Puppies are cute. Buy a car .

Nonsense and distraction in advertising

BRENDAN CATHCART STAFF

Just for a moment, only a brief moment, forget about hegemony-capitalists eating third-world Timmy’s lunch money for breakfast. OK. Let’s look at this commercial. Sentimental music of the nostalgia sort opens against images of people in the throes of significance, while a narrator weaves the succession together. For approximately 30 seconds, the commercial is all about life moments that people cry and laugh about 10 years later, the kind that you recognize as having contributed to who you consider yourself to be. I truly believed — with hopeful naiveté — that this commercial was actually going to be for

breathing air, or remembering the significance of loved ones while we still have time. Then: “Moments can define you, moments can delight you, and moments can change your life. Here’s to the moment, and squeezing all you can out of every last single one of them. Pursue the moment. Lexus.” Damn.

Aside from the fact that this commercial is manipulative, employing emotional associations that have nothing to do with driving a luxury vehicle, it is flat out wrong in the reason/logic/common-sense kind of way. The point of the commercial is to sell a car, but bizarrely absent is any extolment of the virtues of the specific model. What is given is a narrator saying: remember when this happened? And then that happened? Man those were good times, right? Then buy a Lexus.

This is a glaringly obvious slip in the signifying chain, where logic gets displaced and 1+1 = horse. So what the hell is going on here? According to Arias-Bolzmann et al.., in the article “Effects of Absurdity in Advertising” from the spring 2000 Journal of Advertising, what is happening in the Lexus commercial is absurdity. “We define absurd ads as incongruously juxtaposing pictorial images, words and/or sounds that viewers perceive as bizarre, irrational, illogical and disordered . . . Absurdity may be communicated via surrealism, anthropomorphism, allegory and hyperbole.” The use of absurdity in advertising is widespread; from the California Raisins to the Energizer bunny, it has largely been accepted as a valid and effective strategy.

The use of absurdity in advertising gains much of its forcefulness by relying on a logical fallacy known as the “Association Fallacy.” Wikipedia notes that an association fallacy “is a type of logical fallacy which asserts that qualities of one are inherently qualities of another, merely by association . . . Association fallacies are a special case of red herring, and are often based in an appeal to emotion.” This is what is going on in an advertisement that seems to be all about a cute puppy that is so cute you can’t help but think that the cellphone it represents is worth buying because it associates with cute puppies.

One would think that not talking about the product and using bad logic would have adverse effects, diminishing the consumer’s sense of trust in the product or company. Not so! Arias-Bolzmann et al. suggest that there are two very good reasons for ad agencies to employ absurdity to sell products. Absurd ads are more likely to be noticed, and they are more likely to be processed extensively. An ad that doesn’t quite make sense, or is perplexing, bizarre or novel, can more easily capture a person’s attention than one that follows standard formats which have been seen, heard or read thousands of times. Right up till the end, the Lexus commercial is captivating and perplexing because it seems to be representing altruism, the nonexistence of which, in advertising, the savvy watcher of commercials is keenly aware. When the narrator drops the “Lexus” bomb, the leap of illogic causes a double take: this is the above mentioned reason number 2: absurd ads are more likely to be processed extensively. After watching the Lexus drive logic right out of the frame, a little extra cognitive work has to be done to determine your response to the ad, be it “pff!” or “yes, I do want a Lexus.” Either way, you’ve ended up running it through your head again. And if extra thinking has been done about something, then there is good potential for it to be brought up in conversation with someone else; which of course would now be two or more people actively engaging with the ad. Bravo absurdity.

Interestingly, taking those extra moments to recognize the absurdity of an advertisement does not often result

in rejecting the claims presented. Arias-Bolzmann et al. assert that according to a model of reception called distraction theory, “subjects who are negatively predisposed toward an advocated message, if they are distracted during the message presentation, would generate fewer counter arguments against the message. In turn, this would result in greater attitude change than if they were not distracted during the message presentation.” The baseline message of the commercial is to buy a Lexus, but as was mentioned above, the commercial gives no actual information about the Lexus. Rather, attention is drawn away from the message and focused on “subjectively ambiguous meanings that can be interpreted differently by different consumers.” One could easily reject the subjectively ambiguous meanings without rejecting the Lexus.

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission ruled in 1983 that deceptive advertising is illegal. The FTC Policy Statement on Deception reads: “Certain elements undergird all deception cases. First, there must be a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer . . . The representation, omission, or practice must be a ‘material’ one. The basic question is whether the act or practice is likely to affect the consumer’s conduct or decision with regard to a product or service. If so, the practice is material, and consumer injury is likely, because consumers are likely to have chosen differently but for the deception.” By a sleight of hand, absurd advertisements can evade implications of deception due to the fact that they are not making any objective or verifiable claims. Absurdity operates just outside of logic, so any criticisms against specific uses of it leaves all the elbow-room an ad agency could ever need to defend itself against deception charges. And anyway, Canada has no official governing body over advertising practices. The federal Competition Act makes provisions to protect consumers against deceptive advertising, but the field is self-regulated by the private sector through organizations such as Advertising Standards Canada (ASC). The ASC’s only means of enforcing standards is through peer pressure, by requesting offending advertisers to remove their ads, or by publicly blacklisting them in annual reports.

The simple fact that absurdity is employed so often by ad agencies demonstrates its efficacy; it would not be continually used if products were not flying off the shelves because of it. For a society that lives and breathes capitalism none of this information is problematic. If absurdity greases the wheels and eliminates the creaking of gears, then who cares if you’re not getting the facts about advertised products, just as long as you’re still wanting to buy them. Personally, the next car I buy should invoke the spirit and power of ancient First Nations warriors, and puppies, because that’s how I roll.