viz.

I’m a big fan of Seth Stevenson’s advertising columns at Slate (he’s going on sabbatical and will be missed). On Monday he posted a new column, where he discusses readers’ submissions for the worst ads on TV. Like a therapist, Stevenson doesn’t so much agree with the contributors as he commiserates with the feelings of anger, betrayal, emptiness and loss directed at or prompted by these advertisements. One question that we can ask ourselves (and our students) is: Why do we care so much about ads? Take this McDonald’s ad for example:

The ad, which is called “hideous” by its nominator and a “Filet-O-Failure” by Stevenson seems to me to be quite good at selling the product. This is not an artsy ad where it is impossible to tell what is for sale, as in this Simpsons parody:

Instead, the ad reaffirms the product constantly by repeating its name over and over. At the end of the ad, you know what’s for sale, and the repetition has drilled the product into your brain. If you pull up the Filet-O-Fish ad in YouTube, the second item in the list of related videos is this ad, which is titled “Worst Commercial Ever”; however, I would argue that it too is effective. When the ad is over, you know what Flea Market Montgomery is just like—a mini mall! Further, the bizarreness of both the Flea Market and Filet-O-Fish spots is likely to get people to watch them (and share them with their friends on YouTube), an increasingly difficult proposition in the age of TiVo. Shouldn’t the title “worst commercial ever” be reserved for an ad that doesn’t do these things?

So, what is it about these ads—ads which I feel are quite effective at selling their products—that irritates people so much? I think this question might be a good entry into a discussion with students of the rhetorical effects of ads; to get the ball rolling, here are two answers I came up with.

First, I believe that sometime around Bud Bowl I—possibly earlier—consumers began to expect that advertisements should entertain them. (This is a development that might be unique to television; I don’t think radio advertisements are made by people who are worried about entertaining listeners.) If an ad is weird or unfunny, then that somehow violates the unspoken agreement we have with advertisers that they must entertain us. The existence of such a contract would explain why the two commercials discussed above are considered so awful: it’s not because they are bad advertisements, it’s becuase they are bad entertainment.

Secondly, I think commercials like the Filet-O-Fish one irritate people because they offend our culture’s logo-centrism. Consider this quote from Stevenson on the McDonald’s spot:

I will admit I occasionally grinned the first time I saw it. But in terms of selling the product? Filet-O-Failure. One should not film fast-food items in their sad cardboard boxes, exposed to the audience's close inspection in a series of long, tight close-ups. Those greasy fish-bricks look decidedly unappetizing.

Here he is attacking the ad on logical grounds. Fast food is gross, he says, so it isn’t logical to show it in closeup in advertisements because then people won’t want to eat it. But everybody knows that Fast Food is gross (particularly the Filet-O-Fish), but even post-Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me people still flock to McDonald’s: the company’s recent resurgence has been built on the back of their greasy staples, not their salads. Clearly, logic isn’t the only thing driving our food-purchasing behavior. Acknowledging this, I think, is cognitively difficult for many people, so when they see ads that defy logic, they ask why a person would make such an ad. The answer—they made it “that way” because that way is effective—is troubling, and the seeming disconnection between the purpose of the ad and its logical effect makes them upset. In other words, hating an advertisement is often an expression of a person’s own dissatisfaction with their emotional decision-making processes.