Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [44]
In 1995, following its “triumph” over communism, few would want to risk saying that capitalism is imperialist; but markets must grow and advertising has a natural tendency to seep like rising groundwater into every cellar of a commercial culture’s multiple dwellings. Advertisers talk about the need to fill empty or “dead” space wherever they find it, by which they mean space not yet put to commercial use. Schoolrooms are now being used as video billboards by Channel One (sold by Chris Whittle to K-III in 1994). And the technology is in place to send audio ads your way while you wait for the telephone call you have dialed to go through,12 and to put electronic billboards in space that would blot out the stars with earthly logos and put an end once and for all to the epiphanal dead space of the night.13 The CEO of the company prepared to orbit ads enthused about the “tremendous opportunity for a global-oriented company to have its logo and message seen by billions of people on a history-making high-profile advertising vehicle.”14 “Living Without Boundaries,” which is how Ralph Lauren sells his Safari perfume for men, is also how advertising colonizes empty space—space, that is to say, empty of advertising.
Helped along by the Reagan administration’s 1984 decision to lift limits on television advertising time, advertising bleeds across various entertainment and information formats, blurring boundaries. Advertisements simulate independent editorial judgments and become advertorials; they infest news programming and turn into infomercials where the public cannot be quite sure whether they are watching a television magazine show about a product or a soft sell for the product. They move into storytelling so that ads look more and more like soap operas, with characters and plots that carry over from one ad to the next as in MCI’s “Gramercy Press” series or the Taster’s Choice love story that follows an affair to (where else?) Paris. But then the “soaps” were always about selling soap by telling stories just as the entire MTV network, the ads quite aside, is one interminable commercial for the music industry and its products—as well as for commercial culture in general.15
Today’s corporate synergy does not permit storytelling to stand alone. Nike offers readers of an advertisement as passion play a phone number where they can order Nike’s “Women’s Source Book,” printed on recyclable paper.16 MCI is discussing a book sale of the silly “Gramercy Press” melodrama cited above about a publishing house being hardwired for the new age; it has also made “Gramercy Press” characters accessible to fans via the Internet—as the ad agency handling the MCI account says, “anything is possible in cyberspace.”17
Infomercials merchandise even more subtly. The National Association of Broadcasters actually told the F.C.C. that these half-hour slow-mo ads “advanced the public interest by providing consumers with more information about product choices than other types of advertising.” Stuart Elliot, who covers advertising for The New York Times and has presumably heard just about everything, was nonetheless astonished: “Who could have imagined that the motley crew of shills, hucksters and impersonators peddling spray-on hair, plastic exercise equipment and overpriced cosmetics were advancing the public interest? Not even one of Dionne Warwick’s ‘psychic friends’ could have predicted that.”18 Time magazine, no stranger to hucksterism, acknowledges frankly that what infomercials actually do is to get “messages across to audiences that don’t fully realize they are receiving them.”19
Licensing offers advertisers another kind of colonization. Names carefully cultivated in a narrow business like high fashion can become global marketing devices when licensed for use on products that bear no relationship to the original designer and that the designer may have never even seen. Pierre Cardin pioneered the low-end licensing of a high-end fashion name when in the 1960s he licensed over eight hundred products from colognes to sunglasses.20