, my otherwise intelligent co-workers did not take the same thing away, but I'm inclined to credit that to the fact my mind takes darker turns than theirs do.

I don't think it takes too much awareness to realize that American pop culture is inundated with sexuality that borders or blatantly crosses into the area of pedophilia, and on reflection I think the OP may be right in suggesting that Little Debbie's 'sweet ride' was a deliberate reference.