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JC Penney — Screaming For Retail

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising, New Media on January 31st, 2012

In their latest campaign, “Enough. Is. Enough,” JC Penney is running what is, to my mind, a hilarious television commercial, involving a serial montage of consumers shouting for outrageously loud and extended time periods at sales tags and other marketing tricks familiar to us all.

What makes this commercial so great is all the horror film iconography — from the ever-present scream to the use of ambulatory mannikins — to treat its, admittedly, very vague subject. I think my favorite spot involves a woman opening her mailbox and screaming at the endless stream of junk mail that pours out of it, reminiscent of horror films where rats stream out of a sewer. The commercial ranges in references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to They Live. It is clear to me that the message is about getting rid of fine print and weaselly language in direct mail and sale materials, but judging from the commentary this campaign is generating on facebook, not everyone understands this and most people are simply annoyed by it).

The ad is really a build-up in anticipation of (as of this writing, tonight’s) “reveal” of a special change in the department store giant’s marketing structure. JCP even brashly announces on their facebook page that “On 2.1.12 we’ve got the biggest news in jcp history (Yeah. We’re talking big time here, since we’ve been around for 110 years).” This commercial also has a great tie-in app on its facebook page called “The No Meter!” in which you can literally scream “Noooo!” at the website and the meter will measure your rage and give you a cheeky comment about how potent your screams are.

Scream at JC Penney's No Meter

Whatever JCP has in store for us, I find it fascinating that this advertising campaign appropriates consumer rage at ads into an ad that is a ploy for consumer loyalty. There’s something inherently contradictory here. And it is using the appeal of tropes of the uncanny to sell us on it. But it is using more than just the directorial horror film references that one can easily spot in the commercials. It is using extratextual parlor tricks.

The No Meter is an excellent example of a modern day “fortune teller” machine, an automaton of sorts that invites humans to interact with its mechanism (or in this case, program) in order to “uncannily” respond with an interpretation of their emotions. It plays on the concept that the computer “app” can really “listen” to you and respond. It is, in other words, the domestication of the funhouse parlor trick, the exotic stuff one used to only find on Coney Island, now broadcast in your home office, living room, laptop, and cell phone.

This folksy sort of hokum reminds me of the horror movie ballyhoo of William Castle — who, in his classically campy title, The Tingler, had Vincent Price taunt audiences to “scream for your lives” by yelling at the movie screen in order to kill the monster that was loose in the theater. The gimmick — called Percepto — notoriously included wiring theater seats with joy buzzers that would go off to try to induce screaming.

I’ll be watching the development of this campaign. I can only imagine what it will be like in the shopping mall next time I visit… I suspect that fun-loving folks familiar with this stuff will scream for laughs whenever they walk in or near the store, and for as long as this cultural memory survives, the mall will echo with these goofy “nooooo!” shouts, reminiscent of a scene from Dawn of the Dead.

The Tingler: Scream for Your Lives!

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The Freakiest Ads of 2011

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on January 21st, 2012

Thank you, Tim Nudd at AdWeek, for posting the 30 Freakiest Ads of 2011. Some of them were quite disturbing (I think the anti-child abuse PSA from Ireland hit me hardest (literally). And some are freaky in the way they just push the boundaries of what is taboo. But many are prime examples of the popularization of tropes of the uncanny in a way that is so orthodox, it’s a little mind boggling. In my review of this annual top thirty list, it seems to me that the ads that take the symbolism from their slogans or product names the most literally are the ones who generate the strangest of all ads.

Note how Freudian these ads are in their symbolism. The number one pick is literally a series of dream scenarios offered up for viewer interpretation. The truth is, ALL ads are dream scenarios to begin with, so Nudd’s selectio of this one — while being the most “freakiest” — is also at the same time the most honest.

I am always interested in advertisements for chewing gum (the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny focuses on the history of gum advertising in fact), because they must go out of their way to grab our attention and “sell us” on buying something akin to food — that is, something we chew but never swallow, in a simulacra of consumption.

Here’s one from the list that is the most audaciously Freudian I’ve seen in quite awhile: a video from the “Unexpected Turn” campaign for Vivident Gum:

Another uncanny ad that struck me from the “freakiest” list is the giant ear that moves of its own accord, in ESPN’s Sports for Your Ears advertisement. An obvious example of animism, with an ambulatory body part taking on all the characteristics of a sports fan, but it’s more like a wacky dream than an advertisement. I find it telling that in the opening of the ad, the ear is shopping, and when it is at work it is a psychologist (subtly recalling (if not directly referencing) the faux radio host Frasier from TV: “I’m listening”).

Some in the list are hilarious. Some are disturbing. Some are not safe for work. Most employ the uncanny to sell a product. See them all at AdWeek.

Leave a post if you want to tell us which ones you’d put in your top two.

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Eternal Moments and Smoking Billboards

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising, New Media on July 4th, 2011

Eternal Moments by Ana Pais

The endless breath of smoke. The unexpected blink. The sudden nod.

Visit the “Eternal Moments” gallery of cinemagraphs by Ana Pais for some stunning moments of the uncanny. The portfolio opens up with a citation from Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” that reads: “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats, what could never be repeated existentially.” Such mechanical forms of repetition are particularly striking when they refer to organic life. These illusory images blur the lines between movement and still images — analogues for life (movement) and death (still) — in a way that generates a spectacularly uncanny effect…mostly because of the intellectual uncertainty that arises when our expectations between visual stasis and activity are foiled.

Cinemagraphs like these are fascinating art experiments, using “animated .gif” techniques. Animation is itself an uncanny artform, because it literally “brings to life” still frames — and while this may in some ways be more apparent in stop-motion techniques (where, I would argue, the jitter produced by editing has as much to do with the uncanny affect as the conceptual “animation” of inanimate objects we see), digital art is offering numerous new ways to trick the eye in uncanny ways.

But when I first saw the striking image above by Pais, my mind went elsewhere: from optical illusions to advertising. I was reminded of automaton-like advertisements that use similar tactics. Like the famous Camel cigarettes billboard that actually blew smoke rings — the one pictured in this shot below from the NY Times is a classic (also see the images and posts at Shorpy.com for more).

'The Sign that Puffed' by Eddie Hausner

There have been some creative reworkings of these billboards that smoke, but they always seem to have to do with life and death, avowed and disavowed by machinery. These are automons, harbingers of death in a monstrously large scale. While I don’t believe they are used anymore for advertising tobacco (I could be wrong), I recently read of the Avera “Why I’m Alive” campaign which used the smoking billboard in a clever way — to call attention to a smoldering car accident. AdWeek reported last September that the billboards were pulled for being a distraction, because people believed the sign was actually on fire and called 911. But — to come full circle — they’re still being used in a new media advert on their website at whyimalive.com.

The Averna ad campaign is really interesting to me because “Why I’m Alive” is not only a good slogan for an emergency assistance company — in which profiles of survivors are used to personalize their life-and-death experiences — but also a direct expression of one of life’s universal questions: “Why AM I alive?” There is a subtle reference to the supernatural in this, for the “agency” of creation is aligned with the advertising agency.

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Kung Shoe

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising, Film on November 8th, 2010

This Fall 2010 television commercial, Kung Shoe DSW (also archived on their corporate site), uses a clever pastiche of contemporary action and martial arts cinema to advertise Designer Shoe Warehouse‘s “Killer Boots.” It’s cute and funny and obviously an effective, eye-grabbing advertisement for the company, as artfully made as any Jan Svankmajer film. It is also a great example of the domestication of the popular uncanny in commercial culture.
[pullquote]It doesn’t matter that DSW is a shoe warehouse, and that they surely don’t want one type or brand to be a “killer” of everything else they offer for sale. They probably also don’t want you to associate every shoe box with a coffin, either. [/pullquote]
First, the ad does what all stop motion animation does: it gives “life” to inanimate objects through an artistic application of cinematic technology. This method is so familiar to us now in the 21st century that we take for granted the strangeness of it all: the boot can literally “kick bootie” as if it were not only a living character with motives and a life to protect, but also high skill in self-defense. No small matter, too, that this object is a boot — obviously the best fashion accessory to show a “kick” — but more importantly, it functions in the orthodox sense of the Freudian uncanny: it operates like a dismembered limb acting on its own accord, since all these acrobatics are imitations of human appendages. [Indeed, this suggestion is obliquely made when our protagonist -- a "single" amputee, separated from its other partner foot -- first meets up with a pair of villainous boots which are shot from "boot level" when they step casually in front of the character, spaced apart like two human legs between our position and the "killer boot's" -- implying a human body standing above, off frame.]

The Foe Steps In

On another level, the uncanniness of this humorous advertisement floats invisibly in the context of its consumption. This ad, while clever, wouldn’t make any sense in a world without genre films. Immediately, the whole scene feels strangely familiar in that it not only uses the generic “trope” of a parking garage ambush to explain the scenario, but it also references any number of post-Matrix action films that use “bullet time” techniques which essentially freeze a moment and spin the camera around in a 360 degree effect to fetishize the moment of impact in a spectacular way: a filmmaker’s attempt to make the fight all the more real because we’re invited to visualize the actual force of the violence, despite the entire artifice of the enterprise. This is the “magic” of camerawork applied to very real physical acting, generating spectator awe because the cinema technology (ergo the spectator’s experience) has power that supercedes the “physics” of the time and space in the universe we are ostensibly being shown. It is a supernaturalized “special effect.”

In the broad scheme of things, to imagine a single boot taking on an army of ninja shoes in a dark parking garage is simply ludicrous — but it is hilarious precisely because it is so fantastically imaginary yet hauntingly familiar. The shoes all are given squeaky voices — delivering high pitched “hi-yahs!” as they “attack” the protagonist, who — after dealing the final death blow to a foe who ultimately knocks over a crate of shoe horns — emits a deep and somewhat smug little chuckle.

It is at this moment — when the video takes a moment to laugh at itself before delivering its advertorial message — that the emotional effect is felt as particularly uncanny. For it is not simply that the boot/limb is “possessed” with a soul but the visual medium itself presumes a sort of hyper-self-awareness that up to that point is not really acknowledged within the text proper. This sort of slippage into meta-commentary is a peculiar element of popular culture, which frequently relies on intertextual nods and winks to appeal to the viewer’s sense of media savvy…and reflecting it back with a knowingness that implies that the medium itself is what has this magical power to give life to lifeless objects. There is always a sense of death underpinning such phenomena when we experience it, which we acknowledge with laughter — just like we do with a yelp of terror or even that swimming sensation of dislocation we feel — when we experience the uncanny.

Indeed, the humorous tag line (“Boots Kick Bootie”) and the anonymous female voiceover that subsequently kicks in provides a reassuring sense of comfort that this was “only” an ad, and communicates a sense of relief that the weirdness of it all is fully explainable in the context of the mass market (since there is no context given for what is shown until the very end). The uncanniness is domesticated in the framework of advertising culture. When the rapidly edited images of shoes being placed into the shipping crate in the very final moment appears, one might miss the fact that what is being dramatized is a sort of coffining of the victims of the battle. It is subtly disturbing that the ad ends on that final “ting” as a shuriken flies from off screen space (our space?) and thunks into the coffin-like shoe box, an empty space infinitely replaceable with any sort of body/shoe.

Death sells.

It doesn’t matter that DSW is a shoe warehouse, and that they surely don’t want one type or brand to be a “killer” of everything else they offer for sale. They probably also don’t want you to associate every shoe box with a coffin, either. While this all could suggest a sublimated guilt over the dead animal skins that sometimes go into the shoes on our feet, or even some anxiety about imports and labor, these deeper feelings are really not as important as the fetishism of the commodity that TV commercials like these seek to promulgate. The emotional appeal that underpins the silly humor in this ad overrides all reason: if you want power (and desire survival) then you want one of these “magical” boots.

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Living, Breathing…and the Autonomous Movement of Fur

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising, Oddities on May 4th, 2010
Perfect Petzzz Sales Kennel

Perfect Petzzz Sales Kennel

“These adorable pets offer a real pet ownership experience without the hassles and expense. Say goodbye to feedings and vet bills. Say hello to lots of love and cuddles. Perfect Petzzz – the ultimate pet.” — Perfect Petzzz website

“It is not a toy,” [VP of Marketing] Clarkson says, “but this is the closest you can get to real pet ownership without the hassles or responsibilities of owning a real pet.” — journalgazette.net

“In 2005, Perfect Petzzz® generated more than $20 million in retail sales in its first full year of operation. In fact, the Perfect Petzzz cart program was named the most successful new product concept in 2005. With the overwhelming demand for these lifelike puppies and kittens, we’ve seen other companies try to produce imitations.” — CD3 Press Release to PP Mall Dealers

Perfect Petzzz are stuffed animals that breathe.  The autonomous movement of their fur — controlled by a battery-powered engine you don’t expect to be there — is enough to trick the eye into presuming that the puppy or kitten curled up on the floor is actually a living, breathing, pet.  Cute, and perhaps attractive to your hand’s caress, until you touch it and realize it’s not real.  Then you are startled and the toy enters the already doll-crowded realm of the popular uncanny.

Of course, the Perfect Petzzz (the ”zzz’s” are for snoring)  are plastic.  And therefore the animal it represents is literally as dead as it looks, with its eyes closed and body stiffened into a disturbing fetal curl.  It should not move, but it does, and it is this representation of death-stirred-to-life — of the presumed inanimate object surprising us with its animation — that gets our reaction.  The tricky switcheroo of statuses between familiar and unfamiliar spin the roulette wheel of certainty:  the domesticated animal is rendered un-familiar (stuffed, inanimate) then restored to a heimish (cozy) status of sleeping and napping..

It is surely cute, and there is little difference between a breathing stuffed animal and a toy doll that burps or blinks.  Of course, even the cutest of dolls are inherently uncanny in the way they are semblances, pale imitations of life…but the creepy thing in this case is not so much its status as automaton, as the fact that this “sleeper” never wakes up.  These are comatose pets…and that, perhaps, is what makes them so “perfect.” Like the commodities these organic creatures have become, our domesticated pets are “perfect” when they are behaved, controlled, and easily replaceable after they expire.  Even more, these plastic pals are simulacratic forms of taxidermy (and surely a savvy taxidermist has already borrowed the motor or at least the concept for an experiment or two).  Another form of death, fantastically alive through the magic show of animism, nostalgia and fantasy.  Living, breathing, death.

Petzzz Adoption Center

Petzzz Adoption Center

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The Vytorin Double: You Are What You Eat and You Eat What You Are

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on September 7th, 2009

Vytorin is a single pill — a drug that combines two different medicines (Zetia and Zocor) to combat the two kinds of cholesterol (generally called “good” and “bad” cholesterol”) which they identify as coming from two different sources (“food & family”). As Time magazine reports, there may be truth in these claims, and also problems with it — but the effectiveness of the drug is not my interest. Instead, I want to focus on how all these “dualities” — of medicine, cholesterol, and its origin — are overdetermined in the advertising, repeating some strangely familiar structures of the Uncanny that we often find in consumer culture. Similar to products like Wrigley’s “Doublemint” Gum, Vytorin lends itself to a marketing campaign that actively employs the figure of the double (der doppelganger) to draw the attention of the consumer. As I argue in The Popular Uncanny, in mass marketing and advertising the structures of the Uncanny often become ambiguously attractive and repulsive representations, reflecting our ambivalent anxieties about consumer culture. Here, the idea that “you are what you eat” is taken quite literally. It’s kind of cute, the first time you see it, but in the endless stream of associative pairings between people and food, one becomes progressively convinced that there is something universal about these claims, and that, perhaps, all food mirrors people (and vice-versa). While this ad — like most pharmaceutical advertising — projects a wish for a miracle cure, the use of doubling is so overdetermined that is also uncannily disturbing, if only because these matings feel predestined and beyond our control.
[pullquote]…we are presented with a live human being whose “alter ego” is the food product — an inanimate (or in the case of meat, dead) object on a plate…a double which the living implicitly consume.
[/pullquote]In the YouTube video above — from Vytorin’s infamously clever television campaign a few years ago — the ad showed a series of screens in which a diversity of overtly costumed actors are associated (first by “dissolves” into a single universal plate, then in panels, side by side on screen) with tasty foods and fancy dishes. The overt correspondences between body morphology, fashion choices, and food dishes is quite striking; the symmetry in design and the patterned replication of color schemes across the frame is orchestrated in a way that one simply cannot overlook the “double” message: people are food. Physical traits as well as personality are “naturally” reflected by our choice in food products. We are what we eat; and in the case of cholesterol, it can kill us, because we can’t help ourselves, and the inheritance of our family lines only affirms this.

This visual personification of ice cream and waffles and hot dogs is more than just clever ad design. Here we have an example of uncanny doubling, but it is different than the traditional “doppelganger” in that we are presented with a live human being whose “alter ego” is the food product — an inanimate (or in the case of meat, dead) object on a plate…a double which the living implicitly consume.

There is a subtle cannibalism at work in the dreamlike psychology here. If you see a scrumptious pile of pancakes in one shot, you probably don’t want to eat the person they associate with it, but the implied message is that these people consume these projections of themselves (and perhaps more subtly, vice-versa). Vytorin is suggesting that some people are “naturally” attracted to foods, no matter how artificial or prepared they might be — and by showing these associations in a lengthy series, subtly argues that this compulsory food choice can be generalized as a “compulsion to repeat” that is, simply, human nature.

The double is the “harbinger of death” and Vytorin presents itself as a cure not for cholesterol, per se, but for our anxiety about our predestined fate. If it is “natural,” moreover, then it is “healthy,” and a manufactured pharmaceutical company obviously benefits from framing itself as a “natural” cure or preventative medicine. Commercial pill brand names often pun on our desire for infinite life and health (as I have argued elsewhere about the pain reliever, Aleve). The name “Vytorin” even sounds life-giving in its prefix (“Vyt-”, implying “vital,” as in “vitamin”), before it battles choles-”tor”-al with its “statIN”-based formula. But beyond that, in the ad, the focus on the communion of “food” and “family” transforms the scary point it makes about the origin of cholesterol into a story of “organic” harmony and healthy wish-fulfillment. All these implicit health claims drive home the subtle message that Vytorin is a healthy choice, enabling you to go ahead and eat whatever you like, because it is your destiny, your nature, and the pill fits into this schema as natural law.

Of course, no matter how healthy and uplifting the product might sound, or even be, the ad benefits, too, from fear, as all advertising does — and with most medical advertising, the fear being alluded to here is the fear of death. If you look like a egg salad, and you compulsively eat egg salad, you are only one step away from becoming the equivalent of egg salad. The blurring of boundaries between signifier and signified is an ambivalence that is both cutely humorous and darkly scary. The harbinger of death is the uncanny double.

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