The Consumer Republic

Shameless Scandal, deviance and even crime are good for the pocketbook. Shame is a luxury only the mega-famous can afford. Recently I was asked by a TV tabloid show to comment on the shocking, shocking phenomenon of Hollywood celebrities making TV commercials in Japan. As everyone who doesn't live under a rock already knows, eminences of the silver screen, such as Harrison Ford, Demi Moore, Brad Pitt and Sylvester Stallone, have been sneaking off to Japan to lend their inimitable auras to cheesy, circa-1960-style ads for shampoo, cars, hot dogs and beer. "Why do they do it?" asked the interviewer. That's a no-brainer-easy money. The more interesting question is why, if they're bent on squeezing some extra cash out of their celebrity, do the stars feel obligated to leave the country to do it. Back in the U.S.A., Bob Dole is happy to sit down for a heart-to-heart with Fred the Baker for Dunkin' Donuts. Tiger Woods is as admired for his zillion-dollar endorsement contracts as he is for his golf skills. Fergie, one-time princess and free-spending parasite, now makes an honest living touting Weight Watchers. Yet, deep in celebritydom's inner sanctum, the outdated perception persists that doing ads would somehow diminish the luster of stardom. The stars would lose face. To use an old-fashioned word, they are ashamed to shill in front of the folks at home. Shame, however, is a luxury only the mega-famous can afford. Move just a rung or two down the celebrity food chain and the opposite is true: Shamelessness is, if not a requirement, an asset in the war for consumer attention. From the cool million O.J. snared for his tell-nothing book while on trial for murder to the John Wayne Bobbitt "Love Hurts" media tour, scandal, deviance and even crime are good for the pocketbook. True, Marv Albert's taste for flesh and women's undergarments cost him his job. Yet if Marv is willing to cast out his personal demons in public, he would not only score a huge book deal, he and his toupee, now more famous than ever, will surely be welcomed back on the air. The mysterious disappearance of public shame is the subject of For Shame, a new book by James B. Twitchell. It is a sequel of sorts to his last book, AdCult USA, the most perceptive dissection of advertising to appear in the past few years. What happened, he wondered, to the shame-driven advertising of the '50s, when consumers were pounded by pitches warning them of the shameful social consequences of halitosis, corns, body odor and coughing in public? Contemporary advertising has a different message: Feel good. We are all encouraged to be like the bunny man of the Crunch ad, toodling around in a world where there are "no judgments." In such a world, shame has no place. Shame feels bad. At the Account Planners Group conference a few months ago, one of the nominees for best planning ads of the year was a long-running campaign for the West Coast convenience store chain am/pm Mini-Market. Its category difference is that it is stuffed with more junk food per square foot than its competitors. As recounted in Adweek, the planners visited the store to observe firsthand what would once have been known as gluttony in action. "Customers would be eating their Icee, munching on a hot dog or sucking down a 64-ounce Mountain Dew before they even got to the cash register." The conclusion was that am/pm Mini-Market "didn't need to be embarrassed about who we were." Its advertising task was to make "a proud, not apologetic statement about the kind of place [consumers] want to go." The campaign's tagline, "Too much good stuff," is surely ironic, since the message is: There's no such thing as too much. Clearly, we're not just supposed to feel good about the cars, clothes and computers we buy. Anything the consumers vote for in the marketplace becomes, by definition, something they should feel good about. Once, it was enough for the networks that we watched television several hours a day. Then ABC comes along and ups the ante, insisting we should celebrate it, too. Having banished social shame in our own lives, is it any wonder we let public figures off the hook, too? Since the day Bill Clinton began campaigning for president, he has been a scandal magnet. Yet despite more than five years of accusations of statehouse financial chicanery, adultery, sexual procurement and campaign fundraising violations, a feel-good America yawns. As the current gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey demonstrates, political fates can be determined by more "relevant" issues, such as car insurance rates-the kind of stuff consumers really feel bad about. Social shame begins at home, and it's in our homes, in front of the television, that we learn our most valuable lesson: There is nothing to be ashamed of.

Brand Marketing

The Consumer Republic

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman