Those commercials on TV really ARE getting dumber

Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal

Time was, life inside a TV commercial was as about as good as it got. Cascades of silky hair caressed the faces of shampoo models. Cascades of foamy beer washed ordinary Joes away to a never-never land free of mortgages and mortality.

Nearly everybody in commercials lived in Happyville. Even the most desolate soul was one tube of Pepsodent or Preparation-H away from bliss.

But something is happening to Happyville. It's turning to Dumb City.

Consider:

• The teenage boys in the Taco Bell commercial who are so enraptured with a Grilled Stuft Burrito that they dismiss supermodel Elsa Benitez.
• Cedric the Entertainer, who can't contain his beer-shaking excitement and douses his date with a blast of Budweiser.
• The cluelessly wretched — and wretchedly clueless — karaoke singers executing "Karma Chameleon" in the Levi's commercials.
• The guys who are so smitten with the German car that they leave the Russian import, Anna Kournikova, cooling her heels on the porch.

Onward and dumbward go commercials.

"Whenever somebody's dumb in a commercial, it makes the person who's watching it feel smarter," says Rich Machin, senior writer at the Red 7 E advertising agency in Louisville, Ky. "That's part of the psychology."

"All media are getting smarter," says Bob Welke, chief creative officer of the Louisville firm Creative Alliance. He cites computer animation, movie special effects, sound bites, e-mail, public relations.

"It's all getting much slicker, faster, better at nailing emotions and thoughts and feelings, and better at grabbing information."

It isn't that people have gotten dumber; their tools have gotten smarter.

"The human condition remains relatively the same," he says, "but we look dumber in contrast."

Machin says, "It's an evolution of the market. When your audience is watching four to seven hours of TV a day, they become pretty marketing savvy. So linear stuff — and stuff that's basically telling them to buy something — becomes a turnoff. You really do have to be more circuitous, subterranean."

Jim White, chief creative officer at Doe Anderson in Louisville, recalls his work on Miller Lite ads in a former life in New York.

"We did the Bob Uecker and the Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith stuff," he says. "You were laughing with them even though you were kind of laughing at them. It was innocent, a fun spirit. ...

"I think today it's a little more vicious and mean-spirited than it used to be. You can laugh at Bob Uecker, but you didn't despise him."

Do these depictions of dumbness help or hurt a product?

"I think it hurts brands as often as it helps them," White says.

And Machin points out that people aren't using dumbness to sell big-ticket items, such as $30,000 cars.

Is it possible that "dumb" is the wrong word here? Is something else more appropriate?

"The only word that comes to my mind," Welke says, "is adolescent.

... Adolescence is a race to stay young and to distance yourself from the previous generation. ...

"To me, this whole genre is adolescent — in the movies and in advertising and a lot of other stuff that's going on, it is adolescent humor, it's adolescent communication, it's young. ...

"What young wants to do is always find a new frontier to sing a little louder, to wear their clothes a little more colorfully, and to be honest and open with one another. And to the extent that appears dumb to the previous generation is to say that they are succeeding."

Machin: "I think a higher percentage of commercials on the air are aimed at a younger audience today than before. So the dumbing down is partly in response to that."

Why (and we're probably all feeling a little clueless here, by now) is this happening?

"I think it's a disposable-income thing," Machin says, "where older people have more money to spend, but they're not going to let go of it as easily as younger people. So (advertisers say), let's focus on the people who have $500 burning up in their pocket. ...

"That's part of it. The other thing about that — it's the superiority thing. I mean, everybody likes somebody who's dumber than they are, because it makes them feel superior."

Welke: "It's not that anybody's getting dumber. It's just that that's where ... the market is. We all go through an adolescent stage where body sounds are funny and sexual innuendo is funny, and most of us grow out of it. Some of us don't."