Interacting With Advertising
Steve Portigal
Portigal Consulting | steve@portigal.com
There’s a famous saying (
attributed to John Wanamaker, the
retailing pioneer): “Half the
money I spend on advertising
is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t
know which half.” And while
that’s still true, we propose this
corollary: Half our encounters
with advertising are dripping
with evil; the trouble is, we don’t
know which half.
Our culture at large, and inter-action-focused professions specifically, seem to be enthralled
by advertising. Our reactions
range from bemused tolerance—
an eye-rolling “What will they
come up with next?”—to giddy
hilarity over such antics as
headvertising (writing or even,
yikes, tattooing on the forehead,
in exchange for financial compensation), or potential lunar-surface advertisements. The
TV show “Mad Men” has made
the advertising profession chic
again, but with the narrative in
a bygone decade, we don’t have
to consider the impact of these
mad men on our lives. People
are being paid to put advertisements on their forehead? An
entire show about advertising?
Shouldn’t we be outraged?
But bombast makes for great
entertainment; the bigger the
posturing, the more gruesome satisfaction we feel in the
extremity of our own times. At
the peak of dot-com irrational
exuberance, Half.com (
remember them?) paid Halfway, Ore.,
$75,000 and donated 20 computers for the town to change
its name to Half.com, Oregon.
Crazy stuff, right? But in 1950,
Hot Springs, N.M., renamed itself
Truth or Consequences and was
awarded hosting privileges for
the radio quiz show of the same
name. While we like to imagine
we’re going to hell in a handbas-ket, the only thing new under
the sun may be that the hand-basket is running Google ads on
its embedded plasma display.
The underlying technology may
change, but the absurdity stays
the same.
As interaction designers
refine their skills to better
infuse usability and usefulness, the same approaches are
being used to trick or persuade
us into consuming advertising
messages. Using what we would
call forcing function, hotels
wrap a cardboard advertisement around the TV remote, and
even though we immediately
extract it for use, the cleaning
staff ensures that the remote is
back in its commercial sleeve
the next day. Instead of making
every bit of text readable, we’re
now regularly exposed to (and
ignoring) “mouseprint”—the
faint, low-contrast, tiny type
that rapidly disclaims (or clari-fies), “Professional driver. Do not
attempt,” or exhaustively documents rights surrendered in an
EULA, or end-user license agreement (“By submitting, posting, or
displaying the content you give
Google a perpetual, irrevocable,
worldwide, royalty-free, and
nonexclusive license to repro-
duce, adapt, modify, translate,
publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any
Content which you submit, post
or display on or through, the
Services.”) Elsewhere, billboard
and sign designers leverage the
colors, layout, and typeface of
wayfinding signage to promote
wares in giant, distracting form.
Meanwhile, we feel a subtle
irony in advertising. Red Bull
gives you wings, and SoyJoy helps
you see the bright side of things.
Of course, neither of those products literally does either, but
somehow we don’t react negatively to the false claims.
Much has been written about
the role of branding and marketing in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. One aspect to
consider is the viral behaviors
that emerged on social networking sites: people changing their
middle name on Facebook to
“Hussein” in order to normalize
the name; people changing their
avatar on Twitter to a portrait of
Obama (often the one created by
Shepard Fairey, a master meme-maker); and the pre-election
phenomenon of “donating” one’s
Facebook status to remind others to vote. We may never know
where these ideas came from,
within or outside the campaign.
Something as supremely viral
and participatory as the Obama
campaign may have essentially
transcended traditional boundaries, thus blurring the lines
even further between politics
and advertising.