viz. - advertising

Casino's Law: Defending American Liberties in Personal Injury Attorney Advertisements

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:37:01 +0000

The Super Bowl, with an audience of 111.5 million people, tends to be a place where the definition of “American” is equally invoked and contested. Not only do the hard hits and pick-sixes play out America’s strength, but also the commercials display American ingenuity and self-expression. After all, what could be more American than Bob Dylan in a Chrysler commercial, a cowboy driving a Chevy Silverado, a multilingual performance of “America the Beautiful” over a bottle of coke? At this year’s Super Bowl, only a personal injury attorney ad could top these greats.

The epic spectacle of Jamie Casino’s advertisement for his Savannah-based Casino Law Group not only invokes an All-American superhero origin myths but also adheres remarkably well to the personal injury attorney ad genre. Considering all the ad’s buzz, what makes this one so great? What makes attorney ads so arresting?

For one, it uses visual and verbal rhetorics of the action flick to portray Jamie Casino as a superhero fighting the villains:

H/T: Deadspin

There’s so much about this commercial that belongs to the Hollywood revenge flick: the “based on a true story” disclosure, the horrific tragedy of his brother’s death, the injustice of the crooked police, and the graveside scenes. The throbbing metal beat comes in at the turning point: “At some point, a man must ask why God created him.” The transition from clean-shaven lawyer to bearded badass who wields the sledgehammer labeled for his brother “Michael” against a shadowy, fiery background, slamming apart the gravestone, plays out in the lyrics as well as the visuals: “When you fall down on your knees / Beg for mercy: ‘mister, please—’ / The time has come to make things right / There ain’t no judge for pleadin’ to / We done convicted you / The Devil gets your soul tonight.” This ad perfectly fits its Super Bowl time slot: it’s as over-the-top as Joe Namath’s fur coat, as high drama as the safety the Seahawks scored in the game’s first play, and focuses on an all-American warrior who “speak[s] for innocent victims who cannot speak for themselves.”

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

I wasn’t surprised to learn from interviews with Casino himself and the commercial’s editor that they intentionally used a cinematic narrative style to draw the audience in. As Stephen Withers, the commercial’s editor put it:

He had a pretty solid idea of what he wanted. He used his storyboards to set up the edits the way he wanted. It was really like an ‘80s action movie, Terminator kind of feel when he brought it in, and he wanted to get away from that. Plus, we had to reconcile this gunslinger image from his previous ads with this family man idea.

Watching his previous commercial, it’s clear that the sledgehammer/song are used to help construct that continuity. The narrative also works for his commercial purposes: to engage his local audiences to trust him for legal services. If you want your attorney to be as a justice-seeking warrior, this commercial locates those traits within familiar action-flick imagery. Taking on the personae of the “gunslinger” and the vigilante makes for good drama: but how is this credible in a lawyer?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

There’s a reason the commercial is so over-the-top: it seems to be part of the attorney ad genre, especially as covered by blogs like Above the Law. Breaking Bad’s sleazy lawyer Sal Goodman has similarly dramatic commercials, featuring the character in front of a Constitution-filled background invoking the tagline “Better Call Saul!”:

Locally here in Austin, we have several equally colorful attorneys who seem to take the city’s unofficial “Keep It Weird” logo as part of their ethos. One such attorney, David Komie of Komie & Morrow, has billboards around Austin that celebrate the fact that he is “the attorney that rocks.”

Image Credit: Austin Chronicle

His dreadlocked visage and leather jacket here perform a rock-and-roll image to appeal to the residents of the Live Music Capital of the World; even though the banner on his firm’s website puts him in a more traditional blue button-up, his biography mentions the name of his band. As Austin sketch comedy group Hustle Show puts it,

At least as far as the ads are concerned, David Komie combines two fun archetypes: the “Better call Saul!”-style billboard lawyer, who’s just trying to make his name and number more memorable than the next guy, and the middle-aged Austin rocker dude who has a square day job but, because it's Austin, wants to let you know that after he punches that clock, things are going get a little crazy.

Another local attorney, Adam Reposa, uses a more traditionally Texan image for his commercials:

The self-proclaimed DWI Badass here relies on a fabulous biker mustache, black cowboy hat, and gruff demeanor to convey that not only is he a lawyer, but one to be feared when you try and stop Americans from enjoying their freedoms. Here, he drives a monstrously large truck and repeatedly slams it into the smaller economy car, to emblematize his approach to the legal system. It’s not a little scary and, as my attorney friend informed me, against the rules of the State Bar of Texas to advertise in such an undignified fashion. (Perhaps it's no accident that Reposa has been held in contempt of court for lewd handgestures.)

Image Credit: Vice Magazine

Why are videos/images like these so prevalent within the genre? Perhaps it’s just to attract Hollywood deals and reality show producers. But not all of these characters actually become entertainment characters. In part, these videos get made because they draw attention, they work. There seems to me to be a classist angle to this: if you’re not familiar with the legal system or without financial means, you’re likely to find out about attorneys through popular media. You might be suspicious of a lawyer with “decorum,” because you want an attorney who can identify with your experiences and needs. If you have access to money or are of a certain class, you want a “tasteful” lawyer, the kind you might find in a biglaw firm who doesn’t need to advertise for business. If you find yourself mocking Jamie Casino, perhaps it’s a sign you don’t actually need legal representation. If you have been injured by your interactions with a corporate entity, you probably do want a legal superhero to save you.

In that case: rock on, David Komie. Rock on.

Ads on Bodies and Bodies in Ads at SXSW

Calliope — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:53:27 +0000

Image Credit: Magic Spoon Production's Vimeo

Few things will make a body more aware of its need of personal space than being in Austin during SXSW. At the height of the music festival, sixth street is a throbbing mass of bodies; most are hurting from the night before; many are pierced and tattooed; and all are in search of further sensory stimulation. Prominence and/or density of bodies are signal features of large scale cultural gatherings like SXSW. Consequently, advertising at these sorts of events often becomes embodied in visually arresting and sometimes ethically questionable ways. This post examines two advertising schemes that came to my attention this SXSW, and thinks about the stakes--rhetorical and otherwise--of confusing bodies with commercial products.

When I was looking around online last week for information about free SXSW shows I noticed that one of the kick-off parties was sponsored by a company called Bald Logo. The name sounded funny so I did some investigating. It turns out the founder Brandon Chicotsky is an Austin resident (pictured above) who sells ad space on his bald head. To rent Chicotsky's scalp, or the scalp of one of his promoters dubbed the "Baldangelicals," it costs $320/day. Apparently, these guys walk around the "highest density foot traffic areas of the city" promoting whatever brand they've temporarily stamped on their heads.

The company calls what they do "animate social marketing," which highlights the fact that these bald guys are moving targets. But the word 'animate' also strikes me as a trivializing and evasive way of describing the medium that distinguishes this kind of advertising from more stable and/or conventional forms: the human body. In addition to being animate bodies are feeling, thinking, profoundly individual, and a million other things. So, a more honest tagline for Bald Logo might read, "social marketing with human bodies." But somehow that sounds a touch too exploitative.

Image Credit: www.bizjournals.com

Bald Logo's business concept raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is why SXSW has attracted similar schemes for monetizing human bodies in the past. Recall the Homeless Hotspots controversy of SXSW 2012 which involved paying homeless people to wear Wi-Fi transmitters in busy parts of town. Whether hawked by bald guys or homeless people, company brands and their services are just millimeters away from surgically attaching themselves to human bodies. This might be a scary thought for some, but perhaps not for the thousands of people lining up to wear a computer called Glass on their faces.

You might say that Bald Logo is intentionally gimmicky, so gimmicky that it should not be taken seriously. But it is through gag humor that the company openly normalizes the sale of human bodies (witness their slogan "purchase ad space on a bald head"). And how could seeing ads on people's heads possibly not degrade our notion of personhood? When someone is called a blockhead, or an airhead, or methhead (significantly, I can't come up with any positive head terms) the idea conveyed by the noun prefix subsumes the whole person, not just the head. So the question is, who wants to be an adhead?

Image Credit: prweb.com

Bald guys, apparently. But I'll stop picking on them for a minute. There are other advertising spectacles worthy of note like the monstrosity pictured above, which was at SXSW this year and last. It's an official SXSW stage made to look like a giant Doritos vending machine. So instead of advertising that enters or becomes incorporate with the body (like the Bald Logo decals) we have a humongous ad with real bodies inside of it.

As much as I'm uncomfortable with the corporatization of SXSW I have to hand it to whoever was behind the heavy-handed metaphorics of this stage. They basically created a giant monument to consumerism, replete with an audience that feeds on the corporate-sponsored music (and the bodies making this music) as they would toxic-colored, manufactured chips. But the people at the Doritos stage were either oblivious to these implications or perfectly okay with them. For those who are somewhat more mindful of how bodies are being used for commercial purposes, keep your eyes open at the next SXSW. The examples are everywhere.

We Have Sold The Future: The Uses of Future Hopes and Fears in Petroleum Industry Advertising

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 02:59:39 +0000

Image Credit: Shell

The future of Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama is optimistic. Clean architecture and efficient technology aid people as they move through the business of their day. As promised in a series of 1937 Shell advertisements in Life magazine using the words of Bel Geddes, the city of tomorrow will alleviate many commuting frustrations. Until that city emerges, however, the ads offer Shell gasoline as a way to save money and reduce wear and tear on car engines while stuck in stop-and-go traffic. This use of a hopeful future contrasts with the darker tomorrows that lurk behind many of today's petroleum advertisements, drawing attention to the double-edged sword of appeals to the future.

Image Credit: Shell

In the 1937 ads, the Shell Corporation promotes its product as a stopgap to deal with the failings of the present until the the arrival of a better future. The first ad quotes Bel Geddes promising that by 1960 stoplights will be a thing of the past, as cars use underpasses and express streets to reach their destinations. The second ad has Bel Geddes reassure us that "children won't play in the streets" and pedestrians will not impede the flow of traffic. A third ad shown below places Bel Geddes in profile next to a quote about pedestrians, express and local traffic all having their own paths.

Image Credit: Shell

Two ads contrast photographs of overcrowded and traffic-choked streets of the late 1930s with the clean, efficient cityscape sketches and models of Bel Geddes. In two of the ads, a third visual bridges the present and future: photos of smiling, happy motorists posed in their cars with Shell gasoline pumps in the background. The ad text spells out the argument: "The regular use of Super-Shell will cut the cost of your stop and go. There's a Shell dealer near you."

Image Credit: Chevron

That such hassle-free commutes failed to materialize is personally a source of disappointment (especially as I dodge vehicular traffic while walking to the bus stop each morning), but the failure of the future to live up to our highest hopes isn't terribly surprising. What does provide some measure of uncertainty, if not surprise, is the choice advertisers or any other rhetor has to make when using an appeal to the future: do we look forward with hope or trepidation? The Shell ads of 1937 presented the company's product as a bridge to a better future, but many oil ads today offer products as a bulwark against encroaching problems.

Image Credit: Chevron

The petroleum industry now wrestles with a future fraught with the threat of global climate change, industrial disasters and resource depletion, even as technological innovation also promises to open up new areas for resource extraction and create greater fuel efficiency. Chevron's website speaks to many of the issues the future brings when it comes to the petroleum industry: Energy Supply and Demand, Energy Policy, Energy Efficiency and Conservation, Emerging Energy, Environment, Climate Change, and others. The first Chevron image above acknowledges the consumer desire to "use less energy" and it promises that Chevron too will help governments and businesses to become more energy efficient. The ad does not explicitly state that people wish to use less energy to save money (let alone consider the idea that oil reserves will one day run out), and the ad uses a positive, can-do tone. Yet, the ad cannot avoid responding to troubles on the horizon.

A second Chevron image from its Supply and Demand web page acknowledges greater energy demands in the future, showing a picture of skyscrapers under construction that look much more like the buildings of today than the futurism of Bel Geddes in the Shell ads from 1937, reigning in optimism for a more realist and incremental outlook.

The kairos of the two eras influences the choices made by the ad creators—Art Deco's optimism vs. the pessimism of our millennial age. Below in a 2007 ad, Shell promises, "We invest today's profits in tomorrow's solutions," elaborating that "The challenge of the 21st century is to meet the growing need for energy in ways that are not only profitable but sustainable."

Image Credit: Shell

Even this nod to a potentially difficult future is couched in hopeful language befitting an ad promoting a company. Shell speaks of "tomorrow's solutions" and "challenges" not problems, though those problems lurk beneath the surface. Unlike the Shell of 1937 that looks to the forecasts of Bel Geddes futurism, the Shell of 2007 century takes on the task of describing and shaping the future. And, their future promises not utopian transformation but a kind of stasis, holding onto energy production that is at once sustainable, profitable, and able to meet the "growing need for energy." Another 70 years, and likely considerably less time, will tell whether such a prediction is any less utopian than a smooth rush hour commute.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Selling Beer and Selling Democracy: American Bald Eagle Logos Today and Yesterday

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:13:37 +0000

Image Credit: Commission on Presidential Debates

Despite its vaguely governmental-sounding name, the Commission on Presidential Debates is a private, non-profit corporation funded by a handful of businesses, as described by George Farah. The Commission serves to accommodate the Republican and Democratic Parties' desire for a relatively controlled event—control which drove the League of Women Voters to withdraw from hosting the debates in 1987. One of the long-standing contributors to the Commission is the Anheuser-Busch corporation (owned since 2008 by the Brazilian and Belgian conglomerate InBev). While watching the debates, I couldn't help but notice the similarity between the eagle that hangs above the heads of the candidates and the Anheuser-Busch eagle, both of which draw on deeply set US political imagery.

Image Credit: Frank Peters

I'm not suggesting here that the debate eagle is some sort of subliminal advertising for Anhauser-Busch, though the correspondences are remarkable in terms of the eagle's posture. However, these correspondences are likely due more to the larger genre of American bald eagle imagery than an effort to associate the debates with one of America's most sold beers. In the debates the eagle serves as a sort of unofficial official seal when the presidential seal would be inappropriate (as both candidates are, supposedly, equally potential presidents even if one currently holds the office). Slate attempted to track down the origin of the eagle as used by the Commission, and while they located several historical precedents, the Commission gave Slate a rather ambiguous answer that the eagle is "an amalgam based on something they found in the Smithsonian Museum."

Image Credit: Cornell University Library

As Slate describes, the image of an eagle clutching a banner with the phrase "The Union and the Constitution Forever" can first be seen in a campaign handkerchief from the Garfield-Arthur campaign in 1880 and again in the above campaign handkerchief from the 1892 Harrison-Whitelaw campaign. Note the size differential in the juxtaposition of candidates and eagle. In the nineteenth century images, the candidates faces hold prominence over the smaller eagles, but in the twenty-first century debates, the eagle dwarfs the candidates as if to promote democratic ideals over the identities and politics of the individuals who fleetingly hold office against the background of an eternal Constitution.

Image Credit: Anheuser-Busch

Like the somewhat ambiguous origins of the debate eagle, the Anheuser-Busch logo has somewhat mysterious origins, as their website explains that "no record remains of the symbol’s original designer or its exact meaning." Anheuser-Busch makes the reasonable speculation that the A in the logo stands for Anheuser and that the eagle may bear some connection to the prominent eagle imagery in US visual rhetoric.

Image Credit: United States Government

As noted in the Slate article, the debate eagle looks away from the olive branches of peace and toward the arrows of war, whereas the eagle in official government seals and even the nineteenth century campaign materials looks toward the olive branches. The Anheuser-Busch eagle only clutches arrows in its claws, but it looks away from the arrowheads (perhaps nodding to the wisdom in refraining from the use of weapons while imbibing while still never letting said weapons out of reach). Both the beer and debate eagles stand on a shield similar to that found in the Great Seal of the United States (though in the Anheuser-Busch logo the top of the shield points at the viewer while in the debate and nineteenth century images the bottom of the shield points at the viewer). And both pose with wings spread as if swooping down from the sky to grab prey or alighting to stand watch—be it over the principles of democracy or of free enterprise.

Logos Isn't Working

Jay Voss — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: storyful.com

So last week I suggested that my post on tennis, David Foster Wallace, and postmodernism might be my last for the 2011–2012 academic year. I lied. Here’s another 500–1,000 words for your delectation. While thinking over what to write about last week, I decided to take coffee at Starbucks and read the paper. This was the day that Paul Krugman wrote his column “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012), and I’ve been thinking about what’s said there ever since. The Op-Ed is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and it is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which, if true, must surely be further compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. There’s probably some truth to this. How could there not be given technology’s onslaught of information?

Krugman’s point isn’t so much a question of whether or not voters can recall that Romney’s speech was given in a drywall warehouse which was shut down during the Bush years – to suggest as much is to blame the average American voter for not having the mind of a Princeton professor, which would be ignorant. “Work” here, it seems to me, is a question or whether or not Romney can emotionally engage his base. The more that Americans are thinking critically about their environment, the more likely they are to realize (not remember) that the president has very little to do with the economy. All of this puts into relief the image Romney was trying to project, and it might be a good measure of the state of U.S. political discourse circa 2012.

A little research suggested that Romney’s entire speech at the drywall factory was part of his new advertising aesthetic: “Obama Isn’t Working.” I found a new TV ad (above) that introduces this notion. Romney’s campaign cites a number of statistics in the ad that try to portray North Carolina’s employment situation in a bad way. As those of you who have watched the youtube clip above have surely noted by now, the TV ad has the feeling of a movie trailer for the latest action flick. Why Romney wants to suggest that 2012’s Democratic National Convention is going to be such an action-packed event is beyond me. (Maybe it’s a sign that large portions of his campaign staff didn’t watch the 2008 Democratic National Convention? And I ask this with all due respect: Grecian columns notwithstanding, the 2008 Democratic National Convention was a far cry from The Avengers.) Perhaps the slogan “Obama Isn’t Working” is meant to suggest that 44 isn’t going to work everyday? Maybe Romney’s implying that Obama’s reclining on the couch with professional football and a bag of pretzels?

Sorry if anybody out there is a Romney fan. I’ll get back to sports and postmodernism next time, I promise. The point here isn’t that I think other’s political imperatives are less important than my own, nor do I wish to imply that Obama’s practicing a rhetoric that would make Hugh Blair proud. What’s striking to me about Romney’s new advertising campaign, however, is how little it relies on logical arguments. (And again, I suspect this would probably hold true for a number of prominent Democrat politicians.) What clearly matters most these days is pathetic appeal. I suspect that the hour plus many working Americans spending commuting to and from work every day doesn’t make them happy people (the geometric variety of brake lights can only entertain for so long), and the longer that these folks are unhappy in a bubble with only a radio to kill the time, the more susceptible they’ll be to emotional rhetoric. This is all economics really – the more charged up one’s base is, the better – and I’m not sure anyone’s to blame for a systemic crisis.

That said, America was designed in a period that prized reason and logic.

Pinterest and Panopticon: Self-representation Through Appropriation

David A. Harper — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:45:27 +0000

Hacked Leviathan Frontispiece. Image Credit: David A. Harper

In the coffee shop where I ‘m writing, there are two large bulletin boards in a high-traffic area (the hallway leading to the restrooms). We all know how bulletin boards and advertising work: once a provocative image draws you in, the text informs you, proselytizes you, or sells something to you. On a well-used board layers upon layers of images vie for attention, each individual post contributing to an unintentional artistic whole. Gathered on the same bulletin board, even the most antagonistic images are put into dialog as the physical wooden frame becomes a conceptual one. We find patterns in the noise. These old-fashioned bulletin boards have been on my mind this week while I explored the high-tech virtual pinboards of Pinterest.

Our predisposition to find order when confronted with a variety of images reminds me of Thomas Hobbes’s use of the “perspective glass” metaphor in Leviathan. These quaint seventeenth-century devices made one coherent (and often surprising) image out of a variety of disparate ones. In Leviathan, Hobbes claims that “passion and self-love” act as perspective glasses in reverse, making every obligation imposed by the state seem a multitude of divergent grievances, whereas “moral and civil science” act as a perspective glass properly reducing a multitude of potential miseries into one less-obnoxious obligation to the state (XVIII.20). Similar to well-constructed perspective glass images, Pinterest invites us to make meaning from a variety of images organized by users of the social media site. Displaying a variety of images, a Pinterest user invites an audience to decipher a composite image of self. However, while the perspective glass contained a lens carefully calibrated to reveal the underlying composite image, Pinterest leaves that task to the viewer.

Image Credit: www.toutfait.com

Pinterest is the latest social media addition to an ever-more layered palimpsest of media revising older forms of authorship. Email transformed the epistolary art. The personal webpage gave individuals a bully-pulpit. Facebook and its competitors created a hybrid of webpage, text-messaging, and email to allow people to engage in an ever-evolving conversation or exhibitionist performance. Now, Pinterest has created an online commonplace or scrap book. Pinterest users fill virtual corkboards with images from the web (or from other user’s boards), using it like a visual Twitter account. It is a new, visually-centered performance space that encourages self-representation primarily through images.

Image Credit: David A. Harper via Pinterest

In 2008, E.J. Westlake noted that performances of self on Facebook are “energetic engagements with the panoptic gaze: as people offer themselves up to surveillance, they establish and reinforce social norms, but always resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects.”[1] Self-representation on Pinterest is both more public and more abstract than the text-based performances of Facebook. It is more public because Pinterest doesn’t allow the same level of audience customization as other social media. Every Pinterest user can view, comment upon, and repin every post. It is more abstract because it is visual. A simple browser plug-in allows users to easily pin any image they find on the web to boards they create and title with names like “Wants,” “Yummies,” or “Books I’ve Read.” Pinboards are categorized by choosing from tags such as “Art,” “Film, Music and Books,” “Cars and Motorcycles,” and “Geek.” A user’s collection of virtual pinboards comes to represent them to the Pinterest community. However, since captions are limited to 500 characters, it is the images rather than text which must bear the interpretive weight.

Like the coffee-shop bulletin board, Pinterest boards create narratives through the juxtaposition of images. However, unlike the unintentional artistry of accretions on a public bulletin board, personal Pinterest boards (not to be confused with those run by bots) are organized by the pinner to perform for the panoptic gaze. Neither linear nor constantly in motion like the Facebook timeline and newsfeed, Pinterest encourages viewers to construct meaning by considering the entirety of a user’s board or boards. And since the majority of the images were not created by the user, the site functions like an early-modern commonplace book into which readers copied out choice quotes from books they had read.

Image Credit: University of British Columbia Press

Just as the quotes in a commonplace book are not creations of the compiler, most images on Pinterest originate from a source outher than the pinner. It is thus not the artistry of the images themselves, but the skillful choice and categorization of them that tell the pinner’s narrative, performing self-representation through appropriation. A recent Mashable Infographic reports that 80% of Pinterest images are repins from other users, compared to Twitter where only 1.4% of tweets are retweets. Even the 20% of pins that aren’t repins are far more likely to be captured from web pages than to be original creations. The site is designed to encourage this appropriation. When a user repins an image, they not only fit it into their own categorization scheme, but they may enter their own description, replacing previous interpretations of the image with their own.

This mechanism of appropriation by repinning makes Pinterest a formidable advertising tool. Each new pin creates another link pointing back to the original source, increasing potential click-through traffic and the source’s visibility to search-engine algorithms. A quick look at some statistics suggests other reasons marketers love it:

Pinterest ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.
Pinterest users are predominately female, ages 25-44, and well educated.
The fastest growing categories on Pinterest are “Food,” and “Style and Fashion.”

Image Credit: Bansky

Pinners aren’t only creating representations of self, but they are also sometimes unwittingly tailoring online catalogs driving traffic to ecommerce sites. An ecommerce company that sells home furnishings told CNBC that customers directed to their site from Pinterest spend 70% more than those from other social media. The Pinterest consumer has seen the product contextualized within another pinner’s self-representation (as a “want,” a “need,” a “lifestyle,” or perhaps as “art”) and already has a developed desire for the product. By giving product images contexts that integrate them into idealized frames, Pinterest users do the marketers’ work for them more effectively than a store catalog could.

Recently, Pinterest has been in the news because they joined with other social media to discourage content encouraging anorexia or other forms of self-harm. The move was sparked by the alarming number of “thinspiration” posts on the site. But because Pinterest encourages wide-scale appropriation, once an image is pinned it takes on a life of its own. Whatever contextualization was granted the image by its original caption and categorization may be obliterated or reversed by the first repin. Images that were pinned as part of an “anti-thinspiration” board may be re-categorized by the next pinner as “thinspiration” itself. Context may be everything, but on Pinterest it is transient at best, as the images themselves quickly become orphaned texts uprooted from any single, fixed context.

Image Credit: GrandForksHerald.com

In Leviathan, Hobbes defined “wit” as the ability to observe similitude and combine disparate things, while “judgment” was the ability to differentiate (VIII.3). Pinterest provides a rich field where we can exercise these faculties, both while gathering images and whether we are viewing a friend’s board or Barack Obama’s. Ultimately, meaning becomes a collaboration between the gatherer and the viewer; however, as the viewer becomes the gatherer, images that once formed part of our composite self-image drift across the landscape of Pinterest and the web, providing someone else raw material to use as they fashion their own self.

Works Cited

[1] Westlake, E.J. "Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance." Drama Review. 52.4 (2008), 23.

Sex Sells?: Reading Romance Over the Covers

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:28:28 +0000

Image Credit: Screencap from Vimeo

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

I thought after my last post on Ryan Gosling that I’d be able to move on to more academic subjects, but when I saw Andrew Sullivan’s post on “The Market for Romance” I couldn’t let it pass. In my Women’s Popular Genres literature class last year I taught Fay Weldon’s wickedly funny novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which tells the story of Ruth, a woman who gets revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a romance novelist. I wanted to pair it with an actual romance novel, but wasn’t sure I could find something that would sustain close reading. However, I think a rhetorical approach to the romance novel—especially its cover—reveals some interesting things.

TIME Magazine produced this interesting video that takes viewers to a romance cover photoshoot. I enjoyed not only inspecting the goods on display, but also hearing from Kensington Publishing Corporation’s Creative Director Kristine Mills-Noble on what she looks for in these poses:

Mills-Noble, after giving some directions to the model, explains the goal of these covers thus:

The fantasy is that this is the man who’s going to jump out of planes to rescue me in any situation. You know, we want to be seduced; we don’t want to be overcome. We don’t want to be abused. We don’t want to be taken advantage of.

Image Credit: Anne Marsh

She further notes that, to create this fantasy, the model must carefully manage the placement of his hands, the look in his eyes, and the amount of muscle he shows. Too much muscle makes him look more Hulkish than heroic; a hand wrong might come across as threatening rather than protective. The picture above shows the shoot’s final product—and Marcus appears strong and confident as he meets the viewer’s eye. The expression just misses stern; the hands almost suggest that he’s about to remove the jumpsuit, but the full exposure he might offer is rather physical than emotional. Yet it isn’t extremely lurid—his chest is mostly covered, only hinting at the body beneath.

Image Credit: Kensington Publishing Corporation

Despite the popular image of the bare-chested Fabio covers, this is actually consistent with what many romance readers say they want. When the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books critiqued an article that attempts to perpetuate reader shame for consuming romances, commenter Hannah E. notes that “While I can agree that I wish the covers of my favorite books didn’t sport naked male torsos (these aids to my imagination simply aren’t necessary), I’m never afraid to admit that I love romance novels.” Hannah’s contrast here juxtaposes a pride in reading romance with a dislike of traditional cover art. If there’s shame, it’s in the ways the cover art represents her romance. While contemporary romance novels contain even more erotic content than you’d find in a Georgette Heyer romance, displaying that content seems to create a dissonance for readers. The naked male chest seems to reduce these works to mere porn, whereas readers like Maria Bustillos see this as an imaginative space for women to discuss real-life problems and work out what they want in men:

The second purpose of romance novels is the exercise of imagination. This may sound paradoxical, given that there is a definite formula to these stories. But they are indeed vehicles for the imagination; each one a love rollercoaster, if you like, to tempt our fantasies. To idealize. What would a really wonderful man be like? What are the very best characteristics that men and women can have? What would the most exciting possible moment in a love affair be like; how would the tenderest lover behave?

Thus, while the title’s pun suggests Anne Marsh wants her readers to be Burning Up, the cover art offers readers one way to imagine what a sensitive smoke jumper might look like. Looking through other titles published by Kensington Publishing Corporation, I was struck that for every Hot Rain or Smooth Play that focuses on the naked muscled chest, there are works like Lutisha Lovely’s Taking Care of Business which suggests other fantasies.

Image Credit: Kensington Publishing Corporation

The two men on this cover are well-dressed and broad-shouldered. Their hands in their pockets suggest confidence as much as their eye contact. The slight smile worn by the gentleman on the right hints that he can “take care of business” as the reader requires and makes the reader complicit in the insinuation. The punning nature of the titles and taglines, I’d suggest, directs these images to an aware audience who imagine themselves as active readers and sexual agents. Instead of celebrating rape, the contemporary romance today markets itself to a readership that can appreciate Fay Weldon alongside Anne Marsh.

The City upon a Hill at Halftime: Detroit, Unions, and the USA

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:43:30 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While baseball is more my sport, I haven’t missed watching the Super Bowl for the last couple of years. If nothing else, I enjoy analyzing the Super Bowl commercials—and this year’s Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood presents an irresistible opportunity to discuss some interesting controversies. Both conservative critics like Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Goldstein and liberal ones like Michael Moore and Charles Mudede have read the commercial as promoting Obama’s reelection campaign. The ad’s copy and visuals directly connect the fates of Detroit and the auto industry with larger economic and political trends, as you can see:

One of the commercial’s early phrases, “It’s halftime in America,” sounds very similar to the phrase from Reagan’s famous ad, “It’s morning again in America.” However, the commercial’s tone is not nearly as triumphal. While both ads feature morning scenes, Chrysler’s surrounds theirs with images of a grizzled Clint Eastwood walking down a dark alley, his face only visible at the commercial’s end. The bright daylight surrounding a man sitting on the edge of his bed is juxtaposed with a commentary track that declares, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback.” The commercial attempts to play on the kairos of both the Super Bowl halftime and America’s economic recovery. And while the Giants and Eli Manning managed to come back after the football game resumed, I want to think about how both the commercial and the conversation surrounding it think through the “comebacks” of Detroit and the American automotive industry at large.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The Chrysler ad’s argument invites America, in the midst of economic crisis, to look to Detroit and companies like Chrysler for inspiration. The commercial’s copy makes the argument explicit:

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again. I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems that we’ve lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead. But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one, because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times—and if we can’t find a way, then we make one. All that matters know is what’s ahead: how do we come from behind? How do we come together, and how do we win? Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And what’s true about them is true about all of us.

The visuals double the words: instead of a waving American flag, we see a flag for the city of Detroit. The images of happy industry are those of African-American men in a plant, wearing safety goggles and manufacturing shiny cars. At the commercial’s end, we see all of the people who were getting ready for the day now relying on Chrysler cars to transport wood to construction sites or children to school.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While both Eastwood himself and Chrysler’s marketing chief Olivier Francois have explicitly denied that the commercial promotes Obama, the copy and accompanying video do implicitly argue that Detroit’s rebirth—enabled by the auto industry bailout—presents a good model for the rest of the country. The warmly-lit unionized auto plants are directly contrasted with images of television news talking heads and protesting Wisconsin union members, in which cold colors predominate. Even the black-and-white pictures of families and firemen visually set these people apart from the others, turning them into models for the rest of us. Detroit thus takes from the rest of America its role as “the city upon a hill.” It is the reborn economy that America can follow, through the purchase and support of American labor and American-built cars.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, this message contrasts strongly with common images of Detroit as a ruined and ruin-city, and conservatives are reacting strongly against it. Clint Eastwood, the paragon of a rugged, silent conservative American masculinity, is now being attacked as “a spokesman for welfare queen Chrysler.” While Chrysler’s slogan, “imported from Detroit,” attempts to play with the stereotype that imported cars like Toyota and Honda are superior, some commentators are reading it as “the signature Obama haughtiness” which prefers a European socialism to American capitalism. In a political moment where Republicans reject unions as anti-American (despite a long history to the contrary), this commercial directly challenges these scripts.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

It’s interesting to contrast this year’s commercial with the 2011 Chrysler Super Bowl commercial featuring Eminem, which also embraced this slogan, incorporated some of the same images of Detroit’s ruin, and also boldly proclaimed Detroit’s identity as “the Motor City” where “this is what we do.”

The important difference here, I speculate, is that the older commercial merely tries to reverse an association between Detroit and cheap cars—pairing the language of “luxury” with images of grand old Detroit buildings—this year’s commercial dares to proclaim Detroit more than just “a town that’s been to hell and back,” but a model for America’s future progress. The language of American exceptionalism is frequently and commonly invoked in advertisements, but what makes American exceptional and what parts of America can be exceptional or “American” is always heavily negotiated and contested during an election year. This commercial and its connected visuals (like the map on YouTube which shows people watching the ad across the country, drawing lines of connection between the viewer and the USA) argue powerfully for “the values we hold in Detroit … and the values we think our customers identify with,” but those values implicit can’t be uncritically accepted during an election year when Republicans are campaigning against a President they call “almost un-American.” Likewise, a commercial that seeks to conflate the “they” of Detroit with the “we” of America can’t be accepted by politicians who explicitly rejected the auto industry bailout. This commercial—unintentionally or not—signals the beginning of not just the Super Bowl’s second half, but also the contentious election season ahead.

Future City from the Past: Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:31:56 +0000

Image Credit: a456

I’ve been thinking a lot about future cities these days, though I’ve mostly been focusing on real-world metropolises as futuristic settings in TV shows and movies. Today, I’m going to shift gears to describe an idea for a future city from the past, Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” advertising campaign for Shell Oil from the late 1930s. The campaign predicts (critics might say “encouraged” or “enabled”) a car-centric, highway-laden, city whose residents “loaf along at 50 [m.p.h]—right through town.” Bel Geddes’ “tomorrow” continues to resound today.

Image Credit: a456

There’s a common theme in yesterday’s future city and today’s—the car. When last I spoke about possible future cities, I critically assessed artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II”, an installation where toy cars zipped across a future Los Angeles surrounded by huge strips of freeways. Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” is eerily similar to the future city Burden envisions. Both futures see unimpeded cars as the epitome of modern efficiency. And both images of the future are utterly devoid of people. Bel Geddes explains this lack by telling the readers of Life Magazine (where the “City of Tomorrow” ad campaign ran for months) that “tomorrow’s children won’t play in the streets.”

Image Credit: a456

Despite these similarities, there is a difference between Burden’s art installation and Bel Geddes’s advertising campaign, and this crucial difference is one of context. Burden created his art installation for public viewing at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). Burden’s dealer Larry Gagosian footed the bill for Burden’s project, while LACMA board member Nicholas Bergguren later bought the project. The key point is that the stakeholders in the project’s success are art dealers and museum board members.

Image Credit: Best Ad

The stakeholders for Bel Geddes’s project’s success are a lot less innocuous. Shell Oil, one of the biggest petroleum distributors in the world, hired Bel Geddes for their massive, multi-segment advertising campaign. Looking at the elaborate advertisements, it’s obvious that Shell is using Bel Geddes’s designs to sell a future lifestyle that would make them millions (billions by today’s standards) if Americans decided to make it a reality. A transportation system dependent on cars would guarantee that gasoline would be a necessary commodity in the future. And it is exactly this gas-fueled future that was embraced wholeheartedly by the city planners of America in the decades following Shell’s campaign. Campaigns like Shell Oil’s “City of Tomorrow” lulled viewers into equating automobiles with ingenuity, modernity, and efficiency. Urban planners like Robert Moses and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright only realized what these viewers wanted to see: more roads, more highways, less impediments. Yet without artists and modelers like Bel Geddes to visualize a future of cars and people-less thoroughfares, what we have ended up seeing years down the line could have been a lot different.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

If the “City of Tomorrow” has piqued your interest, be sure to check out the Harry Ransom Center in the fall when their “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America” exhibition is up and running. Until then, visit the Ransom Center’s preview page for images and background related to the upcoming exhibition.

"Maybe These Maps Are Legends": Ghost Signs and the Traces of the Past

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:40 +0000

Austin, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

There is nothing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the water, or in the air we breathe but will be found in the universal Language of the Walls. ("The Language of the Walls," anonymous, 1855).

Maps are propositions as well as indexes, making visual arguments about our orientation in this world--a good map (whether road or otherwise) gets us somewhere, forces us to reconsider the relationship between us and the world. Advertising, that pernicious beasat, is also somewhere between sign and proposition. A visual referent to a thing--a bottle of beer, a pack of gum, an insurance service--an advertisement also makes an argument or, at the very least, presents a fantasy of (self-)orientation. But what happens when those relationships are obscured, when the fantasy becomes outdated? What happens when the ad remains after the product is gone?

Image, John Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene," 1835 from Wikimedia Commons

Advertising really becomes a science and a spectacle under the Victorians, who understood (and saw the signs of) the radically changing nature of capitalism. victorians pioneered advertising on the walls, as the sardonically frustrated narrator of "The Language of the Walls" notes. Advertising thus became a kind of "commodification of public space", as Sam Roberts and Sebastian Groes call it; an intrusion that we now take for granted began as a visual index of the transformation of public culture.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

The marks of this early advertising culture are all around us today, sometimes revealed--as in this photo--by the restructurations of late capitalism. As the photographer notes, this ghost sign only became visible after a local business had been pulled down. Ghost signs, then, function as both advertisement and map, indexing a previously obscured spatial relationship to the past. Often overlooked or unobserved, ghost signs write out--visually signify--a complex map of urban histories.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

Multiple businesses can be encoded onto each other. Like a palimpsest, ghost signs narrate the derridean traces ("the mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present") of history (local, cultural, capital) in physical form. They are inscrutable maps as well as unobtainable fantasies; as such, they represent almost pure representation (italicize), as it were, as they now exist without a goal or purpose, "signifying nothing."

Baltimore, MD, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

Fast Food Morality

Michael Widner — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Image via Fast Food FAILS Ads vs Reality

Appetizing, right? This image comes from one of several websites devoted to examining the differences between fast food as-advertised and as-is. These sites make the same argument: the ads promise fresh, attractive food, but what you get when you buy it fulfills the worst fears of the fast-food consumer. These photographs are the equivalent of showing how images of cover models are photoshopped for magazines. They imply that the companies who push such disappointing food are dishonest cheats.

The distortions of ads ties into a larger complex of concerns surrounding the marketing and consumption of fast food. San Fransisco, for instance, recently banned McDonald's from selling its Happy Meals to protect children ("Won't somebody think of the children?") from the pernicious effects of the toy-waving, high calorie junk food. The toy always rides on other heavily-marketed children's fare, mostly movies. The accumulated force is, many argue, too much for kids or parents to withstand. The child-consumer, like the adult duped by unrealistic ads, is a mindless, uncritical consumer of media and food, drawn in by doodads, bright colors, and that clown. Our mission, then, should be to teach the young how to parse marketing.

Picture of a McDonald's Happy Meal via "The War on Happiness: Leave Happy Meals Alone", The Atlantic

Screenshot of happymeal.com

Instead, we shame them. As other viz bloggers have noted (see Bodies of Evidence, Bodies vs Behavior: The Problems with Childhood Obesity Campaigns, and Lee Price and Exposed Eating), conversations about eating and ways to combat obesity often impute some moral defect to the subjects because of their bodies. The obese, such arguments go, blindly follow the dictates of ads and yet also rational agents whom we should blame for their unhealthy bodies. Even if PSAs don't verbally blame and shame the child, images of fat kids are held up for warning and mockery. Commentary often vocally does blame the parents for their moral failings and poor parenting.

Image via McDonalds Sued Over Happy Meals

The sarcasm from the Mitchieville blog encapsulates this judgement:

McDonald’s really does make it hard to say no to my legitimate children. I’ve tried feeding them food straight from the fridge, but apparently kids’ don’t like ice cubes and mustard for dinner. So then my kids’ catch a McDonald’s commercial on the tube – the same tube they had been watching for 10 straight hours – and they start up with their blathering nonsense about how they would love a hamburger and fries.

Parents who give in to their childrens' demands for Happy Meals are the same neglectful parents who plop their tots in front of the tv 10 hours a day, yet another moral failure.

The link between body and morality is not limited to children and fast food, however, as the Christian Diet movement shows:

Globe cover via Miss Plump Universenet

Several recent books imply that obesity is not only unhealthy, but a sin (e.g., Dieting for God and I Prayed Myself Slim). The correspondence between body and soul is easy and clear. If you do good works (i.e., eat healthy and exercise), your body will reflect it. If you sin by giving in to the deceiver and overeat, your "crime" will out as fat.

But like the habits these ideologies attack, the equivalence of body with soul is temporarily satisfying, ultimately unhealthy, and too convenient.

TOMS' "One Day Without Shoes" - Awareness, Activism, Advertising?

ebfrye — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 02:45:18 +0000

"One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS via Youtube

Today TOMS shoes conducted its second annual One Day Without Shoes campaign in which anyone (wherever in the privileged world) was encouraged to go without sandals, boots, sneakers, etc. The intention behind the event is to "raise awareness" for what it's like for the millions in less developed countries who daily go without adequate protection for their feet and, as a result, are at risk for serious infections. At the risk of sounding like a cynical jerk, I'm going to raise some questions about how the campaign attracts an audience through compelling visual tools and ultimately how it benefits those for whom it claims to be raising awareness.

From what I've observed by looking at the TOMS website and performing minimal internet searching, the campaign appears to be quite popular with high school and college kids, many of whom, it can be assumed, already wear TOMS shoes. Like other activist branding campaigns, this one predictably makes use of respectable celebrities. A screenshot from the video above shows that Demi Moore was into taking off her shoes:

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS via Youtube

So was Kristen Bell:

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS via Youtube

In addition, the campaign maintains a viable internet presence by encouraging its participants to post videos and photos. Students have been tweeting about the response they've received from administrators and passerby. Curiously, the Twitter feed resembles a composition notebook, perhaps emphasizing that it's acceptable to be distracted from class for such a good cause.

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS website

Similarly, the information that the site provides about its purposes are limited but they use a visual rhetoric that recalls the educational system but emphasizes that this is an alternative to the usual schooling. Also on the website, above some photographs of children playing without shoes (happily, which is odd given TOMS' message), is this blackboard-style equation:

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS website

Is this an education in activism? If so, it's also an education in consumerism. Before the big day, would-be participants were edged toward and rewarded for their participation by such videos as this one that feature fashion bloggers, editors of mainstream magazines, and doe-eyed, hipster dream-girls who give advice on "how to get your toes ready" for the big day. See screenshot and accompanying video below:

Screenshot, "Get Your Toes Ready," TOMS via YouTube

"Get Your Toes Ready," TOMS via YouTube

The video demonstrates the pull of the campaign on other corporations and media entities. In addition to the fashion elite, videos and images of employees at AOL, Google, and Microsoft can be found on the TOMS website. Yet, obviously, the brand that benefits most is TOMS. Now, I certainly don't begrudge anyone a pair of shoes, and, full disclosure, I've owned and worn bare a pair of TOMS myself. But I am struck by how by becoming compelled to buy more TOMS shoes, the "students" are also able to participate in an event that expands the experience of a brand beyond what they usually encounter. TOMS has one-upped the Gap's RED campaign by creating an extended moment of bonding with one's peer group.

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS website

Because the rhetoric of the campaign provides little information for what its participants should do after they become and make others "aware," I'm inclined to say that participants are not encouraged toward a specific kind of activism but a more definitive aesthetic. Alternative education, attractive celebrities, the relief of comfortable, canvas sneakers after a long walk. This is California dreaming at its best...

Meat is Murder, PETA is Porn

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Imogen Bailey; image from http://www.imogenbailey.com/peta.html

It's not news to say that PETA, in its quest to protect animals, regularly objectifies women in disturbing and disturbingly consistent ways. We've had a couple of posts on viz. already that discuss some of PETA's tactics, such as Posing for Your Eating Habits and the Girls-Gone-Wild parody examined in Ugh! Milk Gone Bad. I object to PETA's ads both for how they perpetuate some of the worst sexism and objectification and for how they are counterproductive; I am a PETA-hating vegetarian. But the trainwreck that is their media campaign is, at least, provocative, if nothing else (which, I suppose, is their "strategy"). Now, PETA has done it again with a new set of videos and pictures that connect eating vegetables to pornography, which they call the "Veggie Love Casting Session". Before we look at "Veggie Love," however, I thought I'd share a few salient images that demonstrate how it is a logical outgrowth of their previous work.

Warning: the rest of the images in this post are NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

All images from PETA.org

The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent. Indeed, the "Veggie Love" ads make clear PETA's alliance with the values and visual motifs of porn:

Veggie Love Casting Session screenshots from http://features.peta.org/casting-session/default.aspx

Playing on the designs of paid pornography websites, the PETA site promises "explicit casting footage" starring bikini-clad women (and one man) in the throes of passion... with their vegetables of choice. Visual allusions to fellatio recur throughout the images and videos. The message, again, is one equating vegetarianism with sex. It makes me wonder who the audience is. Since most of the celebrity spokespeople for PETA are women and most vegetarians are women (a 1992 report claims 68%), perhaps PETA is trying to induce more men to give up meat. Is PETA implicitly promising naked women to men who "go veg"?

Regardless, it's yet another sad entry in the hall of shame that is PETA. I sometimes wonder if the organization is funded by the meat industry. What better way to discredit vegetarianism and animal rights than to make their most outspoken proponents seem like sexist lunatics?

Anti-abortion Rhetoric Then and Now

ladysquires — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:24:04 +0000

(Public Domain Image found at Wikimedia Commons)

I came across this Russian anti-abortion poster from 1925, and thought it was pretty striking. The text translates to: "Abortions performed by either trained or self-taught midwives not only maim the woman, they also often lead to death." It shows a woman talking with a midwife, then a woman in a hospital, and then a coffin being lowered into a grave with mourners looking on. What struck me about the image is that the argument is essentially that abortions are bad because they endanger the lives of the women who get them. The pathetic appeal depends on the viewer's sense of identification with the woman.

While you do often hear pro-life advocates talking about the negative consequences of abortions for them women who get them, I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that the "life" at the center of most pro-life arguments is not the life of pregnant women. Rather, anti-abortion advocates today have been phenomenally successful at making the baby/fetus the primary point of identification and erasing the presence of the mother. I'm not going to post pictures of aborted fetuses on this site, but these rather maudlin images from the 1973 Right to Life comic Who Killed Junior get the point across pretty well (potentially disturbing):

(Image Credits: Ethan Persoff)

You can view the entire comic book here. I've been thinking for a while about what a pro-choice visual rhetoric might look like, and given our current public debates about the redifinition of rape, conscience clauses, and this disturbing but hopefully DOA bill in South Dakota, which would essentially make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions, it strikes me that there may be an opportunity to reclaim the language of life in a way that makes pregnant women in distress visible once again.

Super Bowl Car Commercials and the Uses of the Past

Michael Widner — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:21:03 +0000

Now that our national gladiatorial spectacle has ended, we turn to the obligatory analysis of the major media event. How many Packers can get injured in a single season? Why, exactly, are the Black Eyed Peas popular? And, most importantly, what about the commercials? Rather than discuss which ones are the funniest, depict the most animal cruelty, or objectify women the worst, I'd like to discuss what seems like an odd coincidence: many of the car commercials use different visions of the past to sell their product.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=47cff490-1225-4e91-97b3-579cdcccdc98" target="_new" title="">Mercedes: Diddy</a>

Mercedes: Diddy

In the Mercedes commercial, we see new car models joining the family. The commercial starts in a barn with an older model car. Its radio turns on and we hear Janis Joplin sing "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz". The setting, the scratchiness of the sound, and the song's throwback country style all make the song sound older than it really is, establishing a past in the country. Near the middle, around the 33 second mark, we see a futuristic car drive past something akin to a Model T prototype. Presumably both are Mercedes. These and several hundred other cars from many eras converge to welcome the 4 new models. Mercedes thus constructs a continuous history, an unbroken line of Diddy-endorsed quality and luxury, that continues with these new cars.

Hyundai Sonata: Don't Settle

The Hyundai Sonata commercial takes a slightly different approach. Rather than just cars, the emphasis is on technology of many sorts: bicycles, cell phones, portable music players, and video games, among others. A voice-over asks what the world would be like if we settled for the first thing that came along. Here the technological past intrudes upon the present to build a teleological narrative that places the Sonata as the ultimate goal. The visual contrast between the modern car and ancient technologies also implies a similar distance between the Sonata and other vehicles.

Chevy Volt: Make History

In this Chevy Volt ad, on the other hand, we have a history of technology defined by moments of brilliance. Rather than an antiquated past or a proud history, we see a series of great discoveries and inventions: electricity, the lightbulb, television, space flight, electric guitar amplifiers, and others. Chevy places their new electric car in the pantheon of technological inventions, giving us both a progress narrative and a muted teleology like the Hyundai and Mercedes commercials. Moreover, the Chevy spot seems to combine the sense of historical greatness of the Mercedes ad with the technological fetishism of the Hyundai one. History, Chevy tells us, is told through the great moments in technology.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=1fa2d8a2-2ed0-419a-b60c-d2c39014d912" target="_new" title="">BMW: Changes</a>

BMW: Changes

BMW, however, tells us that the past was dirty, inefficient, slow, and noisy. Their new diesel-powered vehicle represents cleanliness, speed, efficiency, and power. The noise is not a clanking, but a baritone engine hum. The dirty cars struggling along the streets and spewing thick, black smoke make the blue, immaculately polished sports car even more appealing. The car represents not continuous progress, but a clear break with the bad ol' days.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=f2db3bd3-0a4c-4681-ae0e-5d8897d5519e" target="_new" title="">Carmax.com: Gas Station</a>

Carmax.com: Gas Station

Unlike BMW, Carmax caricatures the Leave it to Beaver 1950s of unbearable cheerfulness and unrealistic levels of service. A modern driver pulls into a gas station and is suddenly barraged by attendants cleaning his windows, checking his oil, filling his tank. He assumes he's being attacked and runs off screaming. But, as the closing tag tells us, CarMax provides this type of service, informed by a nostalgic creation of the past. The clean-cut, uniformed, and smiling workers contrast with the paranoid, stressed, and unkempt modern driver. CarMax, the ad argues, returns us to a more wholesome time.

While these were certainly not always the best or most interesting of the Super Bowl commercials, the ties among them struck me. They almost all rely upon cliched visions of imagined pasts that fetishize technology. Is it the revolving door of automotive invention--a new model every year--that demands we abandon the obsolete while retaining what progress has been made? Are other products are so insistently linked to the past?

American Apparel's Imagined Bodies

Megan Eatman — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:47:07 +0000

Cropped version of American Apparel ad by Boris Lopez

I hate to be talking about this, because I hate to be one of the many people giving American Apparel attention, but I can't help but find their recently released ads, which feature line drawings of nude, young-looking women, worthy of commentary. While American Apparel's ads usually contain some degree of nudity, their foray into line drawing rather than a particular photographic aesthetic seems to invoke, maybe too obviously, questions about the nature of pornography in a virtual world. More photos, which are not suitable for work, after the jump.

While the critiques of American Apparel's ads are numerous, I have always found their ads more over-the-top and obvious than offensive (their policies--like not selling some items over a size 6--are another story). AA forgoes subtext in favor of selling sex as obviously as it possibly can; the clothes themselves are barely featured, and and young women's bodies become the primary consumable. These line drawings clearly follow that pattern. While the slogan "You can feel how good it looks" may ostensibly refer to the woman who would purchase and wear cotton undergarments, the drawing's beckoning expression suggests that it is, in fact, the observer who can "feel" how good the underwear looks through his/her attraction to the model.

One of the most noticeable features of these ads is, of course, the models' apparent youth. AA has always pursued a youthful aesthetic, forbidding its female employees from having "unnatural" haircuts, performing any obvious eyebrow grooming, or wearing more than minimal makeup, so the use of youthful women is not out of the ordinary. What interested me about these ads is that they could have been photographs; there are certainly models who look extremely young but are of legal age, and AA has obtained models from a variety of sources to get an "amateur" look (although it is untrue that, as the company claims, all of their models are amateurs). The use of provocative, underage-appearing line drawings calls attention to the line between fantasy and reality without fully surpassing it. Interestingly, the slogan could be used in arguments for legislation (extant in, for example, Australia and Canada) that forbids images that portray child sexual abuse even if no actual children were involved. By suggesting that this image, which draws attention to its own un-reality, can still inspire sexual sensation, the slogan suggests that the way a viewer feels about a drawing of an underage girl and a picture of an underage girl might not be that different.

When It Can't Be Clever - Domestic Violence PSAs (part two)

Cate Blouke — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 05:26:43 +0000

In many of the ads, the abuse tends to occur off camera, subjecting the viewer/auditor to the sounds of violence without the spectacle (this French ad, for example, and this British one). These ads tend to be aimed at the "innocent bystanders," those who are surrounded by abuse but who do nothing to stop it. While I've been fortunate enough to be spared such an experience, I imagine that the commercials cause the target audience to re-live the experience and reflect on their own passivity.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Pond's Ad on YouTube

Other ads depict the effects of abuse without showing the causes. These tend to be aimed at women who may be the victims of abuse. This Pond's commercial (the lotion company) shows images of battered women next to a quoted excuse such as, in the above image, "Fell off the bed." This ad for the Family Justice Center shows us a wedding in which the woman vows to "make excuses when you humiliate me in public" and "to blame myself when you hit me."

As a woman, I bristle at the way these ads seem to implicate the victim for not speaking up. They strike me as more accusatory than supportive, and one wonders if shame is really an effective means to reach victims of domestic violence. Perhaps. In the Jezebel post I cited last week, the author explains how most people involved in abusive relationships don't actually see themselves as villains or victims.

That issue is quite poignantly addressed by this British advertisement directed at teenagers:

Image Credit: UK Home Office via YouTube

H/T again to Rachel

This is one of the few ads I found that targets the perpetrators of abuse specifically, and it's interesting that the target audience is young men. It asks the teenage boy to look at himself and his actions from an outside perspective - arguing that if he could "only see" himself, he wouldn't be behaving that way.

When adult abusers are targeted, children are often invoked, using the argument that children learn from their parents. In this ad, the violence is acted out by children, though we only see their feet in oversized (parental) shoes. This poignant Australian ad is aimed at a variety of parental misbehaviors, pairing adults with children who mimic their actions.

I wish I had something profound to end with, but wading back through these commercials has just left me disheartened. While the David Arquette ad that I talked about last week may not have been serious enough, it also wasn't as depressing. And so I wonder if it's actually possible to find ways to raise awareness without making people feel lousy?

When Humor Hurts - Domestic Violence PSAs (part one)

Cate Blouke — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 03:13:36 +0000

Image credit: The OPCC via YouTube

H/T to Rachel for suggesting the topic sending me the clip

Although Halloween is behind us, and we've packed up the glam make-up and eaten all the goodies, I'd like to call your attention to an interesting use of bunny suits I recently came across. Or, perhaps "interesting" isn't quite the right word... inappropriate, insincere, ineffectual... these seem more apt. While this ridiculous domestic violence PSA has already been addressed by Irin Carmon over on Jezebel, I think there are some more fundamental issues we can tackle from a rhetorical standpoint. Ultimately, the commercial leaves me with questions about when humor actually hits the mark and when it just goes horribly wrong.

Using humor to "get your attention," the two segments of the commercial don't line up. Bunny suits and feigned infidelity, while possibly funny (though I found it rather inane), have nothing to do with the realities of domestic violence that the second half claims to concern itself with. The attention grabber, by essentially admitting to its own frivolity, undermines the potential for taking the second part seriously. So does using David Arquette to deliver the message. As pop culture spokesperson, he's woefully impossible to take seriously, despite the attempt to reclaim authority at the beginning of the commercial.

While I'm a huge proponent of using humor to make a point, here, all it does is undermine the message it attempts to deliver. In the following Australian PSA, however, the humor really hits home...

Image Credit: YouTube

Whether you laughed or cringed or both when the husband handed over the baseball bat, this commercial hits its mark. The "humor" correlates directly to its message, and makes it even more affective. Aimed not at those perpetrating violence, but people who stand by and do nothing, laughter, regardless of motivation, implicates the viewer in the scene of violence we hear behind the door. Laughing at the problem is tantamount to ignoring it, or, like the next door neighbor, handing over the bat.

Whereas the audience for the Arquette commercial is undefined at best, this commercial makes it clear that domestic violence is a concern for everyone, not just the abusers and abused. The Jezebel post I cited above includes a French commercial that is similarly aimed at "the people around abusers," and it raises interesting questions about audience which I'll pick up on in my post next week.

Picturing Survivors

Megan Eatman — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:43:48 +0000

October is breast cancer awareness month, so you may be seeing pink ribbons and products more frequently. While the pink ribbon is a powerful symbol of breast cancer awareness, "pinkwashing" (exploiting consumer grief or guilt to sell products, such as pink hair dryers or nail polish, with minimal donations to breast cancer organizations) has been the target of much critique, in part because it allows consumers to feel that consumption of material goods is a solution to a widespread health problem. The SCAR project, which takes and exhibits photographs of young breast cancer survivors, offers a different visual argument for cancer awareness. Depending on your office environment, the images after the jump may be NSFW.

Image: David Jay, The SCAR Project

SCAR stands for "Surviving Cancer: Absolute Reality," and the images the project produces clearly offer a counter to the disembodied pink ribbon. SCAR's strategy is not entirely new; campaigns raising awareness for other issues have often used images of injured or otherwise physically affected individuals to further their cause. These images, however, avoid falling into overwhelmingly sentimental appeals to pity, guilt, or shock. The women pictured are self-selected, volunteers who chose to show their bodies to help fight breast cancer. While absent or reconstructed breasts may be shocking to some viewers, the comfort that the composition projects steers the images away from pure shock value. Looking directly into the camera without fear or shame, these women do not seem to need help; rather, with knowing expressions, they are here to help you.

Gathering support for a cause is difficult, and I certainly wouldn't discount the effect that pink ribbons have had on breast cancer awareness. However, the SCAR project seems an important counter to "thinking pink." At the nexis of tragedy and hope, these images seem to balance between the incessant positivity that Barbara Ehrenreich critiques in Bright-Sided and an apocalyptic sadness. These women are survivors, but they aren't unharmed; getting better and being strong does not have to (and often should not) mean hiding the marks of what happened to you. That complex message, spelled out with these women's bodies, may not always be apparent in the more common iconography of breast cancer.

Accessorizing Surveillance - Barbie Video Girl

Cate Blouke — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:03:14 +0000

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

H/T: Noel

From coloring books to glitter to unicorns, my viz. posts seem to be revolving around adult repurposing of the trappings of youth. Naturally, we'll have to throw Barbie into the mix. While she has certainly seen her share of fashion updates over her 50-year reign as fantasy icon extraordinaire, this creepy 21st-century update to Barbie's accessory collection reverses the gaze and turns Barbie’s body into a tool for surveillance.

The doll is marketed and designed for video sharing. The website encourages girls to take video, upload it on the computer, and share it with their friends. The chord plugs right into Barbie’s spine, and for just $49.99, you too can have a cyborg girl gadget!

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

With a video camera “hidden” in her necklace, Video Barbie ostensibly allows young girls to “record movies from Barbie’s point of view.” However, masking technology in the doll’s bosom opens the door for less appropriate kinds of video-taping and raises questions about children and technology.

Aside from my instinctual reaction – that this is the perfect new toy for pedophiles (the jacket looks like it could easily be replaced with one that would conceal the video interface) – I’m dismayed by the message this sends. For one thing, the placement of the camera reinforces fetishization of the female chest. Though the location may have been strictly due to technological constraint, to make eye-contact with the camera, little girls have to gaze directly at a biologically impossible female form.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

The language used to sell the doll blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Barbie explains to us, “I am a real working video camera.” In a weird way, she ends up objectifying herself – selling both herself and her camera within. For all Barbie’s associations with female objectification, this doll flips that, and you become the filmed object.

And why are we teaching little girls to tape themselves in the first place? Let alone with a hidden camera? The recent internet incidents with 11-year-old “Jessi Slaughter” should be enough to have parents kicking their kids off computers, let alone buying them toys to broadcast with.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

Glitter re-visited (deadly and disembodied)

Cate Blouke — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:43:55 +0000

Image Credit: Norton

H / T to my mom for sending me the video in response to last week's post

Last week on Viz I posted about glitter as an undermining agent in images of solemnity. In this commercial for Norton security software, the glitter use results in deadly (and delightful) consequences.

The commercial functions through analogy. "Your on-line bank account" is like an adorable little cartoon unicorn - friendly, harmless, and essentially insubstantial. Depicting on-line information as a mythical creature, the commercial highlights the "unreality" of computer-based data. Whereas we can (and should) shred our sensitive information when it comes in physical documents, our on-line information is much more vulnerable through its illusive, unicorn-like existence floating in the ether.

Dolf Lundgren, however, is a very "real" representation (so to speak) of all the nasty bad guys out there waiting to do horrible things to our unicorns. "Real" criminals can seriously harm our ephemeral information, as demonstrated in the alternate version of the commercial below. Criminal activity is embodied in the looming stature of Lundgren, whereas our own points of vulnerability are disembodied (cartoon) and unwittingly dreaming of rainbows.

Similarly, Lundgren's weapons are also very physically menacing (a knife, a pistol, and a flame thrower), whereas the unicorn's defenses (when bolstered with the Norton software) are just as fantastical as the unicorn itself - he/she/it defeats Lundgren with a cloud of poisonous, sparkling fairy dust.

While I still hold that the comparison between security software and fairy dust might not actually be that reassuring on closer examination, in this instance the incongruity seems intentional. The fact that the unicorn fights off an automatic weapon with a cloud of smoke shot out of its horn (complete with tinkly fairy noise), causing Lundgren's head to explode into a cloud of glitter, is hilarious. The seemingly innocuous dust has deadly effects which are made festive and amusing through sparkle.

Overall, I find the embodied/disembodied personifications the most rhetorically interesting aspects of the commercial, but who doesn't love some unicorns and glitter? Or flame-throwers and bad jokes (below)?

Image Credit: Norton

H / T to my mom for sending me the video in response to last week's post

All that glitters is not gold... or in good taste

Cate Blouke — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:15:55 +0000

Image Credit: posted by "Hellen Killer" on Regresty, originating from PeachyProfiles.com

H/T to Megan Eatman for sending me the blog

As recent Twilight films have demonstrated, sparkling is one of the few things that doesn't translate well into new media. It also makes it hard to take anything seriously - regardless of authorial intention or gravity of subject matter.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks nine years ago, comedians across the country were faced with the question of how soon would be "too soon" to joke about the tragedy. The question of timing has arisen over and over again, recently in conversations about Clear Blue Tuesday, a movie musical with 9/11 as its narrative foundation that premiered in New York last week. The subject is inherently a sensitive one, and though the blog post I pulled these images from used them as a source for ridicule, this will be a conversation more about glitter than the ethics of humor.

Image Credit: posted by "Hellen Killer" on Regresty, originating from HitUpMySpot.com

Though these images were (presumably) created as hearfelt monuments to one of America's most significant tragedies, the use of a "glitter" effect fundamentally undermines any sense of solemnity that they were intended to invoke. The underlying photographic image of two New York City firefighters with hands clasped and arms raised, signifies a brotherhood and sense of community that infuses our collective memory of the 9/11 attacks. Yet the sparkling overlay, though it certainly draws our attention, also obscures the sincerity expressed in the caption. Sparkles are tied to feelings of festivity and celebration that seem utterly inappropriate for the content, and the juxtaposition verges on laughable (depending on your sense of humor) or downright tragic.

While these images are bound to stir up an unpedictable mix of feelings, they might serve as a useful tool for talking about context, content, and ethos. They seem to come from websites that specialize in icons for use on MySpace, and this could be used to fuel conversation about social networking and the "image" students present to the world. Or, an equally interesting converstation might arise regarding marketing strategies and pathos - to what lengths will advertisers go to grab our attention?

I'm not including a link to the url listed at the bottom of this last image as it seems to be a spam site that traps you into answering survey questions before you can navigate away from the page. Perhaps that's fitting given this is probably the most tasteless of all the images "Killer" collected. The cartoonish sparkling sky set against the reality of the smoking buildings completely negates the seemingly reverant message.

Image Credit: posted by "Hellen Killer" on Regresty, originating on MySpaceLayoutsHome.com

Satire Sandwiches: Stephen Colbert's Thought for Food

fc — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:50:12 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from ColbertNation.com

Food policy can be pretty disheartening stuff: anything that combines environmentalism, worker's rights and public health in a single topic is likely to include bad-to-terrible news pretty much every day. With the Senate underfunding the Child Nutrition Act, bluefin tuna set to go extinct and Dirt! The Movie preparing to air on PBS, even my fairly-high tolerance for crisis fatigue was wearing thin this week. Thankfully, Stephen Colbert was there to talk me off the ledge. As is often the case, Colbert managed to make life livable with his pringle-and-whipped-cream-like blend of irony and humor-- two remarkable human capacities that are often undervalued because they elude satisfactory explanation by rhetorical, literary or philosophical models. While even Jon Stewart's comedic analysis of politicians and pundits can often be as depressing as it is amusing, Colbert's satiric send-ups consistently manage to wink their way through all kinds of maddening news stories and leave me with a crisp, clean finish. His new "Thought for Food" segment lives up to those expectations. Rather than attempting (and almost certainly failing) to explain the jokes, I thought I'd share a few videos and comment as needed. More on Colbert, corn-surpluses, advertising and unholy sandwiches after the break.

Colbert began his "Thought for Food" segment in mid-March. His second installment covers a lot of the ground that I have written about recently on this blog. He begins, appropriately enough, with some novel uses for corn-- when subsidies artificially supress the price of corn while simultaneously creating massive surplusses, you get... well, you'll see. He ends with his own take on Oliver's Food Revolution.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Thought for Food - Corn Diapers, Fatty Foods & Jamie Oliver

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

The third and latest installment of "Thought for Food" focuses on marketing processed foods. The centerpiece of the segment takes aim at KFC's new "Double Down" "sandwich". If you thought Colbert's Pringle-RediWhip creation was a bad idea, then you'll love this bacon sandwich with fried-chicken buns. Oddly enough, the fist time I logged on to ColberNation.com and watched the video of Stephen roundly panning the fried mass of animal protein, the banner ad at the top of the page was selling-- wait for it-- KFC's new Double Down sandwich (I guess that when your food is a publicity stunt, any attention is good attention). It reminds me of Michael Pollan's "rule" about not eating anything you've ever seen advertised.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Thought for Food - Mentally Ill Advertisers & German Cupcakes

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

One important effect of satire like the Colbert Report comes from creating a space in which we can release the engery, frustration, angst, etc. that are stirred up by serious social problems. They can be refreshing without being escapist. As Kierkegaard puts it in his "Concept of Irony," works like this can disarm us, and being taken off-guard can be a valuable experience for people locked in an entrenched debate. Humor can give us critical distance from even deeply held values (an effect Bakhtin notes when writing about parody and the sacreligious), and even when it doesn't bridge differences and open new lines of dialogue, that temporary distance lets us catch our breath and rest our passions. Ok, that's all the speculation I have in me today. I'll leave you with a video of Colbert interviewing Jonathan Safran Foer in which Stephen gives the world's greatest description of free range chicken eggs.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jonathan Safran Foer

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Advertising in America

Andi — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:39:45 +0000

Image credit: screen shot of Emergence of Advertising in America database

On March 26^th Noel will be leading our workshop on Best Practices for Digital Images here at the DWRL and in preparation for that meeting many of us at viz. are compiling several blog postings on image databases. This week Rachel posted about Radical Software—a database that provides access to work done in the ‘seventies with the creation of and theorizing about digital and video media. I’d like to take us back even further to a database dedicated to making available early advertising images from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s. I found Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 to be extremely entertaining to browse and can easily imagine integrating it into my classroom practice.

The Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 is housed at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History as part of the Duke University Libraries. The database is home to over 9,000 images from the early period in American advertising. Because the strength of this collection centers on the period of increasing professionalization within the field of commercial advertising and the rise of national print magazines, this database holds many many images that will be of use to those of us who work with visual culture. Moreover, the ability to access so many early advertisements may provide several unique opportunities for the use of these images in our classroom. Obviously, these images would be useful for any unit providing a history to advertising in this early period but I also think that access to so many early ads might offer some contextualization for popular advertising campaigns today. Introducing students to these earlier advertisements may help to denaturalize to pervasive nature of contemporary marketing tools.

The database is easily searchable—especially fun is to use the search function to look up early advertisements for particular products. Typing in “perfume” or “soap” or “cola,” for instance, yields several fascinating results. Browsing through the collection strengths was also amusing—the database has designated pages for the history of specific campaigns, including Pond’s, Kodak, as well as for the history of particular types of advertising strategies, including broadsides, trading cards, calendars, and advertising cookbooks. I hope this resource proves as useful for your research and your pedagogy as it might for your entertainment.

Mechanized Spectacle: Lo-Fi Effects for Viral Content

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:14:02 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Hampton Finger

Lucky for you and me that before I started working on my blog post today that my friend Hampton asked me if I’d seen the new OK Go video for “This Too Shall Pass,” and thus I stumbled onto a much more interesting debate than any engaged in by any Texas Republicans running for the governorship.

The above video does a great job of catching the audience’s attention, as it features an enormous and complex Rube Goldberg machine (apparently created from a collaboration between the band and Syyn Labs) that not only moves a car and drops a piano, but also contributes to the song by playing music at one point. While the song itself is pleasant, the video’s visual interest overwhelms it, especially as the lyrics themselves aren’t terribly memorable. Considering that OK Go first achieved major success with their clever video for “Here It Goes Again,” in which they do a choreographed dance on treadmills, this video simply seems to fit into an artistic identity that the band has built for itself.

However, what is interesting to note is that, prior to releasing this video yesterday, the band had recorded a video for the song with the Notre Dame marching band that was released in early January. Why this video didn’t go viral as their new video (the latter of which already has generated 1.2 million YouTube hits, more than the previous one) is because their record label, EMI, initially refused to allow the first video to be embeddable on other websites. As noted by several websites, this created a controversy. The band responded not only by writing an open letter to their fans on their website, but also by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times authored by their lead singer Damian Kulash. His argument considers the power of music videos as artistic statements and financial cash machines, and asserts that EMI neglects both interests by prohibiting embedding.

He starts off the article by asserting his band’s interest in their videos as an extension of their art:

My band is famous for music videos. We direct them ourselves or with the help of friends, we shoot them on shoestring budgets and, like our songs, albums and concerts, we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.

However, what’s also interesting to note is that he represents the videos as much as branding devices as a creative product when he alludes to how his band is “famous” for the videos. OK Go has profited financially from viral Internet success, and Kulash isn’t afraid to admit it. However, his warning to EMI is particularly potent. While they make money from making people view the videos on YouTube, they miss out on the long-term benefits of viral success:

In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.

Kulash’s eloquence here is directed towards the bottom line: the band and EMI will only profit if people are interested in the band, and online videos now serve the purpose that radio once did. However, the “This Too Shall Pass” also raises questions as it builds onto the low-fi aesthetic of their famous “Here It Goes Again” video, which now has almost 50 million views on YouTube.

OK Go - Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

They’ve also played into a curiosity about their video by posting a series of making-of clips on their YouTube channel in a way that reminds me of the also-viral Old Spice commercial from the Super Bowl, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”

A part of this commercial’s success lies in its lo-fi appeal as well as its success. The advertising company behind the commercial admitted in an interview that the commercial was made in one take with no CGI, something that seems almost as impossible as OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine. I think there’s something fascinating about the mix of viral Internet advertising and old-fashioned creative trickery that also speaks to a desire for an experience with the real (which may be a part of the appeal that The Hurt Locker has over Avatar, and why Roger Ebert is picking the former for Best Picture) in the midst of technological innovation. “Home made” art, as OK Go describe their video, just may be more appealing than anything else, especially as the emphasis is on the performance over the technology. (Maybe this is why State Farm’s logo is hidden in the video on the truck that starts the dominos: advertising is best done in a subtle and artistic fashion.)

As a teacher using technology and as a researcher interested in its implications, I wonder what such desires reveal in my students, and whether the use of high technology works best for them when it is least explicit and obvious.

Knockout Ads: Sexism and the Super Bowl

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:04:21 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

Since almost everybody else on the Internet is commenting on this year’s Super Bowl ads, I couldn’t resist offering my take. The obvious issue with the Super Bowl ads this year is their fairly blatant sexism.

Whether declaring how men need Dodge Chargers because women emasculate them, or entreating men to “wear the pants,” the Super Bowl commercials addressed themselves to a male audience, as noted by the New York Times:

There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are. That theme recurs in Super Bowl ads because so many of the viewers are men and so many of the products advertised are aimed at them.

Or, as James Poniewozik from Time put it:

Wow, Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

The visuals of the Charger ad in particular, entitled “Man’s Last Stand,” are particularly creepy; the ad features a montage of men staring into the camera, ending on a closeup of one man’s intense eyes before shooting to footage of the car zooming over the landscape as the words “Man’s Last Stand” appear on the screen. The deadpan of most of the men’s expressions doesn’t directly express hostility, but the voice and the script, which dully intones that “I will carry your lip balm. I will watch your vampire TV shows with you,” implies a building hostility that can only be recovered through the car’s fast speeds.

What I find interesting about this, though, is how seemingly tone-deaf these ads are to a potential female audience. According to the Nielsen Company, this year’s Super Bowl reached more than 106 million viewers—it seems obvious that many of these viewers would be women, right? Why would they risk alienating a potential audience, many of whom are the people who go the store to buy the beer that their families will drink while watching Drew Brees and Peyton Manning? (At the Super Bowl party I was at, there were ten women and six men—and while the women weren’t all major football fans, we all watched the ads attentively.)

However, in looking at the most successful of the ads, the Snickers ad “Game” that featured Betty White, the message isn’t dramatically different. Betty White is actually Mike, who is “playing [football] like Betty White out there.” Once Mike eats a Snickers provided to him by an attractive girl, he becomes a young man again, as the tag line assures viewers that “Snickers satisfies.” While Betty White getting tackled in a football game is amusingly incongruous, the basic message of the commercial is still the same: being a man in sporting events is good, and whatever product makes you a “satisfied” man is to the good as well. Maybe the issue with the Super Bowl ads this year wasn’t their sexist content, but rather that the amount of sexism has to be tempered by equal amounts of humor. Women can take a joke, but just not too much of one, so advertisers need to not express their angst about the economy and their lost jobs to avoid knocking out a valuable audience.

The Glee Effect: New Media Marketing for Old Institutions

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:57 +0000

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds! After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz. I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all. My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

While I might critique the video for what seems to me to be an excessive length (it’s over 14 minutes, and starts to drag during the long list of student activity groups), what I find fascinating about this is that what seems to be one of the most traditional American universities is choosing to brand themselves using the most current cultural trends: the YouTube viral video and the unexpected musical. While Andrew Johnson, the Yale graduate who dreamed up the idea, disclaims that he was influenced by shows like Glee and High School Musical, the “campiness” noted by Matthew Nojiri of ABC seems very influenced by Glee’s particular brand of snark and softness.

What Nojiri doesn’t discuss is that these attempts to advertise colleges are a long-standing trend. A former professor of mine, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wildly controversial essay called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students” for Harper’s in September 1997 which critiqued universities for marketing themselves to students “immersed in a consumer mentality.” This ad does just that, selling things like Yale’s residential colleges (and their organic meals) alongside experiences like “monitor[ing] a foreign election. / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection.” While both things might appeal to a student body, there’s something uncomfortable about suggesting that the university is another fashionable purchase to make alongside a Wii or a hipster shirt, or that volunteering at law school clinics is cool because cute girls do it while sitting in fabulous new buildings.

Glee, as I’ve already noted, markets itself as dramatic irony; what is more interesting about the Glee
phenomenon is how successfully it has turned itself not only into a popular television show, but also an iTunes phenomenon where individuals can buy cast recordings of the songs, and season DVDs before the season is even fully finished. Taking advantage of the appeal of old 80s songs and new R&B htis, Glee is helping make FOX serious money in a time when media conglomorates are trying to find ways to monetize the web. While it’s understandable that in a time of financial crisis even Ivies like Yale want to seek out the greatest number of possible undergraduates to fund their coffers, there’s something disturbing about a university marketing itself like a musical. Is the slick marketing of “That’s Why I Chose Yale” a little too knowing? What is the substance underneath which this video is meant to express? Or is it a good sign that professors seem to be rethinking what they're doing as not merely educating, but selling valuable skillsets and educational services for a newly media-savvy generation? Maybe Yale's Glee-ification is just all in good honest American fun, like the musical itself.

OMFMMLA!

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:26:06 +0000

Image Credit: Gossip Girl Insider

Having returned back to Austin from an enchanting trip to St. Louis for the Midwest Modern Language Association conference, I thought I’d talk a little bit about “OMFGG: Advertising Class Mobility and Ambivalent Spectatorship in the CW's Gossip Girl,” the paper my friend Sarah Orem and I co-delivered there.

Though neither of us are pop culture specialists, our paper discusses how the teen Gossip Girl show uses its advertisements and its thematic examination of class to force audiences into a position of ambivalent spectatorship. As hopefully the above ad demonstrates, the show draws viewers in by celebrating its own faux-scandalous trashiness. In the above ad, the “Very Bad for You,” juxtaposed with Chuck’s lecherous gaze and the woman in the darkness not only offers a glimpse into the show’s sexy plotlines, but also demonstrates the way that the show winkingly acknowledges adverse commentary. Gossip Girl may be “every parent’s nightmare,” but that’s what establishes its appeal for its audience, which celebrates its ironic melodrama.

Image Credit: Gossip Girl Insider

What is also great about the show is how some of the ads also play on the technological nature of the show, which is embodied in the gossip site Gossip Girl, and the text messages that the characters send and receive from Gossip Girl containing the latest scandals surrounding their private school world. This video plays on “WTF,” which here stands for “Watch This Fall”:

Here the major changes surrounding the characters, including their move to college, are what invite viewers in as much as the shared language the show uses to establish its adult audience. Gossip Girl even uses its promos to advertise and create its own language that its characters and its audience can share together, as with their Gossip Girl “Speak of the Week” on Bass-Talk:

Although our paper dealt mostly with class issues, what I find particularly interesting is how the show’s clever marketing constructs itself a twentysomething audience that is both familiar with technology and ironic attitudes that allow for the simultaneous enjoyment and mocking of teen melodrama. What I think could be explored further in studies of Gossip Girl is how the show meditates on the nature of public spheres as created in technology like Facebook and websites like Gawker.

American Gothic on Mad Men

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:32:55 +0000

Image Credit: Chicago Tribune

Mad Men, AMC's popular television show, has long garnered the attention of visual designers based on its subject matter (the advertising world of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s) and on its careful attention to authentic period detail. (The show's few missteps, as when it featured a 1987 Compact Edition of the OED, were widely reported on the Internet.) The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, deliberately chose to set the show on Madison Avenue because advertising is "a great way to talk about the image we have of ourselves, versus who we really are." Since starting to watch the show, I've been fascinated with how the design elements, the character’s actions, and dialogue all work to construct a claim to authenticity about what the 1960s were that some immediately rush to challenge.

Image Credit: Flikr

Last night's episode, "Guy Walks into an Advertising Office," significantly upset the show’s claims to ultra-realism in the sequence where the invading future boss and Brit Guy McKendrick loses his foot in a lawn mower accident in the Sterling Cooper offices. The reaction shot featuring several of the ad men covered in blood made such an impression on my friends that we had to use the DVR to re-watch the horror several times over. While this might be due to our lack of disgust, I think it also had to do with a different kind of argument that the show wants to make about the reality of life in the 1960s.

War has come up several times during this season in conversations between Don Draper, the show's protagonist, and his father-in-law Gene. In this episode Smitty (the man who first drove the John Deere lawn mower into the party) discusses the Vietnam War draft before the accident. While this season is set in 1963, and so well before the major opposition to Vietnam, the blood spatter also rehearses the Kennedy Assassination to occur later this year.

This show has not shied away from presenting culturally complex or challenging moment (as when the boss Roger Sterling performed in blackface earlier this season for his guests), but this show seems to be using visuals very carefully to define what kind of 1960s it describes. While the Slate in particular has offered great coverage of this, I look forward to seeing what other visual arguments the show might offer in the future.

Gays in Advertising

timturner — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:04:16 +0000

Hat tip to Seth Stevenson at slate.com's "Ad Report Card" for first calling my attention to this ad; I haven't actually seen it on TV:

Stevenson wonders (with others) if the ad depicts a gay couple; Progressive says it wasn't intended to, but when people started to ask questions, Stevenson notes, they began running the ad on LOGO, the cable channel aimed at LGBTQ audiences. My thoughts after the jump.

This discussion made me think about the kinds of cues that "count" as gay in visual analysis. Here, the evidence includes what may be a rainbow on the shorter guy's t-shirt (mostly obscured by his jacket) and the gaydar bells set off for some viewers by the taller guy. (Stevenson dissects all the possible evidence).

Having taught classes on gender and sexuality in the past, it occurred to me that this ad (or other gay or ambiguously gay ads) might be an interesting way to open up classroom discussions about stereotyping on the one hand and the performative elements of gender and sexuality on the other hand. This discussion, with some finesse, could include either a discussion of portrayals of LGBTQ people in media or the ways audience response to such portrayals is conditioned by the assumptions about sexuality or gender that each viewer brings to the ad. That is, rather than just focusing on whether the ad itself is gay, the instructor might be able to turn the tables and ask how the ad itself constructs the viewer/student. For example, what is it about the taller guy that suggests homosexuality to some viewers? Eliciting student responses to this question could perhaps lead to some useful deconstruction of gender/sexuality norms. I'm not suggesting that the ad is guilty of stereotyping, or that any discussion of whether the guys are gay is stereotyping, either. I'm more interested in the ways discussion of the ad might open up a conversation about why some things count as stereotyping when others don't, or why some viewers will see "gay" when others won't. Context could also be key to this discussion; for example, does the "obvious" meaning of the ad change for a viewer who sees the ad on Logo vs. a viewer who sees the ad run during the Super Bowl? (Please forgive me for engaging in a little straight stereotyping myself.) And how are all these questions, or the responses they elicit, perceptibly or imperceptibly charged with the value judgments that attach to our notions of gender and sexuality?

The ad could also lead to some discussion about close reading, visual rhetoric, and "secret coding." That is, first it could be pointed out that it does take a fairly careful viewing to notice the ad's supposed "gay" aspects. But secondly, some audience members might miss the cues even on careful viewing--for example, anyone who doesn't know that the rainbow (barely visible here, after all) is sometimes used as a symbol for the LGBTQ community.

Instructors interested in this stuff may want to check out other gay ads archived at the Commercial Closet, and check out this assignment (link opens .pdf) on gender roles in advertising. After I read this, however, I immediately thought of another, classic ambiguously gay duo, the Da Da Da Volkswagen guys: