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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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Strange Rain: An Uncanny Interactive Story for the iPad

Published by Michael Arnzen in Fiction, New Media, Oddities on January 28th, 2011

STRANGE RAIN is a new iphone/ipad application (aka “app”) by Erik Loyer at opertoon.com that, simply, simulates looking through “a skylight on a rainy day.” Rain falls from the cloudy abyss “above” the viewer to splatter down on the glass of the device. Tilt the device and the atmosphere tilts back, too, maintaining a 3-dimensional appearance that makes it genuinely feel like you are looking up through a portable, handheld window into a sky. You can make gestures with your fingers and cause the rain to gather into a column that follows your fingertips. You can tap on the glass and make music…and words begin to flash in “whispers” beside the raindrops…or, if set to “story” mode, the words appear in complete phrases, in errant but profound micro-musings, evoking a narrative (see Holly Willis’ review at KCET for a description of the ‘story’). The game encourages interactive finger-tapping and dragging as it plays musical notes with each touch. Tap quickly, and you “fall in” to the sky, as the clouds above become framed by other clouds…and still more frames of clouds, cascading and creeping in around the edge of the screen, frame inside of frame inside of frame….

It’s a very mellow, hypnotic kind of 21st century phantasmagoria. Words can’t describe it as well as the sample video on their website:

Strange Rain Preview from Erik Loyer on Vimeo.

The app is quite simple, even monotonous to a degree, but it seems to be surprisingly popular for what amounts to an interactive haiku (Apple featured it in their Entertainment category, and it hit #1 on Jan 14th). I usually don’t buy these kinds of “eye candy” sorts of things, but there are times when it’s worth it to just kick back and relax with a computer/device and see where the muse takes you. There’s something very “zen” about this sort of application — and as Fast Company points out in their review, there are already a host of other “ambient meditation aids” out there in the ipad/iphone market — and we’ve also had New Media Poetry and other forms of Electronic Literature for decades now — but there’s more to the attraction than its successful application of this genre on the ipad platform. On his blog, the app’s author, Erik Loyer, once referred to this approach to gaming as prompting “casual significance” – taking “a stab in the dark, doing things you’d like to build theories around but shouldn’t, and as such they enable you to walk into the unknown with joy and confidence.” Creative minds need to do that. But that wasn’t the entire draw for me: when I read the description of the app, I immediately noticed how it employed the language of the uncanny, and had to give it a try:

Strange Rain…feels as if you’re holding a living window in your hands. The more you touch, however, the more strange the rain becomes: layered skies, visual anomalies and shifts in speed and color, even the occasional cataclysm if you’re not careful. Before your eyes and beneath your fingers, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, familiar.

Any reader of Freud would recognize the opposition of the familiar and strange as unheimlich — and it is precisely the tropes of the uncanny, rendered interactive (“beneath your fingers”), which make this “living window” so curiously appealing.

Instructions for Estrangement in Strange Rain

Though the game subtly plays off our instinctive “sky is falling” kind of fear, virtual rainfall in itself is not so disturbing. Yet the effect is uncanny. In a review at iphonefreak.com, Andy Boxall compares the app to a David Lynch film, and in the process nails the reason why: “The oddness comes not only from the appearance of the rain falling from inside your device upwards, but from the discordant tunes you can make while tapping the screen.” Let’s talk about these two elements — the visual and the aural — to probe into what makes this app so “strange.”

In Strange Rain, the world is rendered topsy-turvy because we are so habituated toward thinking that the sky is always fixed in a position up above us. Gravity is a natural law for us. Click on this app with an ipad down on your lap or desktop, and suddenly the world has been turned upside-down, fostering a minor sense of acute weightlessness. “Rain” still “falls” in a natural way, but it does not so much fall down on you as fall at you. This feels a bit threatening, sure, and the inversion of our perspective on the world is felt as threatening because it challenges our sense of mastery over the environment. But that threat is offset by a larger fantasy of control over the environment, too: we can “magically” manipulate — nay, orchestrate — the rain with our fingertips. And who hasn’t wanted to control the weather? Or, to quote the game’s tutorial, “reset the world”?

[pullquote]The uncanny is never really just about “scary” objects, but about the projective fantasies we have that seem to “come to life” with more power than we imagine they might have.[/pullquote]

Yet at the same time, the glass is a persistent barrier in this relationship, and the use of cascading frames as you probe deeper into the game persistently reminds the player that the window remains a medium that enables this “control” but at the same time blocks the user from really ever touching or feeling the water and other elements implied by the game’s diegesis. This is why the music — a pling-plongy waltz of notes that change tempo when you tap — is so important, “framing” the experience as an aesthetic one, set to a soundtrack in the foreground, while the “ambient” sound of rainfall is pushed sonically into the background. Diegetic and extra-diegetic elements compete in a way that render the familiar elements of nature (rainstorm/sky) strange (mediated by sounds/images/words). There is a play, too, between what is pre-programmed and what is randomized by the user, as well as between the inescapability of gravity vs. the mobility of the app, which generates oppositional tension: the game flip-flops the fantasy of mastery over the environment with the feeling that the environment is master over the user.

Perhaps the oppositional tensions I have been describing are a common structural element to most interactive handheld games, but the aesthetic framing of this one explicitly puts such issues in the context of a subjective fantasy about the natural environment, where “thoughts” are projected directly onto the sky. I am reminded of the way we often imagine we see uncanny shapes (animals, faces) in random cloud formations. The uncanny is never really just about “scary” objects, but about the projective fantasies we have that seem to “come to life” with more power than we imagine they might have. Strange Rain dramatizes this fantasy in a contemplative and mesmerizing way.

Visit Erik Loyer’s “Generous Machine” site for more of his projects, which include interactive comics and other ‘virtual windows.’

Strange Rain was also recently reviewed in-depth by CNN, who raises the question, “What exactly is it?” The answer: a postmodern phantasmagoria of the popular uncanny.

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Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising, Art+Music on August 31st, 2008

If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering:  gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? 

The ad itself is a twin:  it almost directly mimes the dancing silhouettes of those iPod TV commercials in its use of lighting, illuminating the pocket-sized product with its magical tracer lines that string back like earbud lines.  I have discussed the uncanniness of the iPod marketing previously on this blog; here the gum is imbued with a sort of magical power in that it seems to dance along with the dancer, spinning on his finger. 

But what’s more, it is also a media doppelganger:  the song is by Chris Brown, whose “urban” Doublemint jingle was commissioned by Wrigley’s with the full intention of being reproduced as part of a separately-released R&B song (called “Forever”) by Brown for his 2007 album, “Exclusive.”  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Other than the “double your pleasure” line, the lyrics to the song and the TV jingle are different. But the melody and the music behind it are nearly indistinguishable. A 60-second radio ad scheduled to air starting Friday further blurs the line between the song and the commercial. It starts with a section of “Forever,” and moves seamlessly into lyrics promoting the gum. “I’ma take you there, so don’t be scared,” Mr. Brown sings. “Double your pleasure; double your fun. It’s the right one, Doublemint gum.”

The campaign was conceived and executed by Mr. Stoute, a former senior executive at Interscope Records who counts rapper Jay-Z as a partner in his business. The idea was to connect the hit song and the jingle in listener’s minds. That way, Mr. Stoute says, “by the time the new jingle came out, it was already seeded properly within popular culture.”

Similar campaigns also took place with jingles for Juicy Fruit and Big Red. Although rap has always engaged in the art of cultural appropriation (referencing consumer goods to comment on mass culture or to appropriate the power of the dominant discourse for their own use on the margins), here the planning and deal-making that goes on behind such crass commercialism gives one pause. The literary form of “allusion” (an intertextual referencing strategy already widely practiced in the hip-hop) is not used to make an artistic statement of any kind, but is instead a prefabricated ruse, calling the integrity of the songwriting (if not the writer and the industry itself) into serious question.  At best, the stunt is redeemable as a sort of inside joke: Brown could be winking at us, suggesting that all music is commodity anyway, so what’s the difference?  Might as well make a buck, and one might excuse Brown’s selling out as yet another symbolic appropriation of the dominant culture by the marginalized. But at its worst, Brown’s jingle is the music industry’s desperate attempt at something akin to product placement in the movies: a orchestrated attempt to “plant” a cultural reference in the bald interest of breeding brand familiarity and loyalty for a commercial product.  Either way, a listener should feel cheated, I think, because it’s clear that there is advertising revenue at play here that cuts across markets which would otherwise be kept separate…unless, that is, one thinks of music as freely available as commercial TV.

I’m not writing this just to damn the campaign, but to show how tropes of the uncanny often function to wow us in order to make a spectacle out of consumerist fantasy. There’s little difference, ultimately, between Chris Brown choosing Wrigley’s Doublemint for his “dance partner” and any athlete who accepts a product endorsement on his uniform. But on a broader, cultural scale the signs become detached from their products and float freely in a quest to saturate the audience’s memory. When the boundaries between art and commerce are erased, tropes of the uncanny often become the method of erasure — and when the click of recognition hits us between the two texts we respond with a sense of deja vu that seems supernaturally predetermined. Clearly, it is not supernatural — it is, simply, a pretty savvy marketing scheme — but what it ultimately does is reify the “power” of the advertising industry as a “magic system” (as Raymond Williams theorizes it). As I show in the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny, Wrigley’s gum campaign has a long history of accomplishing this, with its doppelganger twins and its never-ending quest to get consumers to “remember this (w)rapper.”

The song hit #3 on the Billboard charts. There are direct gum references in the song and also in the music video, such as when Brown pops a stick of gum that almost “magically” launches the fantasy sequence in its opening segment. The ad at the top of this entry uncannily is resurrected in various light tricks in the video, as well, in which Brown “dances forever.” In the video, his partner is a woman; in the ad, a consumer product — are they not therefore fundamentally equated as ‘objects’ of pleasure in this intertextual way?

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Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on August 2nd, 2008
iPod Shuffle ad asks consumers to "Enjoy Uncertainty"

iPod Shuffle ad asks consumers to "Enjoy Uncertainty"

Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.”

I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny.  Typically, uncertainty is associated with fear, anxiety, dread, and all things terrifying — indeterminacy is the Other to the certitude of intellectual mastery.  However, there can be pleasure in the unexpected – a “pleasant” surprise — and this is the crux of Apple’s iPod campaign, which is selling a product that literally “shuffles” (or “randomizes”) song files in unexpected and uncanny ways. 

The “random” function of listening to music is nothing new, of course.  Ever since I first saw a CD player (let alone a jukebox), I’ve seen this ability — and of course ANY item that can be indexed can also be randomized.  You can close your eyes and randomize your tunes.  Almost any commercial music player (CD or mp3) can be set to randomize.  While you can “certainly” set up a play list and know exactly what you’re going to listen to on a Shuffle, it’s true that the Shuffle can pull random songs off of a hard drive and mix them up on the device so that you’ll never know what you’ll get when you listen to it.  But we experience the uncertainty of randomization and the unexpected when we listen to the radio, too, so something else is going on here. 
[pullquote]What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”? The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity. [/pullquote]
The marketing of the iPod attempts to package the tropes of the uncanny in both subtle and over ways that overdetermine the ambiguity between the familiar and unfamiliar in order to HIGHLIGHT its “magical properties” as a commodity.  The iPod device itself is so alien in its flat “obelisk” design and lack of external readouts that we need to be sold on its symbolic power as much as its actual capabilities.  As a consumer object its familiar dial/wheel is still radically unfamiliar in that it appears to resemble a remote control for something inexplicably not present — a dismembered part of a missing whole — a partial limb of a larger organism (and it is indistinguishable from the “Apple Remote” in fact).  You can’t see any readouts or windows on the device to know what songs are coming.  You can’t know what’s coming when you press its buttons, either.  It is, in effect, a pure randomizer — like a magic wand that can conjure something unexpected-yet-ostensibly-enjoyable.  It’s almost like they’re selling the remote without the TV.  Apple is selling the potential of “chance,” mediated by the very act of randomization its technology enables, as something magical, so listeners can experience the uncanny surprises time and again.

From my perspective, the ‘uncanny’ elements of the packaging are most evident in the 2005 TV commercial for the Shuffle, which features the familiar “dancing silhouettes” (aways like ghosts) who dodge the threatening approach of those animated two double lines.  The music implies that these random attacks are fun, but to me it appears a little frightening as those unstoppable lines keep coming, worming their way out from the corners and borders of the frame as if virtually charging at them on their own accord. 

The uncanny TV ad for the Shuffle.

The uncanny TV ad for the Shuffle.

In the entire merchandising of this product, the “strange familiarity” of the iPod is reinforced by the familiarity of the graphic design.  As designer Stephen P. Anderson astutely points out in an entry on his blog, the iPod Shuffle alludes both subtly and directly to the marketing of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum.  From the “gum stick” design of the device (whose instruction manual actually (jokingly?) warns users not to chew it!) to the way its packaging employs double arrows (employing the familiar “random” icon of interlaced arrows from iTunes) and shades of mint green to draw on our common social perceptions, the shuffle is one consumer product alluding to another famous consumer product, in the interest of being both “familiar” and yet “strange.”  The allusion is to Doublemint gum — a product whose packaging and advertising I align with the doppelganger in my book on The Popular Uncanny – simply amazes me.

What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”?  The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity.  For one thing, the source for the songs is known so a listener will not be surprised to hear Peter Frampton “come alive” on their iPod if they own that CD.  Instead, they may have forgotten that they own Peter Framptom — that his music is lingering in one’s archive like the dead — and his music will become reanimated by the iPod.  The “a-ha” moment of hearing Frampton “come alive” again is like the logic of the return of the repressed. 

My point is that the way we interface with the media is very much analogous to the way we interface with our own memory banks.  The technology is treated as organic, anthropomorphic — and given “supernatural” agency because of it.

There are algorithms at work behind the randomizing process, but we wish they were something else, because recognizing the pattern removes the thrill and the irrational belief that underpins the random surprise.  Consider how a listener at City of Sound describes it:  ”I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. I’m currently enjoying the odd effect …Sometimes the random effect delivers a sequence of music so perfectly thematically ‘in tune’ that the sense that iTunes just knows is quite unsettling.”

A related “a-ha” moment that City of Sound is referencing here is the anticipatory glee of hearing how songs thematically concatenate — that is, how there seems to be a “hidden logic” between the song order, where the messages seem to be ordered with a purposeful coherence, or that there is a “hidden” will in operation, spelling out a secret message.  Like, if Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do?” is followed — randomly — by a song that sounds like an answer (James Brown’s “I Feel Good”), an ironic response (Morris Albert’s “Feelings…nothing more than feelings…”) or even just another logical follow-up (“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club).  It’s as if the ‘god in the machine’ is our own private DJ, mix-mastering a secret subtext. We imagine a human agency where there is only random chaos, granting the device the godlike powers we wish it had … but we know that these are really projections of our own desires and our own logic, reflected back to us when we weren’t prepared for it– an unexpected instance of the “omnipotence of thoughts.”

Is the message that we should “enjoy uncertainty” because we have no choice?  Is it a command in the imperative voice, or a plea, or simply a symptomatic response to the illnesses of our age?  Do these products assuage our fears, or pray on our insecurities?  Perhaps, after all, marketing gimmicks like these mean nothing, but Mapping the Marvelous marvels over the Shuffle in a profound way:

while the iPod shuffle slogan “Enjoy uncertainty” has prompted many ironic comments on the reliability of the device, for me it’s pure genius…I’m pretty sure that at some point, in retrospect, the iPod shuffle will be considered the icon of an age characterized by insecurity and the uncertainty of knowing.

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