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Truth in Advertising

I haven't owned a television for several years now. I know, I'm weird. I had to get rid of the my TV because if I have a TV I'll...well....watch it! All the time. I mean, I'd eventually have to get a feeding tube IV and be cathatarized. The other reason I can't own a TV is commercials. When I was in 8th grade, I was taught, as part of my multimedia class, about nefarious techniques used by advertisers. You know, bait and switch; food design in ad layouts; that sort of thing. Being an already cynical youth, and one of reasonable intelligence, I jumped on this like syrup on pancakes. Every advertisement became an exercise in 'spot the bullshit' for me and I became very good at it. For me, advertising, particularly TV advertising, is an exercise in being insulted. Because advertising is generally very insulting. At least to me it is. I often wonder about most other people because advertising clearly works. Companies spend millions of dollars doing research about human psychology, buying trends, you name it, and they continue to spend billions on advertising, so it must work.

Now I can watch TV on my computer. Oh joy. And I have been watching...and I have been insulted.

But I'm not here to rant about that. I'm here to talk about a particular ad I've seen lately that fascinates me. I've seen this ad interspersed with TV shows and movies on a popular web site for watching movies and TV shows. I don't know if it actually airs on broadcast TV, but since it's there alongside ads for fabric softener and Hungry Man TV dinners, assume it does.

This ad is for Trojan condoms. Okay, stop giggling, we all know what they're for. It's not the potentially titillating nature of the product that has me so fascinated about this ad. It's the fact that it is grossly insulting to the consumers who are the targets of the ad.

In the ad, there is a goofy soundtrack playing over a scene in a bar. There are several 'ladies' in the bar surrounded by pigs. That's right PIGS!!!! Real life farm hogs standing on their hind legs drinking and standing around. One of the pigs goes to the men's room, buys a condom from the handy Trojan dispenser, and is transformed into our typical 20-something, half shaven, shirtail out, denizen of vacuous city, who then saunters out and up to one of the aforementioned 'ladies', apparently a shoo in for Kama Sutric bliss.

The first time I saw this ad I was dumbfounded. I mean, this would be like WalMart ads featuring characters out of 'In the Heat of the Night' or McDonald's ad showing....well typical McDonald's customers!!! I mean, how does that work?!? Then I thought "Ahhh, they're targeting women as consumers of condoms" but if that was the case, the scenario would not be the PIG buying the condom from the dispenser in the Porcine/Men's lavatory.

So advertisers and their corporate clients have finally done away with any edifice of metaphor. They've stripped down their message to the essence, like Orwell's Newspeak they've done away with all of the frills and windowdressing and gotten down to the core of the message "you're all pigs until you buy what we're selling and we're not afraid to tell you so....because you're all too stupid to even realize what we're saying about you"

Gotta go, Battlestar is on.....

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