T A B L E_.T A L K

My so-called Zeitgeist: Discuss what's meant by the word "mainstream" in Table Talk's Media area

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R E C E N T L Y

Wall Street Journal personals work!
By Susan Lehman
A Page 1 feature about a filthy-rich businesswoman was "a giant, high-class singles ad." Plus media news and notes from all over
(01/21/99)

A battle for the soul of America
By Steve Erickson
It's time for the American people to realize that the Clinton trial isn't really about Clinton -- it's about democracy
(01/20/99)

Magazine racks
By James Poniewozik
Esquire, Cosmo, Self and Men's Health show us their tits
(01/19/99)

Of Fallowships, Flynt, Republican phone sex and demon goddesses of love
By Susan Lehman
(01/14/99)

The century of the trial
By James Poniewozik
Clinton's Senate trial is just the latest episode in the long-running series of American Solomania
(01/12/99)

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BROWSE THE
UNDER THE COVERS
ARCHIVE

--------------Truth in advertising

The downfalls of Miller Lite's "Dick" and Spin's Michael Hirschorn show marketing can still explode when you defuse it.

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK
The Gregorian calendar notwithstanding, America's real New Year's Day falls on Sunday: the harvest festival when, with an ancient ritual of bloodletting, we welcome and give thanks for the arrival of our culture's staple crop, advertising. And as we prepare to turn over a new marketing calendar, it's clear from the recent past that one thing is definitely out in the ad biz: ads.

At least, that's the impression one gets from the slew of reality-, authenticity- and self-criticism-based ads that, in their zeal to bare the mechanics and wiles of Madison Avenue, seem like they were storyboarded by media-studies professors. Sprite has athletes ridiculing athlete endorsements; Diesel jeans pictures a creepy consumer-fascist world of propaganda films and mock ads; J.C. Penney's Arizona jeans TV ads show kids telling advertisers, "Stop telling us what's cool" (a campaign that must have sprung from the embittered pen of a Gen-X copywriter once forced to go to school in Plain Pockets); hipsters in Levi's new TV and print series hold forth for the camera on "What's True"; a model in a Moschino boutique ad carries a surgeon-general's-style warning: "I am a consenting part of the fashion system."

Some play the truth card less dexterously than others, of course: Winston cigarettes' "No Bull" series, the reality-ad campaign best suited to raise conniptions among advertising's intellectual critics, promotes "100-percent additive-free" Winstons as an island of honesty in a world of BS. "If only all ads were as honest as this," one of them reads; the art shows a lung cancer victim smoking a cigarette through his tracheotomy tube (oh, sorry! actually it shows a fat man squeezed into a pair of jeans). But at least Winston's clearly validated tickets to hell play by the old rules of ad crit -- they're a blatant, cynical effort by a mammoth company to sell death. The other, more clever campaigns pose a more frustrating question: Can you celebrate a product, or consumer culture, while critiquing the means used to sell it?

The short answer, from the anti-addies, is: No. The long answer is: No, and wipe that damn smirk off your face. In the January Harper's, novelist Jonathan Dee neatly represents current anti-ad dogma in an essay on the Clio Awards, heavily indebted to corporate-cooptation screed "The Conquest of Cool" by Baffler editor Thomas Frank. Dee likens today's ads to the art of totalitarian states: "Commercials' dominant aesthetic quality -- humor -- is the last thing we tend to associate with officially sanctioned art under Stalin or Hitler or Mao," he writes. (For any good anti-ad partisan the word "humor" leads naturally to the subject of state-sanctioned mass murder.) "But the rise of humor, especially self-deprecating humor, [italics added] in advertisements goes hand in hand with what ... Frank has established as advertising's (and capitalism's) great achievement in the years since the 1960s: incorporating the idea of dissent from the doctrine of consumption into the doctrine itself."