12 July 2001, 820 words
Advertisers do not target people like me. If they did, you'd see superior dramas like The West Wing on TV, as well as witty sitcoms like Frasier and investigative news shows like ABC 20/20. But the advertisers are quite right not to try and sell me their products.
You see, the vast majority of advertisements depend on the psychology of status. If a consumer can be persuaded that a particular product will make her peers esteem her more, then the product will sell like hotcakes - or, rather, like Levi jeans. For someone like me, whose sense of status depends mostly on intellectual activities and my naturally curly hair, such appeals fall on barren ground.
Indeed, the ads I pay the most attention to are for products I don't use or use rarely: tobacco, alcohol and coffee. I pay attention to these ads for several reasons: because of their technical excellence; because it strikes me as significant that the best commercials are those which all advertise drugs; and because they usually have the sexiest women. But, despite my attentiveness, I have never been persuaded to start smoking or drink rum or even have more than an occasional cup of coffee.
Now it may be that most people are not as immune as me. But I strongly suspect that the average person is not, in fact, as susceptible to advertising as is popularly believed. You always hear commentators talk about "subliminal messages", when it has long been proven that such messages (images or words flashed too fast for the conscious mind to detect) do not work. The human brain is far too clever to be taken in by such stunts.
People also believe that the "underlying messages" in ads can influence human behaviour. One letter-writer recently complained about the Lotto-Plus ad which shows a man bullying his employees to get the job done. Her concern was that this would send the wrong message to children.
Well, it may send a wrong message, but that doesn't mean children's behaviour will be influenced by it. Ads, and the media generally, cannot influence anybody's behaviour unless the individual is already strongly predisposed - by their genes, by their peers, by the wider culture - to attend to such messages. And, if a person is so predisposed, then opposing messages will be ignored. The mind is not a tabula rasa, and the same commentators who imply that it is would, I am sure, simultaneously deny their own susceptibility to media messages.
But, although advertisements are not a key factor in influencing people's behaviour or their core opinions, they can still tell us something about our society. Ads, after all, are designed to appeal to the average consumer. They therefore often reflect predispositions, good and bad, that already exist in the target groups.
Bear in mind, however, that "often" is not "always". Another letter-writer recently complained about the lack of Indian males (meaning Indo-Trini men, not Bollywood movie stars) in local ads. Of course, the person saw this as a racial plot to emasculate Indian men. (Racists find it hard to believe that every other group isn't constantly plotting against them.)
The true reasons are probably much simpler. Nearly every advertising agency is located in Port of Spain and environs, and advertisers choose their models from people they know and those who send in résumés. Thus, the agencies would likely have very few Indo-Trini male models to choose from. There is also a more fundamental reason: people of Indian descent tend to be small in stature, but male models/actors are usually used in some macho context, which requires height and muscles.
This brings me back to the Lotto-Plus ads. Another letter-writer complained that the lack of "Indians" in them reflected racial bias (yawn). Now I have always been impressed with the casting of the Lotto and Play-Whe ads: all the actors have a dissipated, even degenerate, look. This is exactly right for a product aimed at people who want to become rich with no effort. But the ads have hardly ever used Indo-Trini actors and, since the National Lottery Control Board's PR officer is Maha Sabha spokesman Devant Parsuram Maharaj - a man who obsesses about "preserving the Indian physical image" - it is hardly likely that the exclusion of Indo-Trini actors reflects racial bias: at least, not against Indians.
However, the Lotto-Plus ads, which use an all-black cast with aggressively American accents, tells you who the NLCB views as its best customers, as well as the culture and attitude which they think will appeal to that target group.
This is how advertisements can be truly instructive: not because they necessarily reflect any real social or psychological attitudes, but because they always reflect the mindset of the people who approve the ads - and those people are always our elites.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh