Red with NV
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
At first, I thought she was holding a bottle of the newest star-branded perfume. But what Carmen Electra is hawking in the relatively new Saatchi and Saatchi ad campaign is not something you spray on to smell pretty, but something you ingest to lose weight. ”I don’t do it for men. I don’t do it for women. I don’t do it for cameras or red carpets. I take NV for me.” Ah, the sound of the noble, independent woman. But is Electra really promoting a pure liberation from the critical eyes of men, women and the paparazzi? We have only to look as far as the name on the slick packaging to realize: no, no she’s not. NV is all about the perceptions of others, but only in as much as others can potentially boost our fragile egos with their delirious “NV”. Even the web address is shamelessly transparent: be-desired.com.
Saatchi and Saatchi is doing what ad agencies do best by crafting this thorough campaign, which was kicked off by a party featuring “a packed house of beautiful people.” The play by play of the party’s photo slideshow narrates the event: “Our stunning hostess makes her entrance. The press goes wild. Carmen Electra strikes her NV pose.” (This is news? And can a pose can be branded?) Complementing the hyped-up fluff surrounding the campaign, is a revolutionary way of packaging the product. This is not the infomercialized garish packaging of the suspicious diet pills consumers have come to expect, but the sleek, feminine look of a so-called “beauty pill” that promises not only weight loss, but beautiful hair, flawless skin and stronger nails. It’s a diet pill coming out of the shadows of the supplement store and into the bright lights of trusted “progressive retailers” like Wal-Mart, Target and Meijer.
If, as the film The Persuaders argues, the job of today’s ad agencies is to create an impenetrable culture around a product, S&S is doing a fantastic job, from the red lighting at the kick-off event to the list of helpful tips on the site and in the box such as standing up straight and focusing on your achievements rather than your failures. NV even served as the “official promotional partner” of the 2006 Mrs. America competition, giving a $2,500 cash award and a year’s supply of their product to top weight-loser, Mrs. Michigan (aka Jody Bernhardt) who lost 13 pounds in 12 weeks to come in at a competition weight of 115 pounds. “I like NV,” Bernhardt says on the site. “It doesn’t make me jittery like other diet pills I have used.” NV is, it appears, a culture within a culture in which diet pills are the norm.
For most of us, we’ll be seeing red with righteous anger, rather than “NV” as Electra frisks through the ocean on our television screens. But the fact remains that NV has doubled its profits every year since its introduction in 2000 and it stood to realize over 100 million in sales in 2006. Perhaps Electra is telling the truth after all about taking NV purely for herself. Ultimately, this campaign is about making an idol of how others perceive us, commanding that that perception be one of consuming envy and lust that is completely focused on our desirability. And we’re just not being true to ourselves if we’re not more desirable than everyone else in the room. With overtones of domination, competition and greed, the NV world stands in stark contrast to viewing others as the image of Christ and being a model of Christ in sacrificial love.
Perhaps the way of the cross wouldn’t stand up against the way of the pill in today’s marketing clutter, but there lurks a truth in the shadow of the cross more deeply fulfilling than, “Being an object of desire means feeling every bit as great as you look.” And that’s the fact that there’s never been a moment in the history of the universe when any one of us has not been desired by the Creator of all beauty.
Eating like a man
Monday, January 08, 2007
In Issue One of Uncompressed, Brian Wuest observes and critiques the increasingly pervasive television advertisements that equate “manliness” with eating poorly (among other things). For example:
From Brian’s article:
The first message these commercials communicate to us is that it is manly to eat in an unhealthy way. In these we see manly men and manly meals, and a clear association between the two. Burger King presents us with two fine examples of such. First, this summer’s BK Stacker ad campaign: the BK Stacker is a sandwich that includes only bread, meat, cheese, bacon, and special sauce. It’s called the “Stacker” because you can choose if you want a Double, a Triple, or a Quad Stacker, the latter of which contains four beef patties, as the name suggests, and 68 grams of fat. The most interesting thing about this sandwich is the rhetoric used to advertise it. First, the advertisements emphasize the absence of any vegetables on the sandwich. “Hold the produce,” one paper ad read; “No vegetables,” a radio ad reported and a television ad included a boss yelling at a worker for trying to add a tomato to the sandwich. The paper and radio ad are especially interesting because they use the absence of vegetables as a selling point. No lettuce here, please; just the multiple beef patties.
A Burger King television commercial from earlier last year showed men running rampant through city streets in celebration of the Texas Double Whopper (two beef patties, bacon, cheese, vegetables, jalapeños). The riot is set off by one man’s decision to no longer eat “chick food.” Men begin crowding the streets, breaking cement blocks with their heads, punching each other in the gut, and eating “until my innie turns into an outtie.” “I AM MAN,” they triumphantly declare.
The Dairy Queen Chili Meltdown GrillBurger takes food’s gender-defining power to a more literal level. This burger’s commercial shows a male-female couple sitting on the couch, watching a weepy melodrama. The man is eating a DQ burger, and then woman asks for a bite. After tasting the burger, she nods appreciatively, then undergoes a transformation. She slides down in her seat, spreads her legs, places her hand in her pants, and switches the TV to a sports game. “Dude – pull my finger,” she says. As a result of such a manly burger, she’s becoming masculine (or the commercial’s perception thereof) in her behavior. And to eliminate any possible remaining ambiguity, the commercial ends with “It’ll make a man out of you.”
The message is clear: if you’re a real man, you’ll eat like a real man. “Stack it high, tough guy,” one Burger King add suggests. Men eat a lot, and preferably a lot of meat.It follows logically that the first message would give way to a second: as eating this food makes you a man, eating healthily makes you less of a man. Take a recent Hummer commercial. A man is standing at the supermarket while the cashier rings up his purchases: tofu, a large collection of vegetables, etc. Another man comes up and starts unloading his items, which must include half a cow of red meat. The two men’s eyes meet, and the vegetable man looks away sheepishly. The meat man has clearly proven his alpha status in the interaction. The vegetable man must go purchase a Hummer in order to reclaim his manhood.
I encourage you to read the rest.