September 21st, 2003
Remember when advertising went from "mean-spirited" to "hard-edged with lip-service to civility?" My memory may be playing tricks on me, but it seemed to happen in the mid-1980s. People in commercials went from being hard put-upon for a sophomoric guffaw laugh that somehow was intended to sell a product to being somehow saved from the ugliness. The Marketeers must have read a magazine article about how people wanted to feel good, so everything went soft and ... well, "gentler and kinder." I can't say advertising ever got more intelligent, but at least there was a small nod to civility and the seemingly foreign concept of treating others with at least a little dignity.
Never fear, assholes of the world: Those days of the Marketeers saying to themselves, "uh-oh, we'd better say something nice even if we don't mean it ... and don't have a clue what genuine pleasantness is anyway" have given way to an earlier 1970s and early-1980s-style hard-heartedness and mean-spiritedness. Just plain nastiness. There are examples everywhere, but two that come immediately to mind are the one where the men playing tetherball in the bar smack a classically beautiful woman upside the head, sending her to the floor, and the "joke" of this is that one man wants a re-serve on account of interference. Meta-message: Go ahead and smack the women, it's funny. Or how about the group of men going around and ordering sandwiches from a fast-food joint's drive-through (in an SUV, of bloody course!) and when the intentionally stupid and "geeky" looking kid responds it's not on the menu, they delight in telling him it's "not on his radar." Frankly, why not just say, "Buy our sandwiches ... your penis will get bigger?"
There's no longer even the pretense that they are trying to be sensitive in television advertising anymore. It's a nasty little fantasy world out there. I'd admire the honesty if I thought anyone was exercising any courage in doing so ... but it takes courage to show a compassionate side, doesn't it? It takes more fortitude to not scoff and sneer at sensitivity ... and nobody seems to train for that event.
I wonder when the pendulum will swing back to the trying-to-be-nice variety.