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What isn’t
extreme? There’s hardly a product left that hasn’t had the adjective grafted
onto its marketing efforts.
Small Fry Snack
Foods Inc.’s Humpty Dumpty potato chips have transmogrified into Extreme™
chips. The package offers one mind-bending claim after another: “Extreme™
Ridged Regular Nature Ondulées Humpty Dumpty™ Chips.”
“Extreme means
never being disappointed!” the bag continues. “If this product isn’t extreme
enough for you, mail the bag and its contents to the address below and we’ll
send you three free bags worth of coupons.” What would constitute
insufficient extremity from a bag of potato chips? “Aw, heck -- no poison
lizard or spring-loaded razor blades inside. I couldn’t have been killed
eating these. Sorry, that’s just unacceptably tame.”
“Snack Canadian!”
barks the bag’s copy, like an artery-clogging drill sergeant. “Humpty Dumpty
is ‘extremely’ Canadian-owned.” Does that mean the people at Small Fry Snack
Foods Inc. are extremely Canadian (overbearingly polite, aggravatingly
well-behaved, malignantly modest)? Or does it mean they’re extreme about
their ownership of Small Fry Snack Foods Inc., guarding the
potato-processing plants with guns and vicious dogs and regularly dancing on
the factory roof, shrieking, “It’s mine! All mine!” “Extremely Canadian” may
mean something similar to the description of the chips themselves: “Extreme
Regular.”
Molson has its
extreme beer/sports promotion, where lucky winners get to do
heart-quickening things like hang around near the Stanley Cup or The Grey
Cup until the winner of whichever final they’re watching claims it.
If Molson wanted
to be really extreme, of course, they’d order contest winners to keep the
trophy away from the players as long as possible, while telling the players
to get the prize from the luckless contestants at all costs. Maybe arm both
sides with axe handles, just to make it more extremely interesting. The
whole concept behind the Molson contest makes the mind reel: winners get to
be extreme spectators, viscerally involved in not being involved at all. How
extremely post-modern; there’s a popular-culture PhD thesis in there
someplace.
The nadir of all
this extreme extremism is using “extreme” to sell water. The ocean in a
storm, a flooding river or a tidal wave are all examples of water that’s
“extreme.” But there’s not enough water in even the jumbo-sized bottles of
Naya or Evian to whip up an irked puddle — a raging sea is out of the
question. The product is extremely wet, but that’s kind of lame as a selling
point.
In the 1960s and
’70s, everything was “new and improved.” As Rob Reiner’s All In The
Family character wondered aloud while unpacking groceries, “What were we
using before, ‘old and lousy’?” In the 1980s, marketers decreed “let there
be ‘light’” (or, in its more common variation, “lite”). Did that mean we’d
previously been consuming excess poundage with the weighty, the ponderous
and the heavy? Or had everything prior to the advent of “lite” been “dark”?
Now that we’re well past the halfway hump of the 1990s and on a downhill zip
to the turn of the century, we’re hip-deep in the “extreme.”
Extreme’s rise to
irksome ubiquity started with sports, as fringe pastimes like mountain
biking, skateboarding and snowboarding were mashed together in a common
category called — you guessed it — “extreme.”
ESPN2, the 24-hour
cable sports channel in the U.S., knew a good thing when it saw one. Here’s
a big, fat wad of 18-to-34s with oodles of discretionary income. Highly
prized but hard to reach, they like to think of themselves as rebellious.
Package and present some sports many of them are already doing. Make sure
you have enough different events to maintain an endless round of
competition: snowboarding segues into barefoot waterskiing, BMX bike
stunting hands its audience off to sky surfing, and so on.
Extreme sports
started turning up in advertising eager for a shred of hipster-doofus
cachet: bungee jumping was in every second commercial. Ads that didn’t
feature bungee-jumping had snowboarders. Mountain biking and sky surfing
filled the remaining gaps.
And that word
“extreme.” How copywriters loved it, and still do. Says nothing, implies so
much. Let’s attach it to some non-sports stuff: extreme food, extreme music,
extreme cars. Hey, this is easy: extreme banking, extreme collect calling,
extreme toilet-bowl cleaning, extreme dog-walking. It hardly even registers
anymore.
Each time you
crank the stakes higher, you create another yawn among the vanguard who’ve
already taken that ride and find its thrill factor diminishing exponentially
with each repetition. Each time you hook “extreme” to a product, it means a
little less and sounds a little stupider. Marketers long ago ran out of
things that could lay any kind of legitimate claim to being “extreme.” Now
the word’s getting soldered onto products in unintentionally hilarious
combinations.
The laws of
dilution and diminishing returns have long ago destroyed “extreme.” The only
kinds of extremity it’s even close to are “extremely overused,” “extremely
tired” and “extremely annoying.”
The only problem
is that advertising folks have been extremely slow to figure that out. |
