Art & Commerce: Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

Everyone casually critiques commercials, but few TV shows exist that openly mock the ad industry If PBS doesn't do it, who will?" runs the ad slogan for our quasi-noncommercial broadcast network. Alas for public TV, over the last 15 years too many ad-supported cable networks have been doing it, raiding the programming niches PBS once ruled. Yet every once in a while a show reminds us that there's a place for noncommercial TV--even in the Land of 1,000 Channels. Such a program is Mental Engineering, in which a panel of critics talk back to the incessant chatter of TV advertising. As it happens, PBS proper isn't producing Mental Engineering; the show is self-distributed by its creator and host, John Forde, a one-time philosophy major and former radio host. Having emerged from the vast wasteland of cable access, Mental Engineering now airs on 50 stations and in half the top 20 markets, including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and the Twin Cities, where it's produced. It's hard to believe this show hasn't been done before. TV commercials' stature as cultural products has risen even as their importance in the marketing communications mix has declined. Ads regularly get ink in TV Guide and USA Today. They get recycled as cable TV programs and on Super Bowl Sunday they're more anticipated than the game itself. No one can escape them, and everyone has an opinion about them. What topic is riper for feedback than the folklore of our time? Forde, who moderates these smarty-pants focus groups of writers, critics, professors and performers, has a philosopher's taste for Big Questions, linking unmemorable TV spots to vast social ills. Do disposable paper towels encourage us to regard other people as disposable? Does a videogame ad that features urban mean streets promote suburban sprawl? Does the Mastercard "Priceless" campaign usurp the role of religion? The sometimes nonplussed panelists are cool ironists whose body language conveys how immune they are to the blandishments of marketing. "Advertisers are always creating new markets," comments culture critic Katrina Tillotson with weary fatalism. That's the weakness of Mental Engineering as entertainment. Unlike the similar Politically Incorrect or Sneak Previews, no one gets very excited or provoked by anything another panelist might say. When comedian Tim Mitchell breaks a sweat over a steamy Ali Landry Doritos spot that Tillotson dismisses, she demurs, "I'm not the target for this ad. Obviously, you are." Talk about a conversation stopper. And while it's easy to come up with funny put-downs of ads, it's quite difficult to say anything controversial about them. Rush Limbaugh's famous coinage "feminazis" thrills his supporters and outrages his opponents. But making fun of a Coca-Cola ad isn't likely to outrage anyone--except Coca-Cola. Mental Engineering is an experiment in media literacy, which is touted as humanism's last hope against the tyranny of consumerism. The idea is that if people--particularly young people--understood how commercials worked on their minds, they wouldn't be so influenced by them. But ask any market researcher and she'll tell you people do understand how ads work, and the impressionable young ones understand it best of all. If I were to create a media literacy curriculum, I'd make the teachers sit at their desks and take notes while the kids stand in front of the blackboard and give the lesson. You don't have to be a cultural critic or communications professor to feel superior to advertising; the average consumer feels it every time he turns on TV. There is no intellectual thrill so cheap in America, no form of condescension so common, as looking down at TV commercials. Far from being controversial, mocking ads is a mainstream pastime. The real mystery about advertising is not how it manipulates us--that's pretty obvious. The puzzling questions are: How can consumers feel so superior to marketing and yet be so swayed by it? How can advertising inspire so little belief and yet affect behavior so much? Those are topics I hope to see addressed on Mental Engineering. Indeed, I hope to see it, period. The only controversial thing about the show is that it exists. A marketing world that has co-opted every other form of dissent balks at direct mockery of itself--even if the same kinds of observations are made at the watercooler every day. You literally have to be the U.S. Government, proud sponsor of the anti-tobacco campaign, to get an anti-marketing message broadcast. Which is why Forde is all but bankrupting himself to keep his show on the air. One wishes Mental Engineering was either more slickly amusing or more analytically deep. But in the Land of 1,000 Channels, it deserves a space on the dial.

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Art & Commerce: Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

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