This Post Might Be A Tide Ad

After the Superbowl is over, you can tell how good a game it was by how much talk is about the game and how much is about the commercials.  This year it was a great game, so there's relatively little talk about the ads, but here's a few thoughts.

First, can we declare a moratorium on meta ads? They can be funny, But enough already. Let's admit that Tide made the ultimate meta ads this year with their ads disguised as other ads, and leave it at that. I hope all the other advertisers appreciated what that did for them, forcing viewers to pay attention to each new commercial for a surprise switch.

But I was also surprised by the Very Serious commercials. For instance Budweiser highlighted their supplying of water to disaster-afflicted areas. They demonstrated this by showing some engineer flip a switch causing the machinery to go from producing cans of Bud to cans of water. I had trouble hearing the rest of the commercial over the sound of everyone in Canada making "what's the difference" jokes, but I saw them list the various places they've provided water. I was pleased to see they included Puerto Rico, despite it being an embarrassing point for the current administration. Now if they'd also included Flint, I'd have gone right out and bought a case just for that.

The biggest fumble had to go to Dodge Trucks - oh, I'm sorry, "Ram" - who set their ad to a recording of a Martin Luther King speech on the importance of service. How could they possibly think that was going to work out for them? Did they somehow find that the demographics of their market happen to line up with the people who look up to King, but wouldn't find it tacky for a corportion to co-opt his image?

There was a similar problem with an ad for Hyundai, bragging about donating a portion of sales to cancer charities. It was a hold-nothing-back heartstring-tugger, but it really felt awkward. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they are donating money to a good cause, though I am troubled by the fact that they just paid $5 million to tell us that they give to charity. But besides that, it seemed almost as tone-deaf as the Ram ad. In both cases, they didn't understand that as a corporation, there's going to be a certain cynicism inherent in the audience, and they have to respect that. It's okay to show your company doing good things, and even congratulate yourself a little for it. But when you go into full tearjerker mode, no one's buying the idea that you're that idealistic.

If You Can't Trust Ronald McDonald...

Lately, McDonald's has been heavily advertising their Ronald McDonald House program, which funds housing for families of sick kids who are in hospital. Of course, it's easy to be suspicious of such ads, since it's a corporation spending money to congratulate itself for spending money, and you wonder how much more they could have done with the money they spent telling us about the money they spent. Okay, in this case you can justify it because they're encouraging people to give to the cause themselves, by putting their extra change in the little box by the till.

How many customers do put money in there? I've had a few people warn me quite seriously that all those donations just go straight to McDonald's profits. Personally, I find that hard to believe. I'm no fan of corporate America, but I doubt they'd try something like that. The negative publicity if found out wouldn't be worth it. And it would require the complicity of so many people; I can understand a few sociopathic executives making an amoral decision, But not the number required here.

But what I find interesting is the huge amount of cynicism that goes into the belief that McDonald's is so corrupt. I'm reminded of something I read about philosophy profs once. It was a kind of BS detector for extreme philosophical views: ask how the views affect their actual lives.

Sometimes you'll hear a philosopher suggest something radical: say, all of reality is in our imagination, or language doesn't contain any information. So ask yourself, does the person expressing these views act like a person who actually believes those views? If you truly believe that reality is an illusion, you wouldn't navigate society the way most of us do. You'd probably cower in your bedroom yelling at the delusions to leave you alone. Or at the very least, you wouldn't let it bother you when the fictional grocery store is out of the figment of collective imagination that is cookie dough ice cream. But usually, these radical thinkers go through the same actions in their everyday lives. If their beliefs don't affect the way they see the world, you have to wonder if they really hold those beliefs, or they're just trying to sound smart or maybe shocking.

I'd apply the same technique to cynicism. If you truly believe that the world is so corrupt that McDonald's steals from its own charity, that's going to affect the way you act. After all, there are countries where such corruption is rife, and the people there act accordingly. For one thing, if you believe everyone around you is on the take, you'll want your piece of the action. You'll assume you have to pay to get things done. You won't have trust in others.

And if your faith in humanity doesn't extend to Ronald McDonald House, then there are plenty of other things to mistrust. You don't even have to leave your local McDonald's to see examples. For one thing, how can you even trust the food? Do you let your kids into the Play Place? Do you trust their debit machine? See, it's just not logically consistent to live in our world which is based so much in trust of those around you, then pick out one thing and claim an absolute lack of trust.

Yes, I know the folks bad mouthing the charity box are really just trying to justify their own cheapness. But I think that opening yourself to that kind of extreme cynicism makes you vulnerable to some bad decision making. If you occasionally and arbitrarily ignore or avoid parts of society, you'll miss out on a lot. This same kind of isolated cynicism-when-convenient contributes to the post-fact situation we're experiencing. If you're in the habit of using outlandish excuses to reject entire institutions when it's convenient, then it becomes easier to understand how you break from accepted consensus.

Shouldn't It Be "Sticking Plaster 30"?

We've had another Band-Aid, this time to help countries fighting Ebola. So cue the complaining! People have criticized the optics of rich white celebrities coming to the aid of poor Africans.  And they've complained that the song paints a negative picture of Africa.

This is part of a bigger problem in modern society, that we want charity without the connotations of charity. That is, please give money to help these people, but don't acknowledge that they are needy. I think this attitude comes from a perfect storm of ideology: The very liberal would resist describing any group in absolute negative terms (particularly compared to the West) while the very conservative see neediness as inherently bad. Surely we can get beyond that and acknowledge that circumstance sometimes put good people in need of help from others.

The fact is that Band-Aid is a symbol of a screwed-up society. We live in a world where one group of people have way more money than everyone else, and that group of people tend to follow the instructions of their entertainers. Realizing this, the entertainers ask the people to give money to poorer people. That's essentially what happens, and it is ridiculous. But I think we can agree that the entertainers asking people to give to the less fortunate is the one sensible part of it. The stupid parts of it are the concentration of wealth in the West, and the exaggerated place celebrities have as trend-setters. Getting angry at the celebrities themselves for making the best of a crazy situation doesn't make sense.

I Challenge Dear Liza

You've probably seen this ice-bucket challenge for ALS. When it first started going around, it really looked like people were missing the point: that is, people were having fun, and keeping the trend going, but not really putting much effort into raising/donating money. A lot of the challenge videos - even those from celebrities who should know better - didn't even bother mentioning ALS or telling viewers where they could donate. This seemed to be the dot-com of charity campaigns: popular and fun, but with little consideration for how it was actually going to make money.

And yet it actually is making money. ALS donations are way up. Thinking about it, you can understand how that works: ALS isn't one of the bigger diseases, so it probably doesn't get a ton of donations. But then it gets a huge, trendy, society-wide trend. So even if that trend only gets a tiny percentage of its audience to donate, that will still produce far more money than they usually get. Again, there's a technology comparison: businesses like Twitter are widely used, but only make a little bit of money - if any - from each user. It's a different approach than most businesses, which would try to make more money off each user, say by charging each user a fee. Similarly, the ice-bucket challenge doesn't use a more obvious money-making plea to each participant, say the way a telethon would.  It relies on a small amount of money from a large number of people.

It's interesting, and it would be nice to believe that every cause could work that way. But when I think of all the charities in the world, and multiply it by the cultural impact of the ice-bucket challenge, I'm not sure we have room in society for that much unfocused fun.