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Opinion
Ad It Up
12/6/2006
By Terry Calhoun
Commercials on television tend to enrage me and laugh tracks are guaranteed to give me a headache. Plus, where do people find the time to watch TV?
The day that the Ohio State University Buckeyes beat the University of Michigan Wolverines, my wife and I bought our first new television. It’s been more than a decade since we’ve even had a television. (I keep wanting to say “television set,” instead of just “television.” I don’t know if that’s generational or not, but I suspect it is.)
So far we’ve watched “The Game” and a few iTunes-downloaded episodes of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” Our still-at-home kids, 18 and 21, have had “That 70s Show” and “The Simpsons” on a few times, but I haven’t sat down to watch with them yet. In fact, having a television (set) isn’t as seductive as I had worried it would be. The best thing about it is that on weekends I can hook my laptop up to it and work online using the 32-inch screen as a monitor and not have to wear my reading glasses.
Just having a television (set?) around, though, makes me think more about “commercials” and advertising in general. Reading the news d'es, too. For example, those raccoon-like stripes that football players, duck hunters, and a number of folks who live in hunter-gatherer situations put under their eyes have some functional value. But I learned in the New York Times last weekend that football players are now using them as backgrounds to billboard-style stencils of things like “Number 1” or “Make Me”: pronouncements. Someone will find a way to charge a fee for the commercial exposure and we’ll soon have entire teams with matching “ads” on their cheekbones.
What won’t people put advertisements on? Someone in the 1950s wrote a science fiction story about a man who had a plan to shoot canisters of dense powder onto the moon in such a way as to create a huge soft drink advertisement across the face that we can see from Earth. There are patents on file regarding methods to project advertisements on the eyeballs of pedestrians walking by shops. Parents, amazingly, let young girls wear shorts with provocative lettering across the back. Eyes that would normally never be permitted to stare at a 15-year-old-girl’s behind are drawn to those letters. What are they thinking?
Even if humans were to disappear, nature would still have commercials. As I write this column, I am sitting in the Voltage Lounge of the Royal Caribbean ship, Sovereign of the Seas. As part of my preparation for this short trip to the Bahamas I read a few books on coral reef wildlife. Many different kinds of creatures live in some kind of symbiosis on a coral reef. Entire classes of “cleaner fish” or shrimp survive by eating dead scales and parasites off of the exterior of other kinds of fish. Some of them float around like neighborhood cleaning stations and use color or motion to “advertise” to their “customers,” which seek them out.
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