Image and Word

JC Penney, it seems, is taking a bold approach to marketing its youth clothing. And by “bold” I mean “deeply confusing.”

In a current ad (which I saw during movie previews but I imagine is also getting TV time) the department store chain has chosen to remind impressionable and insecure youth that failure to adhere to fashion orthodoxy will result in scorn and alienation. Scorn and alienation are played by a horde of stylishly-dressed invisible zombies (see below) who chase the fashion heretics, tear their unacceptable clothes from their bodies, and replace them with conforming, attractive JC Penney brand togs. The victims walk away from the scene of their attack oddly unshaken, admiring their new outfits.

Ads have been playing on our insecurities ever since the beginning of advertising time. What is bizarre about this spot is that it is so transparently explicit about its strategy. The people who wear our clothes, the ad declares, are quite literally a marauding pack of faceless zombies. Furthermore, it says, choosing to don our apparel is the equivalent of having your soul eaten by the undead. It is hard to believe that any but the most passionate defenders of conformity would find this tactic appealing.

The part of me that still has faith in the world has to wonder: What made JC Penney think that the teenagers of today want to have their individuality stripped from them so as to be absorbed into an undifferentiated, homogenous mass?

However the part of me that, as a teenager, dyed my hair purple and wore army boots to the prom (oh yes I did) can’t help but ask, with a little bit of fear: What if they are right?

In the beginning, there were the spongmonkeys. And they were good.

With crazed, gravelly voices, the hamsteresque duo of Photoshopped rodents sang to us of warm toasty Quizno’s subs and the virtue of a sandwich shop with a pepper bar. The one in the bowler tackled the lead vocals while levitating in the foreground, and his pirate hat-clad sidekick accompanied him on guitar.

From an advertising perspective, the spongmonkeys were genius. They accomplished what every ad campaign is hoping to; they cut through the clutter. They were so remarkably bizarre that they were impossible to ignore. People talked about them, wrote about them, wanted to know more about what these strange singing hairballs were doing on their televisions. Despite this brilliance, however, Quizno’s eventually fired the spokes-rats–something about vermin not being appropriately appetizing pitchmen for a food service establishment.

Since that time, the use of wacky attention-getting images and characters in advertising has proliferated. But the technique no longer cuts through the clutter; it is the clutter. No product category is immune from this phenomenon of forced whimsy–the use of random quirk to signify hipness and relevance. What the consumer ends up getting is cynical 30 second spots that are more grating than engaging. They feel like calculated interpretations of what a boardroom full of advertising execs thought would appeal to the youth demographic.

Case in point: this loathsome ad for Starbust Berries and Cream, shrill and unfathomable. It is far too proud of its own departure from convention. This smugness makes the viewer an outsider, who is just not in on the very strange joke.

What, then, about the Geico cavemen, who were so successful as commercial characters that they are getting their own sitcom? I would argue that the cavemen, though an undeniably peculiar premise, escape the trap of off-putting foreced whimsy. The ads achieve this by incorporating dry humor and meticulous details: wry jokes about mother issues, casually unbuttoned shirt collars, well-timed grimaces of exasperation. Over the course of the campaign’s several different installments, the cavemen become empathetic likable characters.

The lesson that the makers of the Starburst spot and its ilk need to learn is that ultimately, it is the humanity under the caveman make-up that makes those ads work. Outlandish concepts may catch viewers’ eyes, but it takes more to win their hearts.

When I was high school, my friends and I played pranks that were slightly out of the ordinary. We printed out dozens of our favorite quotes and hung them around the school; we slipped messages into empty soda bottles and threw them into the town pool, for the lifeguards to discover in the morning. One particularly boring night we hung large newsprint signs about town, with large arrows helpfully directing motorists to turn right to find sheep. Another sign, with what we felt was exquisite cleverness, labeled the rough-hewn crossbar of a park fence, “Tree.”

If we were more self-aware at that time, and had heard of the phenomenon, we might have identified ourselves as nascent culture-jammers.

Why do I, at this moment, bring up these adolescent hijinks?

Because this week, for the first time, I purchased and read an issue of Adbusters magazine, a publication that holds itself out as the Bible of culture-jamming. Every page of this periodical is infused with the same earnest, raw, passionate spirit that inspired us back then–and I am not sure I mean this in a good way.

What is most noticeable about the magazine is that the writing in it isn’t very good. The subject matter is appropriate to a college freshman who is first discovering a sense of social consciousness; Starbucks, we learn, is evil and marketing, we are told, encourages young girls to present over-sexualized personae, which is also bad. The actual writing matches the sophistication of the ideas expressed. It is unpolished, coarse, and unimaginative.

My guess is that this style (or lack thereof) is an intentional choice, an attitude my college self might have expressed as “an unwillingness to accept a dominant aesthetic that priveleges syntax over emotion.” As I initially flipped through the pages of the magazine I was sympathetic to this philosophy, but soon wearied of such poetic musings as “Authenticity is/ Found in the ironic laugh/ Dripping from Al Gore’s patented shoes.” Bearing a remarkable similarity to the angsty verses my high school literary magazine might have published does not make a poem more genuine. It just makes it poorly written.

And on the subject of the philosophical purity of the organization behind the magazine that prides itself on its anti-consumerist stance…if the corporate monoculture is such a blight upon our society, why then did I buy this publication on the newstand at a Borders bookstore?