In recent weeks there has been many conversations and controversy about advertising. First we had the wild claim that the American eagle jeans advertisements with Sydney Sweeney were racist, then a notfuffle about the Cracker logo.
Since Trans Celebrity Dylan Mulvany opened his first Bud Light, advertising seemed less and less like an attempt to sell widgets and more and more as a ground zero in the cultural wars of our society.
An early example of an advertisement with an important recoil was in April 2017, when Pepsi broadcasted a place with Kendall Jenner in which she magically subjects angry protests by offering everyone a soft drink. The reaction of the left was fast and angry.
Sydney Sweeney ‘Jeans’ advertisement indicates a large cultural turning point, say industry experts
Jenner and Pepsi, it was argued, believe the Black Lives Matter movement.
Only a few years earlier this advertisement would have been a no-brainer, the message is, let’s concentrate on what we all have in common, especially love for our product, but suddenly the advertisement itself was part of the problem.
Fast-Forward until 2020 and the rise of COVID-19 and almost every advertisement on TV for everything was really an advertisement for lockdowns, with silent piano music about rolling recordings of empty streets and mindless commonplaces such as “we are all together”, are landed together.
We all have the message. Again and again.
But why has the television advertisement risen to such a high place of fame in our political and cultural discourse? The simple answer is that Americans simply no longer watch the same TV programs, so advertisements have become the only content that we all really share.
If you follow the acceptance of homosexuality in America, from Stonewall to the Obergefell v. Hodges of the Supreme Court, you can see that the whole thing takes place in our TV shows in that period.
In the late 1970s, Billy Crystal played a comical gay character in ‘Soap’. By 1989, the Boomerama drama series Thirtysomething was a homosexual character in a serious role and in the nineties Jerry Seinfeld and George Constanza were not gay, but they were certainly: “Not that something is wrong with that.”
Our society saw something very similar to racer relationships in our television supply from the sixties and seventies, which often attacked race issues directly, in fact, in fact, generally more fair and more direct than today.
Shakespeare called this the mirror to nature. The TV shows of the pre-streaming era may have played a role in stimulating public opinion, but their much more important role was reflected. Telling our stories was to catch up with society more than cavated in to tell stories.
The transgender movement would also explode in the national conversation through a show, this time in 2013 with the Netflix streaming program “Orange is the New Black”, as a result of which trans -actor Laverne Cox and every doubt of his gender make an act of impugnative.
The following year the conservative writer Kevin Williamson would estimate a column entitled “LaVerne Cox is not a woman”, only for the Chicago Sun Times to purchase it 24 hours later in the midst of recoil from transactivists.
This is day and night of the way Old School has tackled television racism and homophobia for decades. These were cultural conversations in which we all participated, because we all looked at the same shows.
Only a very small part of the population once saw “Orange is the New Black”, and in the world of streaming shows that trans story lines, such as the “sex in the city” reboot, are also consumed by a very small, often Lefty piece of America.
So today, if you want to get the message that men and women are interchangeable there, your best gamble is not a guest star in a very special episode of a popular sitcom, it is to leave Dylan Mulvany Prance in a Bud Light advertisement.
Polling has shown that there is a political dimension for what Americans use streamans. Liberals prefer Netflix and Disney Plus, conservatives tend to Paramount Plus, but what we all see are the same advertisements.
For too long, the advertising industry, together with most of a C-suite, have believed that there is a kind of social justice mission in their job description. Good company citizenship, or something.
Advertisers must remember, to the extent that they think it is their job to help solve the world, that TV shows could only help that because they received good reviews and earned money.
How did we know that in the 1980s America would make the Brooklyn family of the Cosby Show the face of the American family? Only because they did that.
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Just as the writers of the Cosby show spent less of their time trying to promote racial justice than on funny and entertaining, advertisers have to concentrate more on their business results and less on saving the world, because the first is the best way to the last.
In all likelihood, these arguments and sea of ​​fire about advertisements will be with us for some time, because Madison Avenue wants to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tradition and away from progressive politics.
But now it is at least a fairer fight. Five years ago, conservatives would probably have thrown in the towel instead of defending the Sweeney advertisements or to defy the Rebrand Cracker Barrel. Nowadays, both parties fight for this cultural space.
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The age of the advertisement stands for us. There will never be another show such as Mash or Seinfeld that looks at 40 percent of the country at the same time. Today 5 percent would be a huge number.
The last people who have all our attention are the advertisers and hopefully they can sell things again and stop trying to develop a new, glorious, progressive society.
