Eating the Dinosaur

  1. We want people to buy Pepsi. Unfortunately …

  2. The country is struggling (and perhaps even collapsing). However …

  3. Whatever beverage consumers are drinking does not really reflect anything important about society. Therefore …

  4. If people need to be wrong about something, it’s okay for them to be wrong about how they feel toward Pepsi. So …

  5. Let’s associate Pepsi with the exact opposite of everything happening in America, based on the premise that …

  6. Young Americans would always prefer to be wrong and optimistic (as opposed to pragmatic and sad).

  This is a brilliant application of profound cynicism—it actively tries to use people’s misplaced optimism against them. It understands both how the media operates and how consumers are pre-disposed to distrust whatever messages they hear. It’s the epitome of “high concept,” which is another way of saying the strategy’s genius is directly tied to the fact that it doesn’t make sense unless you think about it in totally abstract, completely intangible terms. The fundamental premise essentially boils down to Al Pacino’s explanation for drinking alcohol on a hot day in Glengarry Glen Ross: “I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion. If everyone thinks one thing, then I say bet the opposite.” It’s that omnipresent notion that there’s some deeper truth in business that’s intentionally counterintuitive—you’re never selling what you’re actually selling. You sell people Pepsi by selling them Obama. That’s the trick, and everyone knows it.

  So what happens when everyone knows the trick? Does it still work?

  It does. In fact, it works better.

  3 As a piece of entertainment, Mad Men has done everything right. It’s perfectly cast and brilliantly paced, and it uses symmetrical symbolism in a way rarely attempted on television—every plot point is mirrored by a minor, less overt story line in the same allegorical vein. No character is drawn without flaws. By placing itself in the “secret” 1960s that everyone now accepts as normative (i.e., the subversive and the damaged masquerading as suburban bliss), its white-collar characters are able to get away with living archaic, un-PC lives that (a) feel completely authentic but (b) would be impossible to depict in the present. Certainly, my opinion of Mad Men is not unique; with the possible exception of The Wire, I can’t think of any contemporary TV show that’s been more acclaimed by affluent audiences. And part of what we upwardly mobile, media-obsessed goof balls adore is the program’s perverse glorification of the ad man. It makes advertising seem like the greatest career imaginable. Watching Mad Men makes me want to trick housewives into buying Tide.

  Mad Men’s protagonist is Don Draper, a pathological liar who charms women by grabbing their vaginas in crowded restaurants. He’s not a good person, but he’s kilometers beyond cobalt cool— and he’s cool for unusual reasons. He’s cool for being extraordinary at an office job. He’s cool for keeping secrets and chain-smoking and cheating on his wife. He’s cool for the way he talks to strangers. What follows is his extemporaneous description of how he intends to sell the Kodak Carousel (a circular slide projector for home movies) to the American public:

  Nostalgia … it’s delicate, but potent … in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device—it isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel. It’s called The Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels: around and around and back home again, to a place we know we are loved.

  Within the environment of the episode, Draper is (obviously) not talking about projectors. He’s talking about his own life and his own insecurities, and he’s thinking about how his success as an idea salesman is irrevocably connected to his failures as a normal person. But try to think about that passage in nonmetaphorical terms; think about what those words would mean in a non-fictional, plotless workplace. Draper’s espoused strategy is to confuse people; he’s trying to make consumers associate a feeling (nostalgia) with a product (The Carousel) by artfully implying that the product generates that feeling. This is—I suppose— unethical. But not enough to hurt anyone: The net result of Draper’s deception is that someone might purchase a slide projector they don’t necessarily need. His motives are impure but not sinister. We all take for granted that this is how advertising works. And because this moment in Mad Men happens in 1960 (and because we’re seeing this moment in 2007), the idea of intertwining emotion and commerce is entertaining: We assume this kind of advertising scheme would completely snow every target market from that era. Because it’s happening in 1960, what Draper is proposing intrigues us because it seems new. It’s like we’re watching the invention of media duplicity. But now, duplicitous advertising is all that there is; it’s what we expect from advertising all the time. The emotional transference Draper appears to be inventing is what we naturally anticipate from the promotion of any product. And that should make it fail. But it doesn’t. And I think that’s because people like recognizing that they are a target market. It makes them feel smart for figuring it out, and it makes them feel good to be viewed as desirable. And I suspect that advertisers are aware of this. Selling emotion is no longer a scheme: Pepsi-Cola can just send out a press release openly stating that Pepsi is now designed for optimistic young people, and optimistic young people make fun of that concept’s lack of subtlety. But even as they mock, they think, “That’s kind of interesting. That’s kind of flattering. Is that who they think I am? I wonder how they came up with that?” Perhaps they imagine Don Draper in a room full of cigarette smoke, holding up a blue Pepsi can that looks like it was made in Tokyo.

  Optimism … it’s difficult but potent … on the Internet, optimism literally means the only answer to an unclear world. It’s an explosion in your heart, far more powerful than common sense alone. This beverage—it isn’t a refreshing treat. It’s a hope machine. It embodies a taste we ache to experience later. It’s not called Soda. It’s called Pop. It lets us feel the way a child feels: out and away from reality, in a place we know we are loved.

  People love advertising. They say they don’t, but they do. And I don’t just mean that they like clever commercials or reading Lucky; I mean they like the idea of a Draper (a) whom they’ll never meet who (b) understands what they want and (c) views that wanting as important. It does not matter that this definition of import doesn’t extend beyond their ability to pay for things. A feeling is a feeling is a feeling.

  4 PespiCo Incorporated has interesting problems. Around the same time they were making Pespi less cynical, PepsiCo made a packaging change to another of their products, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. For whatever reason, PepsiCo changed the orange juice carton: Instead of an orange with a protruding straw, they featured the more literal image of a glass of orange juice. Immediately, orange juice drinkers lost their shit (not all of them, but enough to get attention). They were outraged; they could not believe that Tropicana had altered this essential image of an imaginary orange you could suck. A few weeks later, Tropicana switched back to the original design. This reversal was covered in the February 22, 2009, edition of The New York Times, and the angle of the story was that PepsiCo was dealing with its own version of Coca-Cola’s infamous 1985 introduction of New Coke.1 However, there was at least one major difference that was mentioned in the story parenthetically, almost as an aside …

  (There are, it should be noted, significant differences between the two corporate flip-flops. For instance, the Tropicana changes involved only packaging, not the formula for or taste of the beverage.)

  The orange juice was the same. As far as I can tell, the size and shape of the container itself was also identical—the only alteration was the picture on the carton. People were appalled because the same product (at the same price) was being presented to them in a slightly different way. If you’re a person involved in the profession of advertising, this kind of scenario is the apotheosis of y
our vocation. It illustrates a rarified level of consumer appreciation: People aren’t just buying something because of the advertising—they feel like they are buying the advertising itself. An essential piece of what they desire is the image on the carton, even though that image is only there to get attention and inform you of what’s inside. It has nothing to do with juice. It almost never does.

  This happens all the time: LeBron James does not sell Nikes; buying Nikes allows people to buy “LeBron James” (and whatever that’s supposed to mean outside of itself ). That cliché has been understood by advertisers for generations, or at least since Michael Jordan killed off Converse in the eighties. But—right now, today—everyone knows that this is how the game works. So how can a trick work when everyone knows it’s a trick?

  Because the trick is the product.

  On Mad Men, Draper tries to create a soft reality—he tries to trick housewives into thinking that Heineken beer reflects something about their level of class that Budweiser does not. Draper knows that this transference is a construction, but he knows how emotive construction works. As the audience for Mad Men, we intellectually relate to his task. We’re sophisticated enough to imagine how beer can be sold as a lifestyle. And this is because the central mission of advertising has succeeded completely. What used to be its seemingly preposterous scheme—selling an emotion or a worldview through a disparate product—is now the actual, accepted motive behind why people buy things. It’s the hard reality. There was a time when the only person who’d be crazy enough to argue that the visual image of an orange with a straw sticking from its side was “meaningful” was the artist who drew it; now everyone assumes this must be the case. It must have meaning. It’s expected. So the advertiser’s question is not “What do we tell people this product is supposed to mean?” The question is “When we tell people what this product is supposed to mean, how much will they accept and appreciate our transparently bullshit message?” In other words, Pepsi is not really trying to market soda pop to optimistic people. That’s impossible and nonsensical. What they’re hoping is that when consumers recognize that Pepsi is trying to amorphously tie soda to optimism, a segment of that audience will decide, “That’s a good idea. It’s ridiculous, but I see what they’re doing. I’m willing to associate myself with this gimmick.” It’s the difference between a magician performing a trick to impress his audience and a magician trying to sell that trick to other magicians. There’s nobody left for advertisers to fool. We’re all magicians.

  3A In the late nineties, a copywriter named Luke Sullivan published a book about advertising regrettably titled Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This. Part of the story was about how much Sullivan hated those “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” commercials from the 1960s and ’70s, regardless of how much toilet paper they moved along the way. To validate his point, he quoted a man named Norman Berry, an old-timey creative director for Ogilvy and Mather (the New York advertising agency that would eventually handle Kodak, just like Draper’s fictional employer, Sterling Cooper).

  I’m appalled by those who [judge] advertisers exclusively on the basis of sales. That isn’t enough … if sales are achieved with work which is in bad taste or is intellectual garbage, it shouldn’t be applauded no matter how much it sells. Offensive, dull, abrasive, stupid advertising is bad for business as a whole. It is why the public perception of advertising is going down in this country.

  Berry’s point seems high minded and superficially levelheaded: He’s arguing that the value of advertising isn’t directly tied to its economic success. He thinks it should be socially uplifting and entertaining, and it should engage its audience. Berry’s sentiments, it would seem, have now become the modern “perception of advertising,” which is clearly not going down in this country. It’s going up. When Americans watch Super Bowl commercials, they analyze them as pieces of art; they think about the message the images imply and they blog about what those implications are supposed to prove about the nation as a whole. We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective. We’re smarter than that. But that understanding makes us more vulnerable. We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them.

  Like all people who pretend they’re smart, I want to feel immune to this. I avoid advertising. Since the advent of digital video recorders, I rarely watch2 TV commercials (even when they come on during live sporting events I immediately change the channel, usually to a different live sporting event). I wrote a column in Esquire for five years, yet I can’t think of one company who advertised alongside my work (I know they were there, but I can’t remember any of them). I’ve never read a pop-up or a banner ad on the web. Does anyone? Even if I watch Survivor at cbs.com, I check my e-mail during the uncloseable commercial that precedes the episode. Obviously, I’m not the only person who does this. Yet—somehow—I still know about new things that are available to purchase. I can sense when I’m a target market. I knew that Pepsi was focusing on optimism long before I saw any new logos or press releases. So how could this be? How is it that ideas I never think about still burrow into my head? Why do I understand an ad campaign I completely avoid?

  I enjoy Don Draper. He’s got a lot of quality suits. But I’m afraid I might be his employer, and I don’t even know it.

  Q: how did that make you feel?

  A: no idea.

  Q: Oh, come on. How did it make you feel?

  A: I don’t know. I know what you expect me to say, and I know what kind of response you’re hoping I’ll give you, and I know how other people might feel if they were in my position, and I know that I’m supposed to feel something, because this was a very traumatic event. But I don’t know how I feel, even though I know there are feelings somewhere inside me. It’s just that I can’t possibly verbalize what that feeling feels like.

  Q: Why don’t you just try? Who cares if you’re wrong? What is the harm in being wrong?

  A: Because why would i want to get something wrong just so it will make more sense to you? It still won’t make any sense to me.

  T Is For True

  1 Put me in a special school

  ’Cause I am such a fool

  And I don’t need a single book to teach me how to read

  Who needs stupid books?

  They are for petty crooks

  And I will learn by studying the lessons in my dreams

  —Weezer, “Troublemaker”

  2 Every morning upon waking, I always feel something of a deficit. “Again! Why have I not dreamt?” This may be one of the reasons I make films. Maybe I want to create images for the screen that are so obviously absent from my head at night … I have never set out to imbue my films with literary or philosophical references … Film is not the art of scholars but illiterates. You could even argue that I am illiterate.

  —Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog

  3 Every time I see something terrible, I see it at age 19.

  —Ralph Nader, speaking to Esquire at the age of forty-nine

  4 Irony, as we all know by now, is not interesting. We have all talked about irony for twenty years, and now we’re done talking about it. But lying is still interesting. And these two things remain connected, even though they feel so utterly different. An ironist is someone who says something untrue with unclear sincerity; the degree to which that statement is funny is based on how many people realize it’s false. If everybody knows the person is lying, nobody cares. If nobody knows the person is lying, the speaker is a lunatic. The ideal ratio is 65–35: If a slight majority of the audience cannot tell that the intention is comedic, the substantial minority who do understand will feel better about themselves. It’s an exclusionary kind of humor. It’s also the dominant humor of this
era and (arguably) the only kind of humor interesting young people are still able to understand. It’s become so central to modern communication that anything smart Americans enjoy is described (or misdescribed) as ironical. Either the product is being consumed ecstatically and with detachment (such as American Idol or Lil Wayne’s nonmusical pursuits), or it’s supposedly serving as a wry commentary on the straight, mainstream world—sometimes intentionally (Jason Bateman, Beck, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) and sometimes accidentally (Sex and the City, Us Weekly, Susan Boyle). To varying degrees, almost every new cultural invention is built on (a) an overt suggestion of partial dishonesty or (b) the universal inference that the artist must be lying, even if he or she insists otherwise. This is why we become so disoriented whenever someone tells the truth in a forthright manner; it always seems ridiculous, precisely because it is not.

  1A People are generally disappointed by Weezer albums. It’s become the band’s defining ethos— they consistently disappoint the people who love them most. It’s an insular version of disappointment that makes no immediate sense: Weezer distresses the exact same people with every record they release. This should be impossible. If every new record a certain band makes disappoints its base, one would assume chagrined consumers would eventually give up. But people have a different kind of relationship with Weezer, and it’s due to the songwriting of front man Rivers Cuomo: He writes completely straightforward lyrics, presented through music devoid of irony. He exclusively presents literal depictions of how he views the world, and he (almost exclusively) plays guitar riffs that he’d personally want to hear as a fan. There are no other major elements to his work. The tone of his guitar is an attempt to replicate the tone of guitarists he appreciated as a teenager, particularly Ace Frehley and Carlos Cavazo. He employs metaphors, but the metaphors are hyperobvious stand-ins for his own confessionals; he tosses around stilted hip-hop language that makes it seem like he’s mocking all the affluent white kids obsessed with superficial blackness, but he used to be one of those kids. His lyrical fantasies (such as living life as a professional surfer) are faithful, expository descriptions of what he fantasizes about. In 1994, he wrote an unreleased rock opera called Songs from the Black Hole that involved six separate characters (one of which was a robot), but he later admitted the entire narrative was really about his own experience on tour. Artistically and motivationally, Weezer makes completely unaffected music—more authentic than Black Flag or Bright Eyes or Janis Ian. But because every other aspect of Cuomo’s public life seems constructed and self-aware—and because he displays all the usual qualities we’ve come to associate with kitsch and irony—audiences are unwilling to view Weezer’s music as a reflection of Cuomo’s autobiography. They think it must be about something else; they think it must have something to do with them, and with their experiences, and with what they want from pop music. They are disappointed that Weezer’s post-Pinkerton music doesn’t sound honest; it often strikes them as lazy or self-indulgent or unfinished. But the reason it sounds that way is because it’s only honest. It’s so personal and specific that other people cannot relate to it. And—somehow—that’s assumed to be Cuomo’s job. For some reason, he’s supposed to make music that his fans can connect with and live through. But he can’t do that (or won’t do that) on purpose. He can only do that by accident, and only intermittently. As a musician, he does not lie for the benefit of other people, and that keeps his fans terminally disappointed.