Author: Michael Darling
I read a rather interesting book over the summer about advertising and branding called Obsessive Branding Disorder. The book’s author, Lucas Conley, discusses how advertising has taken over our lives and how much time is devoted to branding of products, places and even people. One of the more interesting revelations was that American companies are now spending more money on branding and marketing than on researching and developing new products. I also found out that in this century there have been products like Play-Doh cologne, Cheetos lip balm and NASCAR romance novels.
There was one section of Conley’s book that gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling of doom. It was in the section on new forms of advertising that I began to lose faith in our ability to escape total advertising culture. Conley detailed new advances in advertisement. As more and more communities like Los Angeles ban new billboards, marketers have tried to find new ways to pimp their products. We’re all familiar with product placement by now, but consider an audio ad that starts as soon as you walk by. How about going to a grocery store and finding that the checkout conveyor belt was covered in advertisements? Can you imagine machines designed to put advertisements in the sand at the beach?
Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Transportation Authority, MTA, has already installed televisions on buses which are running advertisements. They’ve even put flat screens displaying movie ads in select subway tunnels. Suffices to say, after reading that chapter, I was saddened and a bit offended. But there was a glimmer of hope. I was at least able to take solace in the fact that Oxy’s campus was almost entirely ad-free. “Huzzah!” I thought, “every day I spend on campus is one with very little ad interference. Take that, Madison Avenue.”
Well, I was wrong. The first time I visited the bookstore this semester I was surprised to see a new addition to the shop. If you’ve set foot in the bookstore you have undoubtedly seen the new screen on the floor displaying commercials and moving images mostly for movies and television shows.
“The marketing bastards have found me,” I said to myself when I saw the advertising pad. I’m told that the thing is pretty indestructible and a truck that weighs a few thousand pounds can run over it with no harm to the precious advertising video. Upon hearing this, my dream of giving the screen a well-deserved sledge-hammering was dashed.
It’s safe to assume that the screen is there so that the school can get some cash. But do we really want to sell our space just to make up for our small endowment? Imagine that the side of the Cooler was painted with a giant mural proclaiming “Drink RC Cola!” What if the Marketplace trays carried advertisements? I understand that the naming rights to Patterson Field haven’t been sold yet. Hey, Rangeview’s basically unnamed; why not sell that to the highest bidder? Who wouldn’t want to live in AT&T Hall?
If the online casino “Golden Palace” can get a species of monkey named after them or have boxers get temporary tattoos of their web address, why wouldn’t they be interested in having one of Oxy’s many buildings named for the website? I even know a few people who would be excited to take classes in the Burger King Asian Studies department.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to stop ad creep on our local level. We must do what we can to halt the over-saturation of advertisements in our lives. The bookstore’s ad pad could be the beginning of ad invasion at Oxy. People often talk about the Oxy bubble that keeps us unaware of current events, news and culture. I propose we make a new bubble, one that resists the urge to brand everything with a logo. And if this means we’ll have to use a SledgeCo brand hammer to preserve the bubble, so be it.
Michael Darling is a junior History major. He can be reached at mdarling@oxy.edu.
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