Business
Advertising unlimited
> BY PAUL HOFMANN
Copyright © 2002 by The Earth Times. All rights reserved

Fair weather with cloudless skies, of course, halts the projections, but this doesn't stump the imperious managing editor of Earth Herald, Francis Bennett. (Jules Verne was an admirer of James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the New York Herald.) Verne's made-up Bennett orders his newspaper's science department to come up with a method to produce fat masses of whitish vapor as heavenly screens for his lucrative advertising business.

We probably won't have to wait until 2890--a thousand years after the Vernes gave their imagination free rein--to see promotional messages from car manufacturers, cosmetic firms and detergent empires in the sky. Or to spot the logo of some gym-shoe brand on the full moon if our satellite isn't darkened by the artificial publicity clouds.

Quite possibly some public relations team is already working right now on a project to add such space dimensions to the publicity trade. Skywriters have long made first efforts in that direction over urban areas--especially during sports meetings and other events that draw a lot of people--and by the Goodyear blimps and other message-carrying airships. Commercial satellites already transmit plenty of promotional material.

We may soon see big corporations sponsor outer-space missions to make selling points. It would of course be a major coup if some aliens could be won over to invade us and ask the first earthlings they meet where they could sample hamburgers that are famous throughout the universe.

Barring the clouds, the moon and other heavenly bodies, there are few other opportunities still unused by the confessed or hidden persuaders. Spectacular slopes around the globe might be sculpted like Mount Rushmore to win new customers for, say, fourth-generation cell phones. The difficulty here is, admittedly, that the environmentalists would fight plans to use Mount Fuji as a billboard for good news about the wonders of electronics, or the rock faces of the Alps for plugging Swiss cheese or mutual funds. There are also the Himalayas, but Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal aren't yet prime markets for consumer goods--not yet at any rate. The tedium of flying over the Sahara and other deserts might be relieved (if you have a window seat) by mile-long texts deep down on the reddish-brown sand praising the benefits of sunscreen lotions or of tranquilizers. So far nobody seems to have thought of putting the watery wastes of the oceans to marketing uses, but so-called in-flight entertainment will see to it that during trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific journeys we aren't deprived of sales talk.

In the developed countries the advertising industry has almost exhausted its media palette--the daily press, magazines, radio, television, the Internet, the movies, supermarket displays and show windows. Trucks emblazoned with publicity slogans aimlessly crisscross our clogged cities; struck in traffic jams (which they help causing), they give frustrated motorists something to read.

Undercover agents of Madison Avenue agencies wander from bar to bar at happy hour and loudly ask for a certain brand of gin or vodka, "The only drink that makes me feel good." It's hoped the word will spread that the cool thing is to get high on that particular spirit.

And who says that publicity messages have to be confined to the overalls of racing drivers and the sweaters of ball players? Couldn't the tunics of cops be decorated with the name and phone number of a helpful law firm that will get you out of the slammer if you are arrested?

Endorsements of costly wristwatches by sports heroes, opera singers, orchestra conductors and rock stars are by now commonplace. Why not interrupt a performance of "Hamlet" for a few seconds to let someone come on stage to sing a tasteful ditty extolling the efficacy of a new antidepressant?

The field of celebrity endorsements surely could be widened. Nobel laureates, European royalty, the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Dalai Lama and the Pope are still to be persuaded to say a few dignified words recommending baby food or electric razors.

The trouble is that the capacity of the human brain for coping with the ever-growing mass of promotional material is limited. The average city dweller in the industrial nations is already exposed to more than a hundred straight and subliminal come-on tidings every day. They scream, cajole and whisper from morning to night, "Buy, buy!"

There is also the matter of status. Famous fashion labels confer social distinction, it is thought, as long as the market isn't flooded by fakes. (Entire subcultures in Southern Europe and Asia today thrive on counterfeiting branded products.) Expensive cars too are supposed to identify their owners as members of the elite. However, if your accountant drives up in a Rolls Royce you may think he has been robbing his clients blind for years or has mob connections. Nobody is permitted to exhibit any outward signs of wealth without arousing suspicion: You have to have distinction and money, possibly old money.

We recognize the hood symbols of a score of car firms and may catch ourselves humming the signature tune of some cereal. We know the rhymed sales jingles of quite a few grocery items by heart. Michelin Man whose reassuring girth is composed of auto tires, is like a jolly pal; Ronald McDonald is the clownish friend of the kids.

Psychologists have long found out how consumers respond to certain colors: Red is exciting, great for automotive ads and Ferrari racing cars; blue signals reliability such as financial institutions seek to project; orange and yellow are optimistic hues; green woos nature lovers; lilac and purple suggest sophistication.

The communications overload caused by the hucksters is augmented by the outpourings from the public relations departments of governments, political parties and other organizations. It's ideological merchandising, practiced by highly paid spin-doctors.

Uncounted billions of dollars are ceaselessly spent on sales drives. In many branches of the economy, marketing is at least as important as production. Cybernetic breakthroughs are futile if computer users aren't talked or browbeaten into upgrading their equipment.

Hollywood sets aside hefty promotion budgets for its A pictures. Studio flacks invent romances or arrange for shocking, if phony, scandals involving lead actors: the important thing is that moviegoers' curiosity is whetted.

Which brings us to the ever more noticeable role of sex in today's advertising, and not just in the film industry. "Sex sells" is a hallowed maxim of the trade; in an age of permissiveness and information glut, the carnality shouldn't be too subtle either. Look at the improbably attractive, healthy, smiling and apparently rich characters populating the glossy ads of the automotive and travel industries. Even if the men, occasionally, are gray-haired, they radiate carefree hedonism. The young women, who look like winners of beauty contests (and many are), seem never tired or bored. We guess, of course, what the happy folks in those full page displays are really up to, and we are being fed the illusion that if we brought that sports vehicle or went on one of those cruises we too would enjoy such sensual thrills and have delicious adventures.

Soft porn, until some time ago confined to the so-called men's magazines (boys' magazines might be a better characterization), has, despite protests from feminists, lately crept also into mainstream publications, even into ads in daily newspapers. Take any 1970 issue of some publication and look at the ads for, say, swimwear, other fashions or fragrances, and compare them with those in a current issue. You will find that the commercial exploitation of the human, especially female, body has won new epidermal terrain, measurable in inches. Periodicals that once had a reputation for staidness have followed the trend as well. Few taboos survive.

Meanwhile, the Internet has become a vehicle for a lot of hard-core porn-for-pay. This too may have an impact on industries like movies, TV and advertising, which are all prime image-makers. How will the publicity business fare in the present phase of the world economy, variously described as a downturn or a recession? On the one hand corporate retrenchments are financial strictures forcing cuts in advertising budgets; on the other hand the marketing executives clamor for more funds because potential customers must be convinced that now is the time for home improvements, for buying that new roadster, for going on a pleasure trip. Just apply for "easy" (and eventually onerous) credit or take out another (your fifth) credit card and use it to the hilt. The chances are that publicity will get more aggressive and more selective, focusing on the young and the young-middle-aged sections of society even more than it is doing already. The message: Have it all.

At the end of the 19th Century when Jules and Michel Verne wrote their Earth-Herald fantasy, publicity was fledgling industry, mainly American, that was no longer content with the print medium and was groping for new channels of communication. Pamphlets, posters, newspapers and occasional sandwich men just weren't enough to stir consumer interest.

In the more than 100 years since then, advertising has become multimedia and global. In the West and in Japan it has decisively contributed to producing and selling goods and creating new perceived needs. It has invaded health care, plugging new medicines, and today is powerful in politics and the arts. Publicity, however, seems to be approaching the saturation point.

Now, in the developing parts of the globe, the publicity business is poised to do the same job it has done in the industrial countries. One of the great questions of the millennium is whether the resources of the planet Earth can sustain a rapidly growing appetite of new billions of humans for even newer consumer goods, "as advertised."

The power of publicity has mightily contributed to the lopsided state of the world economy, with one fifth of humankind affluent and the remainder poor or even destitute. If it were found that our globe is unable to cope with further economic expansion, the industrial nations might need some negative advertising to persuade their people it's time for curbing overconsumption and to stress the virtue of frugality so that the poor of the Earth have a chance to catch up. That chance cannot be denied them for ethical, economic, social, political and also military reasons.

Paul Hofmann, for many years a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of 14 nonfiction books, including "The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile" (Doubleday) and "That Fine Italian Hand" (Henry Holt).