July 2009
Fighting Cynicism
by Charles H. Green on Monday, February 25, 2008 (post #257)
.gif "Snide-oh, ergo sum")
I often want to be hip and in the know. I don’t think I’m the only one. And frequently this urge manifests itself in sarcasm, cynicism or being snide.
Are we living in a time where this urge is perhaps more prevalent than others? So much so that we’re beginning to see a backlash?
Some see the Obama phenoma as evidence of such a backlash. I’ll abstain from that debate. Besides, I’ve got a better piece of evidence.
In Advertising Age —‘of all places,’ I’m tempted to say—we find Snide Advertising is Bad for Business and Society, by Richard Rapaport. He dissects some of the snarkier, hipper ads on TV today—ads by FedEx, Budweiser, Priceline.com.
I don’t think of advertising as a bastion of expansive social thinking; much less of a philosophy linking social well-being and business profits. I think of it as a center of cynicism, actually. And yet, read these few snippets (and remember, this writing appears in Advertising Age):
There are few barometers so reflective of modern life as TV advertising. It makes sense. Take the culture's most facile minds, challenge them to pry cash from an increasingly tapped-out audience, and what do you get? Commercials built on sadism, on derision, on one-upsmanship — in a word, "snide."
If you look up "snide," you find synonyms such as "sarcastic" and "malicious." Snide advertising possesses a governing syntax that demands, to begin with, sacrificial victims...
Another building block of snide advertising is physical aggression…
Snideness is the leitmotif of sexy slapstick that predominates in ads for domestic beer bottlers, the bottom feeders of American advertising…
The bottom line of snide advertising is a kind of Darwinian "survival of the snappiest," requiring that you get the last word in any exchange and that it be a "gotcha."
… the crux of snide advertising [is] the ability to communicate that you and your product are too hip to so much as work up a spit to actually sell the merch; that the very process of making the ad, like most other human endeavors these days, is barely worth the effort.
…It behooves marketing professionals to understand the difference between subtle irony and idiot snideness and aim for an advertising denominator cognizant of the maxim that expansive, confident consumers part with their cash far more readily than do angry, fearful ones.
When the purveyors of pitch are telling us not to foul the nest—maybe there’s something going on?
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/
You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen
posted in Trust in Leadership Development and Strategy
Shaula Evans said
The first rule of advertising is: make the product the hero.
And yet, the narrative and subtext of so many commercials on American tv amount to: our product is used by losers and petty sadists; if you choose to associate with our product, you are flagging yourself as one of them.
The ads may impress the rest of the hip in-group around the agency water cooler with their ironic statements about society, but they don't make me want to buy the product (or be associated with it in any way), which means they don't serve the agency client.
I can forgive talented people for a lot of things. I wouldn't mind cynical ads so much at all if they were good or if they worked.
posted on Tuesday, February 26, 2008