I took a three week vacation to the US in July to see my family. I had a fantastic time, but coming back was rough. There are several reasons for this. One is that three weeks is long enough that it’s almost not a vacation but a temporary relocation. It was weird to leave New Mexico, and weird to come back to Denmark. I wasn’t sure I’d remember how to navigate the Danish transit system or what the PIN is for my Danish ATM card.
Another reason is that vacations, by nature, are kind of depressing because you get to experience something that you are completely missing out on most of the time. It’s a reminder of what you might have if you had made different choices.
Finally, it was kind of depressing to get back because in some ways Denmark isn’t different enough. There are a million small things that are different, but American culture has impacted Denmark so heavily that it’s depressing. McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and 7-11 are all here. Coka-Cola is everywhere. American TV shows and movies play on Danish television and in theaters, and there are BlockBuster video stores all over. Virtually everyone under 30 is plugged into an iPod. And so forth.
But it’s the advertising that bothers me the most. Danish ads are clearly just copies of American ads. That’s not to say they aren’t original (if you can call an ad original), but they are slick and merciless in their approach, just like American ads. They use sex a lot in advertising here — there are posters in the metro station that would cause uproar in the US, but that doesn’t bother me so much. Sex is natural, and so it’s natural that we respond to it. I don’t think it’s very nice to use this response to convince us that if we don’t buy a certain product sex will never happen to us again, but there are bigger qualms I have with advertising.
For one thing, advertising is at the fore-front of re-defining our language and therefore the way we think about things. Consider the word “pre-owned”, for example. Marketers have spent millions of dollars drilling this term into us, and it has worked. Every American knows what a pre-owned car is, and has a perception that it is a better alternative than buying a used car. Pre-owned implies that the car was purchased but never used, but of course it was used, and is therefore a used car. It may be a used car that has a warrantee, but it’s still a used car. But by coining a new term, they’ve convinced us to buy used cars at near-new prices. No wonder they were willing to pay millions to teach us that word.
But it’s not just about language; it’s about culture as well. There are many commercials where a kid is playing — usually doing something that they’ve surely been warned against doing — and they spill grape juice all over a white couch, for example. The mother walks in, smiles, shakes her head while looking at the kid lovingly (“oh, you crazy ball of joy — my precious little treasure”) and then fetches the product that’s being pitched. There’s no reprimand, and certainly no spanking. The message? No matter how your kid behaves, there’s a product that can fix the problem. There’s no need to do any parenting. And if their behavior is really unacceptable, well, wait 30 seconds and they’ll be an ad for mood stabilizing drugs. You can drug the kid or yourself, or both. Again, there’s a product for every problem you may have. Don’t even think of trying to solve problems on your own or try to prevent them from cropping up in the first place.
There’s a great magazine out of Vancouver called Adbusters that essentially operates under the tenet that products aren’t marketed to people — people are marketed to products. In other words it isn’t about creating products that people need, it’s about convincing them that they need something that they clearly did not know they needed. Does every family really need an SUV or a Lexus? Do we need to live in 4000 square foot houses? Do we need to pay $2 a bottle for water? Do we need to eat 5000 calories a day? Of course not, but you wouldn’t know that from watching advertisements. And, as both the Danes and the Americans watch more and more ads, it becomes harder and harder to analyze these messages rationally. Which works out well, because after living the lifestyle that involves SUVs and 5000 calories a day, we’re fat, but that’s just another problem that can be solved with products. Seen any ads for diets or exercise equipment lately?
One promising development of late is the availability and adoption of media-viewing products such as TiVo and Windows Media Center, both of which record shows in advance, thereby allowing you to fast-forward through the ads. But this won’t work for long. The corporate media machine is busy even now, working on a way to ensure that we watch their creations.
I would say the only way to avoid the advertising and product placements are just to stop with the media all together. I’ve been watching a new show on the SciFi channel called Eureka and everytime they’re in the research center, you see computer screens advertising Cisco Systems and I’m sure there’ve been placements of sodas and things like that that we don’t even notice. We use a DVR and I still find myself forgetting to fast forward the commercials or, even worse, stopping and rewinding to watch the Mac/PC commercials. They’ve got us right were they want us – they’ve effectively changed us from the American Worker to the American Consumer. We don’t produce anything anymore – we just buy things!