The Image (32 page)

Customers themselves seemed more effectively persuaded, more personally interested in being sold by a pseudo-event which in this fashion they themselves had helped create. No one worried much over how to fabricate the essential fact—how to persuade the most popular model of the year to prefer Rheingold over all other beers. The contract which candidates were required to sign contained no mention of beer. A cynical advertising man observed that since beer was fattening, it was always unlikely that a model slim enough to win the election would actually be a heavy beer drinker. Reputedly only one of the early winners drank much beer. But was it untrue for Miss Rheingold to say, “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer”? Any model who won the election, with its $50,000 in fees and prizes, would have been preternaturally callous not to like Rheingold best of all. What better way of securing truthful testimonials?

In a world where brand names dominate, the consumer’s power to bring the brand name into common use can make the brand name synonymous with the product itself. This, despite the legal perils of dissolving the right to the name, is much desired by the manufacturer. This is a verbal symbol of the consumer’s power to make the product the success it claims to be. By daily use of the product and the word, the consumer actually makes “Kodak” his synonym for camera, “Kleenex” his synonym for paper tissue. In an expanding economy, where the very function of a commodity is often an aspect of the claimed qualities of a particular brand (for example of a mouthwash like Listerine, or of a deodorant like Dial soap or Ban), the consumer, by believing in the function and by developing his “need,” actually gives the product a new reality.

(3)
The appeal of the half-intelligible
. In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand advertising
jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress
is
being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow.

Who would want to live in an economy so stagnant, in a technology so backward, that the consumer could actually understand how products were made and what their real virtues were? The very obscurity of advertising language proves that manufacturers are really at work for our benefit—developing new processes, discovering, perfecting, and adding mysterious new ingredients, elaborating subtle and complicated new features. The consumer cannot be wholly satisfied, then, unless he is partly bewildered.

Advertising is, of course, our most popular reading, listening, and watching matter. Precisely because it transports us to where the rigidities of the real world have dissolved. As we stroll through the world of advertising, the half-intelligibility of what we see and read and hear encourages us to hope that our extravagant expectations may be coming true.

To people who want the latest model, but who do not understand automobiles, a “V-type” engine, “hydro-matic drive,” “wide-track wheels,” and “uniweld body” are especially appealing. These are scrupulously true statements of fact. Their appeal consists in our half-understanding.

When the function of newly contrived objects becomes more attenuated, when an automobile is no longer merely a transportation machine, but something we wear and luxuriate in or something that gives us “that carefree feeling” and “that sense of indescribable luxury”; when a ball-point pen is no longer something to keep accounts with or to write checks with, but something vaguely useful for writing on butter or under water; when a soap is not merely for washing, but to give us “round-the-clock protection”—then we can no longer be “deceived” about the “function” of anything.

On a full-page, full-color portrait of an enticing woman who might be oneself, the lady reader is told:

In a world of functions so vague, so derivative, so attenuated, we read advertisements and listen to commercials to discover functions, ogres, needs, and perils of which we never dreamed and never would have known. Advertising attenuates, making everything more interesting, more fanciful, more problematic.

(4)
The appeal of the contrived
. And we enjoy being courted. Like the little girl pleased to see her best beau stand on his head for her sake, we delight in the headstands and handsprings of advertisers. Not necessarily because we especially enjoy acrobatics, or even because the acrobatics are done so well, but because we are flattered that anyone would go to such trouble for us. When we see an elegant living room ensemble by Dunbar Furniture spread on a lawn; when we see “The Pepperell family on Cotton Cay—Imaginary Island in the Sun” poised improbably in an array of three hammocks, one above another; when we see a man hunting, fishing, or playing poker while chained to a large egg (“For a better way to take care of your nest egg talk to the people at Chase Manhattan”) we are pleased. Not so much because we know what is happening or what it all
means, or because the spectacle is anything but ludicrous; but because we cannot help being pleased that so elaborate a pseudo-event should be made especially for us.

The shrewd planner of advertising pseudo-events plays on our puzzlement. Even our own suspicions and doubts themselves become themes for new pseudo-events. An advertising campaign in 1960 by Clairol, Inc., makers of a hair dye for women, featured a photograph of an attractive model with beautiful hair. Over the photograph appeared the question: “Does she … or doesn’t she?” And underneath: “Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure!” The advertising copy which followed did not answer the tantalizing question. Someone wrote to the company for the facts. The enterprising publicity director then made news by releasing the story of the correspondence, and the company’s reply as follows:

The unanswered question, of course, was what relation if any there really was between using Clairol and having beautiful hair. The fact offered was that a girl with hair naturally beautiful enough to make her a cosmetic model had not spoiled her appearance by one application of Clairol. Here obviously the real interest centered not on the qualities of the product but on the advertisement itself—the mechanics and mystery of the pseudo-event.

*   *   *   *   *

When “truth” has been displaced by “believability” as the test of the statements which dominate our lives, advertisers’ ingenuity is devoted less to discovering facts than to inventing statements which can be made to seem true. Making them seem true is relatively easy. With the apparatus of the Graphic Revolution, almost anything can be made to seem true—especially if we wish to believe it. The advertising man resembles the newspaperman for whom he was in some ways the prototype. He artfully develops his pitch as the journalist cleverly develops his story. The happening which the reporter sends over the wire has often been incited into being in the same way in which the advertising man has produced the “facts” for his copy. Both aim at newsworthiness and believability. The advertising man who, according to Endorsements, Inc., may approach as many as five big names for a particular endorsement before he secures a single acceptance is like the conscientious Washington reporter who approaches seven senators before he finds the one to make the statement needed for his story. Both work hard to incite the pseudo-event into being. Both are inhibited by prudence and ethics: believability is produced only if quasi-facts are invented within certain limits. But the problem is both complicated and simplified by the fact that in many fields of marketing (for example, drugs, cosmetics, automobiles, or home appliances) a statement cannot be most attractively believable unless it is only partly intelligible.

The readers of advertisements are always playing a game with themselves. Momentarily they enjoy the pleasurable illusion that an extravagant expectation has been satisfied. Then they enjoy the revelation that they have seen through the illusion: the fairy princess is not really a fairy princess at all, but only Jinx Falkenburg dressed up like one. Ample room is left for the advertiser’s “creativity.” His imagination, like a poet’s, enlarges our world for us. In the contest between the creative imagination of ad men and the disillusioning information and sophistication of ad readers, the successful advertiser stays one step ahead. He can keep us in “that
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which [according to Coleridge] constitutes poetic faith.” He is always conceiving new legends for a world governed by its own legendary rules to take the place of those legends which have been disenchanted. The citizen-consumer enjoys the satisfactions of being at the same time the bewitched, the bewitcher, and the detached student of witchcraft.

The difficulty of curing us of our ever exaggerating expectations comes from the very fact that not truth, but credibility, is the modern test. We share this standard with the advertising men themselves. For everybody, then, it is more important that a statement be believable than that it be true. This is illustrated by the spectacular success of a series of Rheingold beer testimonials. These were, of course, written by copywriters, to suit the personalities of the celebrities who gave the endorsements. “Although the agency helps out,” Freeman explains in his
Big Name
, “the endorsement is none the less sincere or believable. The foundation for the endorsement is the fact that these are well-known persons, believable as beer drinkers, who are well liked and trusted by their publics. [Some examples are Van Heflin, Victor Borge, Louis Armstrong, Ernest Borgnine, Nat (King) Cole, Sir Cedric Hardwick, Raymond Loewy, Joanne Dru, Beatrice Lillie, Charles Coburn, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Groucho Marx.] They would not put their names to a statement unless it were true, the readers believe, so that it is of little consequence that the actual choice of the words used to convey their approval of Rheingold is the work of another hand.”

The advertising world can never collapse so long as believability remains the test. Even as each old advertising formula becomes ritualized and its mechanics become widely known, the mechanics themselves become the pseudo-eventful center of interest. When a manufacturer of shaving cream was cited by the Federal Trade Commission for using tooth paste instead of shaving cream on a television commercial to show the supposedly remarkable under-water staying
qualities of the shaving cream, the manufacturer inevitably benefited from the repetition of the brand name in this widely reported pseudo-event. We have already seen that in the news world, when the press conference became ritualized as a form of pseudo-event, it lost some of its charm and much of its function; when a looser, more ambiguous form of communication was required, the institutionalized leak was developed. Similarly, in the world of advertising, when the straight endorsement becomes ritualized and loses its appeal, new interest can be created by such devices as letting the public elect their own endorser (Miss Rheingold) or by showing them how the endorsements are bought and paid for (Thom McAn). There still remains enough of an always novel kind of believability.

P. T. Barnum’s flamboyant explanation of his success as a showman can serve now as prosaic description of our everyday experience. The world’s way, Barnum observed, was “to excite the community with flaming posters, promising almost everything for next to nothing.”

This might be the appropriately immodest motto for an expanding American economy, which thrives on our ever more extravagant expectations.

T
HE CENTRAL PARADOX
—that the rise of images and of our power over the world blurs rather than sharpens the outlines
of reality—permeates one after another area of our life. There is hardly a corner of our daily behavior where the multiplication of images, the products and by-products of the Graphic Revolution, have not befogged the simplest old everyday distinctions.

Life in medieval times, remarked the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga in his classic
Waning of the Middle Ages
(1924), offered sharp edges and bright contrasts. Each season, each time of day, each station in society, was clearly distinguished from others. Perhaps we can never recapture the poignancy which a medieval man felt in a warm fire on a winter day, in the sound of the leper’s bell, in the dark of night, in the splendor of a nobleman’s brocade. Equality and economic progress have leveled sensations. In rich, adept America, distinctions of social classes, of times and seasons, have been blurred as never before. With steam heat we are too hot in winter; with air conditioning, too cool in summer. Fluorescent lights make indoors brighter than out, night lighter than day. The distinctions between here and there dissolve. With movies and television, today can become yesterday; and we can be everywhere while we are still here. In fact, it is easier to be there (say on the floor of the national political convention) when we are here (at home or in our hotel room before our television screen) than when we are there.