Madison Avenue
Mills, Nicolaus
The sun is barely up when the old man taps on the McDonald's door. "We're open in a few minutes, sir," a young countergirl answers. The old man points to the McDonald's cap he is carrying. He...
...After each incident we are told in song what Mita does not make, until at the very end of the commercial a voice-over announces, "Mita...
...They owe more to a close watching of "Saturday Night Live" than to a close reading of Marx, and their attacks on the system are ultimately cynical, resting on the supposition that, if clever enough, such attacks can sell products...
...Then Joe starts in with a series of extravagant claims about Trooper II (It can carry a symphony orchestra...
...People watch an old man accept a teenage job, follow a montage of breaking products, stare at a car salesman telling lie after lie, see a government official vacation on stolen tax dollars, and their sense of reality is confirmed, even as they smile and find themselves coaxed into buying more...
...a washing machine overflows...
...Macklin, and we hear a sultry woman's voice coo, "Oh Mac, it's a darling little boat...
...Typical is the "Liar/Mom" ad...
...Informed that Meister Brau only tastes expensive, the secretary quickly adds that his department's beer purchases are handled by his assistant, Mr...
...What gives "Senate Hearing" its final comedic irony is not, however, the duping of a cabinet official...
...More and more, however, the kind of social message found in McDonald's "New Kid" commercial has become a staple of television advertising...
...SUMMER • 1988 • 375 Mita "All We Make Are Great Copiers": In these ads by the newly formed international agency HDM, the aim was to get Mita, the fourth-largest copier in America, better known...
...To the very end the commercial assumes its audience accepts as a given that salesmen and advertisers lie consistently...
...Senate Hearing," a pre-Irangate ad, takes place in a Senate committee room where a nervous secretary of defense is being quizzed about his department's Meister Brau expenses...
...At the end of the commercial Joe's mother goes up in smoke when she is struck by lightning, and viewers are urged to see the "affordable" Trooper II at their Isuzu dealer's...
...But they are angry rather than accepting of the world they have inherited...
...What carries the Jordache commercials are the Jordache-wearing teenagers talking about an America they find to be "really screwed up...
...He is the picture of efficiency and good humor, prompting the girl working beside him to ask, "Are you sure you never did this before...
...New Kid," which debuted more than a year ago, is part of a larger slice-of-life series by McDonald's designed to show that it cares about people on both sides of its counters...
...and, as the news footage of Woodstock and a Vietnam War protest in one of the commercials shows, they wonder why their baby-boom parents have lost track of their generation's history...
...If we accept the proposition that Mita can outperform its bigger rivals, another conclusion also follows: the more diversified the multinationals that dominate American life become, the less likely they are to care about any single product they turn out...
...Macklin...
...The commercial is a montage of breaking products that seems like nothing so much as an updated scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times...
...In America the elderly cannot get by on their retirement incomes, even when they live modestly...
...At the end of the commercial, we follow the old man back to his small, single-story house...
...It is the left that ought to draw some encouragement from the success these ads are having...
...While "As Time Goes By" plays softly in the background, we watch eleven products (all assembled by American Express so that no brand would stand out) self-destruct...
...By charging with your American Express card, you are guaranteed more protection than if you relied solely on the company you bought from...
...It is the kind of hidden message we don't look for in a television commercial...
...He is the "new kid" the restaurant has just hired...
...The Isuzu "Liars": In this set of six commercials by the West Coast agency of Della Femina, Travisano & Partners of California, the comedy comes from a lampoon of traditional hard-sell car commercials...
...All we make are great copiers...
...A clock pendulum falls off...
...There is a pause, then a jump cut to a huge power boat, the S.S...
...The ads acknowledge an America in which 53 percent of the public believes that most corporate executives are dishonest and the president is lying about Irangate...
...In Jordache's thirty-second spots, all of which were done in-house, its jeans get five seconds worth of mention...
...A steam roller crushes a camera, an elephant sits on a vacuum cleaner, a wrecking ball smashes a recorder...
...American Express "Buyer's Assurance": In this campaign by the prestigious Madison Avenue agency of Ogilvy and Mather, American Express promises to extend the free period of any manufacturer's warranty by doubling it up to an extra year...
...As middle America views nightly television, it is neither shocked nor angered by commercials that insist there are systemic weaknesses in our economy, our government, our national character...
...We have seen the perils of buying anything...
...At the end of the commercial, we see Macklin basking in luxury with the dollars he has saved by purchasing Meister Brau...
...In the ad, salesman Joe Isuzu begins by announcing, "This is my mom, and if everything I say about the four-wheel Trooper II isn't true, may she be struck by lightning...
...Our boys deserve an expensive beer," the secretary declares...
...As the Reagan era comes to an end, Madison Avenue is changing...
...These are teenagers with money...
...But behind the smiling faces and happy ending of "New Kid" lies a serious, indeed a grim, premise...
...But as the Mita commercial ends, we are not simply left with the quaint notion that smaller is better...
...Buyer's Assurance" makes clear there is no avoiding the poor workmanship and shoddy engineering behind all the products in our stores...
...The irony comes from the lightness with which a theft of tax dollars is treated...
...I don't know how they ever got along without me," he proudly tells his wife...
...As the camera pulls away from his boat, we are asked not to think about his being caught, but to be amused at the life he is now living and to treat as commonplace his kind of crime...
...Since 1980 the conventional wisdom among both liberals and progressives has been that raising fundamental political questions at election time is self-defeating because it turns off middle America...
...In the ads, which improved Mita's dollar growth by over 38 percent between 1985 and 1986, we are shown a series of seemingly absurd incidents...
...To be sure, the ads are not radical in intent...
...Not only has the viewer been put in a position to know the Mita brand better, he has also been encouraged to conclude that a company that makes only one product is bound to do it better than a company with many...
...Look closely at what a series of mainstream ads has been saying for the last two years and what emerges is that their underlying subject is an America in which we cannot trust the products we buy, the companies that make them, or our government officials...
...What these Madison Avenue ads show is that such a rationale, if once true, no longer holds...
...Since 1986, the hottest ad campaign for the youth market has been one by Jordache jeans...
...Well, what's he doing with the money he is supposed to spend on beer...
...The reverse psychology—a car company so confident that it can parody car commercials—hits home, but so too does the fact that the Trooper II commercial won't break the tone it started with...
...Each claim is followed by a crack of lightning and a small printed caption that gives the facts about Trooper II...
...a toaster burns one slice of bread and leaves the other white...
...With a giggle the girl lets him in, and for most of what remains of the commercial, we watch him take orders and serve customers...
...an angry senator asks...
...What gives "Buyer's Assurance" its appeal is, however, much more than American Express's genial promise...
...It starts at just $10.80...
...They need extra work, and they are most likely to get that extra work doing the entry level jobs traditionally reserved for teenagers...
...In a decade of mergers and takeovers that idea serves Mita particularly well...
...Nonetheless, in the end as intrinsic to these ads as their cynicism and hype is the disenchantment they assume on the part of their audience...
...Meister Brau "It Only Tastes Expensive": In these ads by Backer and Spielvogel, we find the most overtly political setting of any recent television commercial...
...If our fears are to be played upon, we expect, as Vance Packard warned us thirty years ago in The Hidden Persuaders, our vanity or sense of prestige will be the advertiser's target...
...Indeed, for the next generation of television watchers, even these ads may be too politically tame...
...376 • DISSENT...
...By the end of sixty seconds, we have seen not just the value of using American Express...
...a blender sends fruit shooting out its top...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
