His description, which is somewhat paradoxical, leaves me unsure of just what he meant to convey, but when I say that today's advertising is artificial truth, I mean that it masquerades as being an accurate portrayal of the real world, when it is so far off everyday reality that it has a truly surreal quality in most cases. And that surreal quality is not an artistic effort to make the advertisements more entertaining or memorable; it is the jarring effect of creating advertising to shape reality in the politically correct, multicultural, One World image.
The blog entry I posted last night, about politically incorrect ads of the past and the ritualistic way most post-moderns denounce those ads, brought to mind this book I refer to above. The book is interesting to look at for someone who is interested in old ephemera, including advertising. I collect a great deal of ephemera of various kinds: postcards, greeting cards, restaurant menus, sheet music, magazines, and advertisements of all kinds. it really is a social history of the era it represents. I collect things from the turn of the 20th century onward, mostly.
Advertising has changed over the decades, of course, but by the mid-20th century, which is the earliest era that I have any experience of, advertising mostly consisted of catchy, cheerful little jingles or patter describing the merits of the product or service being sold. Now, advertising has to be 'edgy', often weird so as to be memorable, but above all, it must be multicultural, diverse, and politically correct in all particulars. Past advertising was usually innocent of political propaganda (except for political ads of course) and philosophical messages. Now, advertising seems to exist more as a vehicle for globalist/leftist propaganda more than for the more mundane reason of selling something to consumers. Now it is ideas that are being peddled, often in sneaky or subliminal ways, sometimes with heavy-handed, blatant images and messages.
The book I cited at the beginning of this blog post, The Golden Age of Advertising: the 60s, is an interesting book consisting of actual ads from that era. It's a thick book, colorful, and fun to page through. In it, Steven Heller says of the ads of the 60s:
''If the advertisements in this volume were the sole artifacts a historian used to examine & analyze the turbulent Sixties, a picture of American culture would emerge that bears scant resemblance to social and political realities of the times.
Where are the blacks, Latinos, or Asians?
Viewed from this vantage point, the Sixties had no civil rights protests, Vietnam War, or sex, drugs, and rock and roll, at least not in any meaningful way.''
First, it's bizarre that it is now a given that advertising, originally meant to sell a product or service, is now expected to include political events, wars, social upheavals, and society in general. Such was never part of the expectations of advertising in the pre-PC era. How could we expect advertising to depict the anti-war protests of the 60s, or marches and riots in the South, or the counterculture youth movement of the late 60s? How was advertising, formerly a mostly light-hearted medium, supposed to portray such things? That is the province of first, the news media and secondarily, of such 'artists' as choose to create political art or propaganda.
In the old Soviet Union, although advertising in our sense was not used, the government used posters to put across its ideology and to indoctrinate and lecture the people on their duties. Our advertising has become just about as ideological as the old Soviet propaganda.
Anyone who watches TV or reads print advertising is familiar with the propaganda: note the prevalence of 'diversity' everywhere, from the advertising inserts that arrive in your newspaper or in your mailbox. Wal-mart, Target, all the retailers feel compelled to include mostly non-white faces in all their advertising, even in areas which have few nonwhites. The images of smart, competent women alongside dumpy, inept beta males are ubiquitous, with TV advertising being the worst. All authority figures in commercials on TV as well as in TV series and movies are likely to be black, and often black females. White judges, doctors, or scientists are fewer and farther between, which is greatly at odds with reality.
So is our advertising ''artificial truth'', as the book says, or is it a substitute for truth, like aspartame is artificial sugar? Advertising is often meant to mimic a kind of reality, but those with eyes to see can't help noticing that it is not like the reality we see outside our doors. It is a contrived and false and lying simulacrum, and yet somehow many people are fooled by it, or manipulated into thinking: the world I live in is not like the TV world, but my world SHOULD be like that world I see on my screen. That is the ideal reality, where everyone lives together harmoniously, blacks are well-adjusted, educated, and wise, while White people know their place and step aside gladly. White males in the pretend world of the small screen have stepped down from their positions of prominence and made way for the super-competent, wise women. Everybody is slim (except for the pudgy White males) and relatively young. Everybody is middle-class or better, and lives in a trendy home.
The critics of the ads of the pre-PC era complain that the ads did not show 'minorities' like the aforementioned 'blacks, Hispanics and Asians.' That complaint shows the ignorance of the critics, who seem to believe that ''diversity'' was always at its present level, and that White society simply kept the poor minorities hidden in a corner, and did not allow them to be seen, except in inferior roles. The fact is, the America of the pre-1965 days was still close to 90 percent White overall. Asians were present in small numbers, and tended to live in certain areas (parts of the West Coast, or New York City, for example) while Mexicans were seldom seen outside the Southwest. Post-moderns cannot grasp this reality. They have been so conditioned to think that America was always a Tower of Babel, a polyglot, multiracial free-for-all, that they resist the idea of a different America ever existing. Why, if such an America did exist, it shouldn't have!
So while the ads of the pre-PC era did not depict ''enough'' minorities, the advertising to which we are subjected now does nothing but depict 'blacks, Hispanics and Asians', in numbers which are flagrantly skewed. Which era's advertising had more verisimilitude? I say the pre-PC era; yes, it depicted a ''whitebread'' America, but that was much more accurate than the ''all sorts'' commercials which are de rigueur today.
And by the way: why are all advertising agencies seemingly in lockstep with the diversity mandate? Will the PC secret police kick down the doors of the agency if they have too few minorities, or if they accidentally depict a competent White male in a flattering light? What are the legal penalties for doing so? Will offenders be 'blacklisted' as the lefties complain of the Communists in Hollywood in the 1950s? Or perhaps 'Whitelisted' would be more accurate?
Why are the ad agencies and all of the entertainment media as well so monolithic in the way they cast their productions and the worldview they present us? Should there not be more ''diversity'' of ideas and atmospheres portrayed? Why the dreary sameness everywhere? I thought these ad people were ''creative''. Creativity, if it is worthy of the name, should show us a great many original and unique visions in our entertainment and our advertising. But these 'creative' people present us with dull and predictable scenarios and characters. The same is true of entertainment. You've seen one show, you've seen them all. I don't watch TV anymore, except for streaming non-mainstream movies and shows, but even I can predict exactly what will be on offer. Everything has to be multicultural, even movies set in medieval Europe (Africans and Arabs; what? no Eskimos, I mean, Inuit? No Polynesians?) or in Tolkien's Middle Earth. I understand multicultural hobbits will now be required. Nothing is safe from the Babelizers.
The 1960s in advertising developed the ''Big Idea'' concept. It appears that we are being sold the ''Big Idea'' of globalism, multiculturalism, and feminism. We are not being sold a product like detergent or toothpaste, as in the old days. We are being sold a whole worldview, self-concept, and philosophy, if not an outright religion.
