Conservative Boot Camp

I don’t pay much attention to advertising, especially TV adverts.  Years of resenting the intrusion of advertising into the shows I watch have conditioned me to pay very little attention.  Whenever I select a show to watch, I simultaneously select a second show to have as an alternate.  By using the ‘previous channel’ button on the remote, I bounce between the shows.  Unless I’m unlucky, that way I miss most of the adverts.  Anyway, for me to putting even a few minutes into writing this comment, you know that this one particular company’s adverts must royally piss me off to have intruded into my world of intentional ignorance.

I’m not going to mention the product name, because I really don’t want to further their aims of getting their name out in front of the public.  But I’m sure you’ll know who I’m talking about if you watch much TV.  They produce a line of zit care products, which according to them and their celebrity spokesgoons, are the greatest thing in the history of zit care products.  I see their adverts on the soccer channel more than anywhere else and I’m still a bit in the dark about why they think that soccer fans are such a good target demographic, but I’m not here to criticise that part of their ad campaign.  For those of you in the know, football is presented without commercials because the game is continuous action with no regular breaks.  Of course when the halftime break rolls about, that means that 12 minutes of the 15 minute intermission is commercials.  This company buys at least a third of that, sometimes it seems like they buy half of that.

The ads themselves are material from their half-hour infomercials, cut down to 30 and 60 seconds.  Since the base footage comes from the infomercial format, they have loads and loads of testimonials.  Since zits are a malady of the young, the testimonials are all from twenty-somethings whose wraparound narcissism literally shines through their shiny clear skin.  I’ve seen these adverts often enough that I’ve developed a particular loathing for a few of the people offering testimonials.

There’s the young woman who talks a mile a minute and with the attitude that since she said it, it’s not only true, it’s gospel.  The way she approaches the camera is just so self-absorbed that I can’t help but think that after talking about herself on a date for two hours, she might well turn to her companion and announce, “I’ve been talking about me all night.  Enough of that.  Why don’t you talk about me for a while.”  Yeah, she’s that girl.

There’s another young woman who in her gushing about her clear skin (thanks to the products, of course) says “not only did it clear up my acne, but made my skin, my actual skin, better.”, or something to that effect.  I’m sure she really meant to say that the products ‘actually made the quality of her skin improve’, but what she says is closer to implying that she has two skins, one actual and the other not-actual.  Whether that means that it’s artificial or virtual, I’m not sure, but I understand my mother tongue well enough to understand that she got the ‘actual’ in the wrong spot in her statement.

Then there’s my favourite - the young man who’s enthusiastically describing how he uses the product at night before he goes to bed and by the time he wakes in the morning, his skin is clear.  Except in his excitement to get his story out, he gets horribly muddled in the person of his tale.  “I put it on in the evening before I go to bed, and when I get up in the morning, you don’t have acne.  Well, that’s a good feeling.”  So I put it on and I get up in the morning, but it’s you whose zits have disappeared.  The stuff must really be magic if it cures other people’s acne if you use it.  I can’t fault the young man.  He’s just a typical young, ignorant self-absorbed twerp who really isn’t ever going to add much value to our society.  But the company is on the hook, in my mind anyway, for using such muddled content to represent their products.

Then there’s the celebutard vocalist who instructs potential users on how to use the product.  “Just a little dab, that’s all you need…”  Innocuous words, but they’re inflected as though she was speaking to a class of second grade students.  Arrrgh!  Get that woman off my TV.

The final person on their averts who grabs my attention is the young man who appears in the centre of the screen with a young woman, presumably his love interest reaching her arms around his neck to embrace him.  As the shot tightens on the young man, he slowly breaks into a beaming smile to reveal the whitest teeth in the world.  Not just white, but white enough to read a newspaper by on a dark night outdoors.  Those teeth would really stand out if they were the only thing about him that are ‘too pretty’, but his skin is so clear and pure that if you saw a closeup of his cheek, you’d be hard pressed to tell whether it’s a man or a woman.  Since when were our young adult men so interested in being so pretty that they look fragile?  Is that a good thing for our society?

Yikes.

If I saw one of these ads once a day, I suppose I wouldn’t have such strong feelings about them.  But when I watch a couple of football matches on a Saturday and see these ads perhaps a dozen times or more, they get to me.  I know I shouldn’t let them get to me.  But the do.  They seem like a chapter on the death of culture in America condensed into 15, 30 or 60 seconds.