Posted on 04/27/2020 8:12:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
A new kind of television advertisement has crept into our collective consciousness here in the age of virus. In an effort to show that they care, and you know, sell stuff, major corporations are inundating the airwaves with saccharine-sweet, super-sincere TV spots that are not a little bit dystopian. Indeed, the virus, it seems, is inescapable even when we cut to a few words from our sponsors.
You’ve all seen them. They include phrases like, “In this time, more than any other,” or “As we all rise to the challenge,” or “Stay safe, stay home.” The last one is particularly infuriating. I mean, I am home! I’m watching freakin television! Where do you think I am, a sports bar? I’m just trying to tune out watching “Friends” over here.
In a Dunkin Donuts ad, employees in one store are making masks. An AT&T ad like dozens of others is a for-profit celebration of frontline responders. There is ad after ad after ad of cozy indoor shots of parents teaching kids, people cooking, virtual happy hours, all of it.
And they aren’t even honest. A lot of families are at each other’s throats. What there should probably be is more Peloton divorce ads about couples who now hate each other, or some single guy sadly taping together used pizza boxes for the recycling.
It is honestly enough to make me long lovingly for the days “Mike Bloomberg for president” ads were more prevalent than grains of sand on the beach. Remember that? It was about 14 years ago, I think. But annoying as they were, those ads weren’t as cloying and Orwellian as the 30-second spots reinforcing lockdown orders while selling products.
We all know already about the shutdown. It’s not a public service to constantly remind us that we have barely left our houses for two months. One of the big reasons people watch TV is to escape this weird reality for a few hours, to settle into the world as it was, not as it is. But the next thing you know it’s back to hospital rooms and facemasks on the screen, stirring music swelling beneath. Just stop.
You know what I want from TV ads right now? I want pretty people with good, strong teeth pushing products that can dramatically improve my life. I want jokes, and celebrity cameos, contests and yelling. I want some affirmation that someday life will be back to normal, not constant reminders of the current drudgery.
A great danger in a long-term slow-motion crisis is that a narrative can start to set in across the culture. Increasingly. that is reinforcing a victim narrative. After all, there is little some Americans crave more than the mantle of victimhood. It is a message of powerlessness in which all we can do is heat up a can of baked beans and wait for the dictatorship of expertise to give us the all-clear.
Television ads play an outsized role in crafting that narrative. This is in part because TV viewership among Americans is so fragmented that we don’t watch the same news, or the same shows, but we do watch the same ads. It is one of the few forms of television that can still saturate society. Please saturate it with something other than shilling while putting on a coronavirus pageant.
There is a danger of wallowing. Yes, our lives have temporarily changed, but no, coronavirus need not be at the center of our every waking moment. In fact, if we let it be, we will all slowly go insane. So please, big companies and advertising companies, just cut us a break. Let us think about something else. I’ll buy it, whatever it is. I promise.
“we’re all in this together”
1984
“My favs are the ads by the rich and famous proclaiming we are “in it together””
Isn’t that the truth. Words coming from the mouths of those chummy TV hosts that make millions per year.
And now, Birx, Fauci, and Jerome Adams are doing a social distancing ad ...
I mute my TV every time FOX puts some asinine Democrat on, it’s now approaching 50% of the time.
I am also tired of the “we’re in this together...separately” ads.
Exactly. Cut the Kumbaya cr@p. It means NOTHING and makes your business/organization look like the bunch of brainwashed sucks that you are.
Get us back to work, Mr. President! Yesterday!
Social engineering and indoctrination, pure and simple. That way, the sheep will already be primed and ready to cower in the next “crisis”.
The phrase, or a reasonable facsimile, which drives me up a tree:
“We are all in this together!”
They do, in fact, think that we are all stupid and fall for such nonsense.
I turn off anything that says “we are in this together.” We aren’t, as the Leftists have their own, very separate, agenda
Now they have Smirnoff Vodka ads saying to social distance for the Red White and Blue.
Seems like everyone is in on it.
Well, not the ASPCA. They are still running the shivering sad eyed dog commercials on, at least, the Discovery Channel.
Those ads have been on for at least 1 month.
Correction: Happy piano players playing sad background music. heh heh heh
“I want pretty people with good, strong teeth pushing products...”
Pretty people???
That went out a long time ago. Social justice demands inclusion of all the types-— one ad now can have five different ethnicities and it takes quite a bit for the ad makers to circle back around to pretty people.
Yes, I am so tired of these commercials and they are everywhere. The only worse ones are that guy on TVLand.
Glad I don’t watch TV anymore.
I heard Debbie Dingo D MI say that about 10 times earlier.
Every time I hear someone on TV say “we’re all in this together,” I feel like smashing it.
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