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According to
British science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, shuttle trips to our
cities on the moon are just a year away. The visionaries we’re hoping will
make that happen better get a move on. And before they build that shuttle,
they’ll have to resurrect Pan Am Airlines from whatever gone-out-of-business
limbo it was consigned to when it folded. As for that monolith, well,
there’s scant evidence that it’s about to make an appearance. But it’s a
sure bet that if it is showing up, it’ll be brought to you by something. And
I don’t mean God or some universal consciousness. More likely, there’ll be a
snap-zoom to its lower left corner, a four-note synthesized sting and a
tight close-up on the “Intel Inside” logo.
Never mind the
monolith. HAL 9000 was the star of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But HAL was
a vast, cumbersome and ultimately evil thing. In real life, computers have
turned out to be a lot more insidious. And smaller. They’ve spent the past
decade in offices and houses sprouting like so many beige plastic mushrooms.
And a computer in every home is not enough: we carry notebook machines with
us so we’re never without a CPU, a screen and a mouse. And if Clarke had
been able to peer into this future — the actual future — he would’ve rebuilt
HAL so that he didn’t offer Dave any piece of information without some kind
of commercial.
“Open the pod-bay
doors, please, HAL.”
“I’d be happy to
do that, Dave. But first, here’s a five-second commercial for Windows 2002 —
available in 2004.”
Advertising and
marketing have grown right along with the appliances that are powering the
information revolution we’re all glorying in right now.
Advertising’s
always done that, of course, adapting to each new medium as it’s been
introduced. While some might see that as a kind of flowering, there’s
another botanical metaphor that makes a lot more sense. Rather than roses or
orchids, advertising has grown more like crabgrass or kudzu. It’s not often
a thing of beauty. But its stubborn persistence is admirable; it’s damn hard
to kill.
The rise of the
personal computer has paralleled the advent of radio and then television. In
each case, a new technological advance has meant bold predictions of social
and intellectual betterment. And in each case, it’s turned out that
whichever advance is marching toward ubiquity is really another place to put
advertising.
Computers are
exactly the same as their technological forebears in that respect. How many
digital divisions have been launched by the big agencies? How many
shoestring digital start-ups have made piles of cash building corporate or
marketing Web sites? And how many more advertising campaigns have been
launched to push hardware, software or everything.com?
Advertising’s
detractors — the doomed refugees of the Love Generation who try and fail
every year to make November’s “Buy Nothing Day” something more than a
dependable annual chunk of feature-fodder for the nation’s newspapers — miss
the point. They think the proliferation of advertising is a testament to
advertising’s inherent self-perpetuating evil.
Wrong.
Like computers —
like any technology — advertising is not inherently good or bad; it’s
value-neutral. As proof, look at some really dreadful advertising: Bell’s
commercials with those two annoying wiener guys or McCain’s continuing
wretchedness, those Toronto Ford dealer spots shot in an afternoon on a
budget of $8.95, or any of the stinky advertising we snort at on any given
day. The people who executed those spots probably had a lot of ideas other
than what they ultimately ended up going with, and it’s probably a safe bet
that at least three of them were better than what the clients demanded.
Computers and
advertising are a lot alike that way: garbage in, garbage out, to quote an
ancient programming mantra from the dawn of the silicon chip era. And in
that sense, if no other, the two things are made for each other.
And advertising,
for all the knocks it takes for being too much with us, isn’t as powerful as
its detractors would like to think. If it were, then some smart creative
team surely could have come up with a way to keep Eaton’s from being a
bankruptcy-court grease spot. |
