Post-Advertising Advertising

The membrane separating advertising and content has been torn.

26 comments Douglas Haddow, 18 January 2010

“Oh America, I wish I could tell you that this is still America, but I’ve come to realize that you can’t have a country without people, and there are no people here. No my friends … this is now the United States of Zombieland.”

So begins one of 2009’s most surprising box office hits: Zombieland. Surprising not for its critical or commercial success, but for its complete absence of plot. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the gist: A group of Americans drive across the country in a shiny Cadillac Escalade in search of the world’s last Twinkie, killing zombies for laughs along the way. Oh, and they also watch Ghostbusters at one point, and two of them have a romantic interlude. Not so much a film, Zombieland is more a sequence of product placements wrapped inside a focus group-friendly pastiche. It definitely won’t win an Oscar, but its producers have achieved something far more valuable: a perfect blur of advertising and content.

The postapocalyptic premise of Zombieland is perfectly analogous to the current state of chaos that has devoured commercial media. The one-two punch of recession and internet growth has left advertising agencies and media firms alike limping to their doom, hemorrhaging funds and employees.

When the economy went to shit and profits tanked, everyone got really desperate and started to panic. The sacred membrane that separated advertising and content was torn apart. Ad agencies, desperate to prove their relevance to their corporate clients, climbed over the walls and spewed their infectious bile over all that was once holy. Print publishers and TV producers, frantic for any ad revenue they could get their hands on, gladly lapped it up. First went magazine covers, then newspaper covers. On April 9 a bankrupt LA Times ran a front page ad designed to look like a real article, prompting Times journalists to accuse their employer of “making a mockery of our integrity and journalistic standards.”

TV news was next. FOX brokered a deal that positioned McDonald’s iced coffee front and center alongside news anchors – a move that would have been deemed deplorable just a few years earlier. Within months the practice spread around the country and has since been dubbed “consum-o-tainment” by producers, who now offer advertorial services alongside legitimate news stories. But at that point, product placement was already omnipresent and news was just the final domino to fall.

In the first half of 2009 there were nearly a quarter of a million instances of product placement on US television. But this is just the beginning. Younger, up-and-coming media companies are starting to challenge the old media, and they are far more savvy and subtle when it comes to creating consum-o-tainment. Vice magazine, once the edgiest rag ever to top the Cassandra Report on teen marketing, now has its own in-house advertising agency. Similarly The Fader, a “super cool” music magazine, is backed by Cornerstone: a lifestyle marketing agency that specializes in band/brand cross promotion.

In order to compete with the likes of Vice and Cornerstone, ad agencies have also jumped on the consum-o-tainment bandwagon. Wieden + Kennedy, a Portland-based agency known for its slick and cinematic Nike campaigns, now has its own indie-centric online radio/TV hybrid: WKE.

The recession has proven ethics to be an expendable luxury. But rather than protest, audiences have largely met the shift toward branded media with a resounding shrug and accepted it as inevitable. In the near future – like this year – products will no longer just be “placed” but will become the focal point of entire films, documentaries and articles.

But perhaps this fin de siècle mediascape is a more accurate reflection of how we as consumers actually live our lives. Was the true focal point of our existence ever the love, heroism, drama or adventure we find in film and TV? Or is the truth much more banal, like the lives of the Zombieland characters who spend their days wandering through a wasteland of brands, watching Ghostbusters and searching for Twinkies?

Douglas Haddow

26 comments on the article “Post-Advertising Advertising”

Displaying 11 - 20 of 26

not_white_0@yah...

19 January 2010 at 06:42 pm

My senior of college was in NYC for September 11th.I attempt to describe the second by second mindset that was instilled while it was all happening THERE.I didn't want to live like that or, rather, I was trying to find how I felt/thought prior to that day when the fun was over.I gave everything away and flew to Chicago.This was another nerve racking thing flying out of Manhattan.I was 22.I am now 30.After Chicago, I moved to Texas.After Texas I moved to Los Angeles where I live now.I felt like I'd found it again.This city is great.I have enjoyed most of my time here.School, art, etc.. This economic landslide had me for awhile.I was down, discouraged and left feeling. . .well, exactly the way I did while in NYC. . .only older. My point is, I thought I was 'getting away' from the incidents of September 11th, only they were marinating.Dropping a pebble in a pond creates ripples. While in these other cities, I suppose I missed certain ripples, but this ripple was one that everyone were forced to sway to.It is easy to type/say it is time to move on from those events of september 11th.It is still in our faces and just because the united states were able to gloss over(pear harbor, hiroshima, etc..)with a movie starring nicholas cage, that doesn't mean it's gone.I am amazed at how little people reference something that CHANGED the united states forever rarely.Is it like asking an HIV infected person 'so how did you contract the virus?'Being around thousands of people crying and within that human to human understanding, lying the question 'why?'
My nightmares of that day are forever. . .only they change with the current dilemas of today.The monster in my nightmares still does the same things only it has grown larger and has become this entity that no longer knows that it is a monster and absorbs anything used to harm/cease it.Manhattan is over.It's cute that Jayz and Alicia attempt to offer the luster again.The united states has always been a product to others.An idea that they can 'have too'.Now that the luster is gone, sell 'em actual tangible items, maybe they'll consume all the united states can make of that thing.I remember seeing news achor men and women scrambling for cover right after the 2nd plane hit. . .still clenching thier microphones out of fear or out of 'I am going to be the one to get the story-even if my life depends on it'. We are all still running from September 11th but have given it new names and new henchmen.
I don't know if it's the central idea of politicians to be like the tide. The tide goes out as far as it comes in. You know, to further the feeling 'are you trying to help us or hinder us?' I read constantly and even that I can't really say helps.This new administration is becoming more and more a retelling of The Narrative of Frederick Douglas.How did all those white men make away with all those peoples lives/dreams AND get bonuses on top of that?But now it's Haiti, right?
If there is a line between being pessimistic and optimistic, on my knees I am in the center.I can read how badly the decisions our new president is making, but then read on how he's done something amazing too.

not_white_0@yah...

19 January 2010 at 06:42 pm

ken vallario

19 January 2010 at 08:34 pm

WOW! that's a beautiful and poetic response...

ken vallario

19 January 2010 at 08:34 pm

WOW! that's a beautiful and poetic response...

Hans Riisgaard

20 January 2010 at 07:06 am

There's something rotten in Zombieland..;)

I'm danish, not american, but hey just about everyone is to some extent "american" now...
I enjoyed the movie very much. Especially that innocent depravity of the characters; going to an amusement park, playing ghostbusters in Murray's house, searching for a twinkie and smashing stuff...
Most brilliant is the MOCK product placement; from my POV zombie-movies has always been about consumer-mentality - usually gathering around supermarkets an the likes...
Spinoza had the philosophy that everything a being does to help it's own survival is sane and ethically justifiable; people gather in communities, civilizations, organize themselves in a system to help them survive. So the beings organized in these systems behave themselves in what way is possible for them to further their chance of survival and procreation in this system; all very sane and reasonable... within the system and the rules of it... What if the system is insane? In the biosphere of a consumersociety there's nothing more sane that gathering at the supermarket; food=good! (I don't know about brothels, but zombies aren't really thinking beyond themselves and the immediate gratification of their hunger for brain/cheeseburger)
Yet there is a world outside the shoppingcart, and if you're quick and lucky, you might find your way out of maze suburbia to catch a glimpse of it before it all turns into Zombieland...