Over the years he has evolved into the Pauline Kael of television commercials, the Rex Reed of “Where’s the Beef.” And in his new book, “And Now a Few Words From Me …” (McGraw-Hill Trade), he examines why so many commercials are so bad.
In the uncharted advertising terrain of catfights, celebrity antiwar statements and commercial-eradicating technology like TiVo, Garfield is a handy field guide. NEWSWEEK’S Brian Braiker recently spoke with Garfield, who also cohosts National Public Radio’s syndicated program “On the Media,” about his book and his very bad Nancy Sinatra impression.
NEWSWEEK: You do say in your book that you’re never wrong. You even cast yourself as god’s delegate. It’s funny, but a little presumptuous, maybe?
Bob Garfield: Yeah, I’m not actually claiming to be god. He’s got a lot on His plate. And so I’m just jumping in to take care of the marketing-communications issues that just aren’t that high on the heavenly agenda. And at any point that god decides to take over this stuff himself, I’ll respectfully back away.
Why do advertising professionals, who are often very smart, come up with the dumbest ads?
There are so many reasons. One of them has to do with this phenomenon that has been described as myopia by immersion: they get just so caught up in the creative process and have left themselves so few checks and balances for how the resulting material may be viewed by the outside world. They start on the wrong course, by the time anybody realizes this then it is way too late. Problem No. 2 I think is not only a widespread misunderstanding, but an actual hostility among practitioners to what they do for a living. Many people in the business–the all-in-blacks I call them–fancy themselves artists and would rather be doing art or stand-up comedy or directing movies.
Is this why you say that “most advertising only just barely accomplishes its benign mandate”?
It’s a lucky thing that advertising works. Good advertising works, bad advertising works, transcendent advertising can create huge fortunes and horrendous advertising can harm the client. But that’s only at the margins. The vast majority of national advertising works simply because it is there. Your greatest insurance policy as a practitioner in the advertising business is if you remember to have the brand name anywhere and you have a budget, you achieve some effect. It’s like the SATs, you get credit just for showing up. Some of the greatest advertising ever made is the result of people who were willing to break all the rules, color outside the lines, push all the envelopes. But that’s a tiny, tiny, tiny number of ads in a universe of millions of ads. And unfortunately in trying to hit a home run every time, the industry’s batting average is hovering way below the Mendoza line.
You’ve never worked in advertising. So what initially, then, qualified you to be an ad critic?
I blundered into this. In 1983 I showed up for my first day of work at the then-not-even-publishing-yet USA Today. My boss said “oh yeah, you, you’re Garfield, right? You’re the advertising columnist.” So I did an advertising column for a few years and kinda got steeped into the subject. Then I went to Ad Age.
In your book you make allusions to Proust, Montaigne, Thomas Gray, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Kant, Salinger and Mencken. Those are some pretty high standards to hold advertisers up to.
My cousin read the book, he said “did you get paid by the allusion?” Why am I writing about Proust to people who are rushing home to catch “American Idol”? I was just doing it to show off.
You say advertising has an intrinsic value all its own nonetheless. What is it?
No. 1, it works. Nobody really understands the central mechanism, but I think it basically comes down to this: the very presence of national advertising confers on a brand the image of quality at least as good as the other competitors in the category, of substance, of you’ll get your money back if you’re not satisfied, of distribution, availability, all of the above. The “as seen on TV” actually means something. Therefore it helps move goods and services through the economy, which is a good thing.
It has underwritten the media for certainly the entire 20th century and long before that. Almost everything we hear and see in the media is paid for directly by advertisers. So it is the sponsor of the information age, and that’s not nothing.
Thirdly, and this is just a bonus, but it’s an extraordinary anthropological tool because if you try to reconstruct a society and a culture and its values, you can hardly do better than to go back and look at the advertising–portrayals of people, their cares, their likes and dislikes, their desires, their needs, their styles, their language. It’s all there.
Yet you say in your book that “the relentlessly encroaching forces of barbarism threaten advertising civilization.”
That has to do with vulgarity, “shock-vertizing,” this whole new calculus for what is deemed appropriate in getting the attention of the consumer. That has shifted 180 degrees in the last 20 years. That is a megatrend and it’s a very disturbing one.
More and more commercials are adopting an ironic tone to make sexist ads seem less offensive, like in the Miller Lite catfight commercial. Does this attempt to whitewash objectification ring false to you?
Yeah that’s a perfect example of the phenomenon you’re describing. Of course it’s fake ironic distance. That commercial is not about the last shot where the supposedly real couples are sitting there. It’s all about the two lesbian catfighters and their giant breasts. Anyone who falls for the notion that this is so ironic and detached and it’s a commentary on the difference between the sexes, I have a bridge I want to sell.
Still, you seem conflicted about sex in advertising. You say you enjoy looking at beautiful women, and sex is often effective in advertising. When does it work?
You’re right, I am conflicted. I am conflicted as a man in this society in the year 2003 because I have an intellectual understanding and moral values in direct opposition to my genitalia. There are some things that infuriate me on a moral level but arouse me on another one. By the early ’90s, things had gotten so bad that beer advertisers decided as a group to ditch the pinup stuff and to not antagonize people who at least theoretically represented half of their audience and just do what’s right. But then between Madonna and Victoria’s Secret and Maxim magazine and Elvira the vampire, suddenly this kind of [postfeminist] retro-objectification became acceptable again. And the brief moratorium on depicting women like a pair of boobs with a bad actress around them ended. And advertising rushed in with what is now, like everything else in our increasingly coarsened culture, an unabashed display of pultritude wherever you turn. As a father of three daughters, it makes me very, very unhappy.
I’ve been noticing more and more that when I go to the movies, after I pay for my ticket and before previews even start, I’ve got sit through a long stream of commercials.
People who display commercials on movie screens think they can be even more out there, even push the envelope still farther. And sometimes the ads you see at movies are even more confrontational. I just can’t envision a time when Americans are every going to embrace screen advertising for the reason you’ve said. You pay $8 for your ticket, you pay either $70 for the medium popcorn or $70.50 for the 55 gallon drum of popcorn. You’ve got a heavy investment in this; the babysitter’s meter is running. Now you have to sit through a Coke commercial? I mean it makes my blood pressure spike. And most everybody else’s–there’s a lot of hissing and booing.
You call political ads a “rancid stain on democracy.” Why?
Most of all, it’s a pack of lies protected by the First Amendment. The typical political ad, apart from being nasty and assaulting, is a very carefully fabricated superstructure of half truths in order to give the impression usually the opposing candidate as some sort of monster. And the candidate is seldom a monster and the nominal facts are assembled in order to create an overall big lie. It’s a perversion of democracy and, by the way, something that doesn’t work very well. Attack advertising does close gaps but I remain to be persuaded that it actually wins elections. All it does is continually degrade the major political debate in this country.
There’s been a lot of talk about celebrities like Jeanine Garofalo and Martin Sheen, doing antiwar commercials. Some people have a big problem with that, others don’t. What’s your take?
I’m not sure what I think. My personal view has been if Richard Gere is for it, I am against it. I tend to be dismissive of celebrities’ opinions. I’m not sure why–they’re no less permitted to have opinions on these things and it’s historically been show to be effective. For example testifying in Congress to call attention to certain problems around the world. I’m not sure that Tom Cruise or Martin Sheen is going to really add much substance to the conversation. It tends to make people feel ill at ease. It certainly makes me feel ill at ease.
The increasing popularity of devices like TiVo is driving some networks, like the WB for example, to develop commercial-free programming and variety shows, with the ads plastered all over the stage, set and talent. Is this a novelty or a possible new trend?
It’s a big, big, big problem. Eventually this technology will be ubiquitous, and that will give people the ability to avoid the very thing that’s paying all the bills–the commercials. So people in the industry, particularly in the TV industry, are always scrounging around for ways to generate advertising revenue other than the standard and-here’s-a-word-from-our-sponsor model. But the only audience isn’t going to accept it. I don’t believe that American audiences will accept what are in effect long-form infomercials masquerading as programming. It’s an irresistible force against an immovable object.
You say in the book you do an impression of Nancy Sinatra.
Actually I don’t. That was a lie. That and the Conrad Adenauer impression, I just made that up. Those were the only two things I made up.
Oh. I was going to ask you for it.
[Sings] These boots are made for walkin'!
