Feel-Good Commercials

Commercials make you feel bad by showing you photo-shopped, digitally enhanced images of impossibly beautiful, incredibly thin or ripped men and women with perfect hair, amazing skin, and phenomenal outfits. You realize that you don’t measure up compared to them and feel compelled to buy the product the ad campaign is pushing to become more like the people in the ad. Right?

No. That’s absolutely not how it works.

Ads that make people feel bad would never be watched. In order to attract viewers to the commercial and, consequently, to the product, an ad should make viewers feel good. And what is it that makes people feel better than anything else? Having their beliefs confirmed, of course.

I’ve seen this happen many times. A bunch of ultra-intelligent people is sitting at a conference, listening to a talk. In the midst of profound insights, the presenter suddenly mentions something extremely well-known.

“Spain lost its last colonies in 1898. . .”
“Lazarillo de Tormes belongs to the genre of the Picaresque novel. . .”
“In the last years of his life, Galdos was blind. . ”

Suddenly, the eyes of the bunch of ultra-intelligent people glaze over. An expression of a near-orgasmic bliss graces their faces and they begin rocking as if in a narcotic stupor. No brilliant analysis or powerful insight makes them as happy as hearing what they have known, heard and repeated for decades.

This is how political campaigns work, and the news channels, and the newspapers, and even comedy shows. And, of course, this is how ad campaigns work, too. They show you the comforting picture of what you think the world should be like and you buy the product to reward the company for letting you inhabit, albeit just for a second, the universe that seems so right and correct to you.

So instead of commercials forcing us to believe that the world should be populated by cyborg-like creatures of total perfection, we are the ones making the ads so obsessively dependent on showing nothing but these images.