Advertising Our Indifference

While television advertising is designed to sell ideas or products it also reflects how we think. I find three recent ads particularly troubling for what they say about Americans. The first features actress Ellen Page for Cisco Systems. Page visits a small town and the mayor shows her into a room where a police officers is watching surveillance camera monitors of the town. Page sees her car being ticketed and runs out.

The chilling idea that even in small town America the police are watching our every move is played for laughs. And because video surveillance has become so ubquitous and people of Page's 20-something generation are numb to it having been spied on their entire life beginning in school, the outrageous invasion of privacy is marketed as something cute.

The second ad is for On Demand NFL football and features a police officer shocking a man with his Taser. The victim and the cop are in a Fantasy Football league and the cop is mad about the victim having On Demand games. When police first began using Tasers they were sold as a "less lethal" alternative to shooting people. Obviously, it's better to be shocked by a 50,000 volts of electricity for a few seconds than being shot and you're likely to survive being tasered unless you have a heart condition, hence the "less lethal" rather than non-lethal description. But police now routinely use Tasers to in non-life threatening situations and the public has become so accustomed to what is a form of torture that it can be played for laughs on television.

The third ad is for a World of Warcraft video game and shows actors dressed as everyday people and athletes like Kobe Bryant and celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel in combat with semiautomatic rifles and rocket launchers. Unlike real combat in Afghanistan which the commercial resembles, nobody gets killed. As a kid I played with water pistols and played Army much to the chagrin of my antiwar mother. But the idea that adults would get their kicks playing war games while fellow Americans are killing and being killed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is really warped.

What these ads show is a country numb to the loss of its freedoms and oblivious to the real cost of war. The jokes in the ads are on us.