The jugular of good taste

Recently I have viewed  a series of new Clorox commercials, under the overall message of cleaning up life's messes. I found two of these commercials to push the envelope on tastelessness, as they directly refer to urine and defecation. While they attempt to use a 'cutesy' angle and obviously are targeting mothers, the remainder of the bleach using public...of which I myself am a member, likely would find them to be tasteless. I happened to see one of the commercials during my dinner, and I immediately found it disgusting because of the images that it generated. I don't know about anyone else, but I suspect that a sink full of baby shit or a hallway full of kid piss aren't conducive to good digestion.

  I've noticed this phenomena in advertising for some time, but in the previous years it seems to be more prevalent to utilize imagery that is borderline disgusting to sell a product. One of the earliest instances I can recall is for a foot odor product that featured an animation of a sweaty foot, the swamp foot as it was referred to in the advertisement. Granted these are powerful images, and they do communicate well, but come on, there has to be a more effective way of selling a product than to make people lose their appetites with your calls to action.

Further, why in the hell do I want to see someone's pustules on a large screen, even if I did need to acne medication, I don't think that I want to see a pustule ridden face in high definition.

Can we please get some taste control back into the messaging in advertising these days? Would it kill any art director to say, "Okay, this is going to drastically affect some viewers, I'll take a different tack with this."    There are better ways to sell products instead of resorting to  the  jugular of good taste by relying on bodily waste, pustules, sweaty feet, throbbing corns, hammer toes, and all other manner of formerly taboo images.

I think that it's indicative larger forces at work in society today however. It doesn't seem that there is respect for the sensibilities of consumers in this day and age, or respect for the fellow humans in general that there was at one time in our society. You have only to look toward the current state of presidential elections and the smear campaigns that they are generating for proof of this. Half messages, misquotes, untruths, obfuscation, faulty claims, all of those things are present in the current campaign, specifically on the republican side of the coin if you've paid any attention to current events, you likely would have heard at least a few stories about the distortions in the messaging.

The only course that any of us have of late, is to vote with our dollars in regards to the products we buy and vote with our conscience in everything else.

This vacuum sucks: A mini-documentary

I finally saw a good commercial on television the other day. I doubt that I'd actually buy the product at this moment in my life, but nonetheless a great advertisement in a sea of sickening sameness and in-your-face pressure to buy is a nice thing. It's for a new Dyson vacuum cannister model that they've apparently improvinated in a redesign thinkfestamajig, I just made those words up, so if you use them that's a dime each time.

The things that actually work well with the commercial, and granted I've only seen it one time as of this writing, is that it does an excellent job of presenting the product by the designer of the product itself. That's a rarity these days, because we really haven't the slightest clue who owns what, or why they want us to buy whatever it is there actually selling. Beyond that, the Dyson advertisement actually demonstrates the product effectively and believably.

It's increasingly rare that there is any believability in advertising when so much of the message of advertising is buried beneath situational obfuscation. For examples of this, see any Geico advertisement for the last decade or so, but it's not good enough to be frank and honest about pricing, we have to bury the message in a metaphor that is hilarious the first time, but later becomes tritely irrelevant and torturous in repeated viewings.

The Dyson ad which I happened to catch was about a minute and thirty seconds, it had a great deal of information contained in that time, it seemed to focus more on educating about the shortcomings of older-cannister designs, as well as illustrate how they've improved upon that design in several specific ways. Further, they accomplished all of this in a very well designed piece of film with polished visuals. It is an effective piece of advertising, it will make you want this thing that you likely do not even need.

 PS

I came away from that ad thinking that it's a very different approach from much of the advertising that I've seen lately. Most advertising, at least from my observations, have been direct appeals.

"Hey you, YES, you! Come over here and buy this, y'know....for kids!"

If it's not the direct appeal, it's the surreal situations that disarm viewers for the stab in the face of product necessity!

I was thinking of ways that Dyson could do those kinds of ads, and they all came away seeming like Dr. Strangelove selling their vacuums. 
 

Cleveland, The City with Spirit

   So, recently my hometown decided to seek out a slogan to describe itself. Rather, I believe that the Mayor decided the town should have a slogan. Good Call! Why shouldn't we have a slogan! Chattanooga, Athens, Atlanta, Knoxville, Nashville, they have slogans. So, after a contest of submissions from the local population they settled on: "The City With Spirit".

While, it seems kind of vague. Most slogans really do, and should have an amorphous meaning. They are supposed to 'generate dreams' in the listeners mind through branding. But, as a native of Cleveland, it's actually a good fit to convey the sense of the town. 


Cleveland, TN The City with Spirit.

That could mean almost anything. Well, maybe three interpretations spring to my mind when I first hear it.

1. An obvious reference to the thriving Christian population of many denominations springs to mind, as well as a reference to being the site of the World Headquarters of the Church of God of Prophecy, many churches, and generally a spiritually oriented population.

2. It's a spunky little city. Spirit, spirited.

South Ocoee and Inman St.

Well, the people in the town are some of the best on Earth, but they're all products of the best that Earth has to offer. Cleveland sits at the inside of a spur of larger cities, so it's become more culturally diverse over the years.  It's always felt like a sort of nexus, and it's always been growing  as long as I've lived in the town. So, yes it does have spirit in more than one sense of the term.

3. There's a ghost who lives near the courthouse square.

Cragmiles Mausoleum

As well, it has 'a' spirit as well.  The Cragmiles family had a very tragic history in the early days of Cleveland. They built this mausoleum after their young daughter was killed in a traffic accident. Shortly after the interrment, the walls of the mausoleum began to bleed.There is a better history here  here.

All that I can say is that one year a friend and I were walking downtown near the mausoleum late at night. I think it was around Easter, perhaps on Easter morning. There was some kind of activity going on, police cars or a fire truck, I can't recall for certain. But, the door to the mausoleum was standing open, and there was what appeared to be a large bird of some kind flying around in the general vicinity of downtown. It was creepy that night. 

Walking with a limp because of exploded glass

I sumbitted the following letter to consumeraffairs.com and the newly created Consumer Protection agency after I had first-hand proof that the internet myth of 'exploding pyrex' was a proven reality. I think at this point in my life, I'm so sick of coping with the tactics and efforts of the purveyors of products, their messages, and the overall insult to my own intelligence that I just don't give a literal fuck anymore that I'm ready to start speaking out to governing bodies about the conditions that normal everyday people are facing in this country on a daily basis.

C'mon, let's face it. People like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Barack Obama aren't preparing their own food, cleaning their own toilets, or doing their own laundry today. So, clearly they haven't the faintest idea of what typical people like you and I are facing everyday. 

The stupid things like I'm mentioning in the following submitted letter are just a miniscule percent of the frag mines that normal American citizens are facing on a daily basis thanks to the dangers of a globalized economy.


Let's just say that I'm okay. I've still got all of my limbs, both eyes, a fully functional respiratory system, and a working way of eliminating wastes from my God-given body. But, I can imagine that there are those that are less fortunate from the experiences that I've endured. Those with worse outcomes, they are who you should concern yourself with, and they are the subjects of the letters which I have written to the consumeraffairs.com and Consumer Protection Agency.


Things could have been a lot worse for me. I've got the burned lineoleum, scars, and photos to bear that out.
The following is a paste of the letter I sent to consumeraffairs.com. 

(The letter was only edited mildly for the Consumer Protection Agency)

I was preparing dinner, a fillet of S'wai baked in the oven. I wrapped the fillet in tin foil and set it down in a pyrex casserole dish. I cooked it for about 22 minutes on 400 degrees. When I pulled out the dish and set it on the top of the stove, the dish exploded! Maybe, exploded is a bit drastic sounding, but let's just say it blew itself apart into shards all over the kitchen, otherwise a small explosion of the materials.

As a result, the bottom of my foot got burned and I got a couple of cuts on my legs. I wasn't wearing shoes since I was fairly certain that I wouldn't have anything to worry about cooking in my own kitchen.

Why the hell hasn't someone said that there should be some kind of warning label put onto these dishes bearing the PYREX trademark? It's utterly ridiculous that people are risking being maimed by their cookware in this day and age just because someone wants to save a few dollars on a cook pan.

Someone needs to bring a class action lawsuit against the makers of these damned things until they finally agree to put a big bright label on the cartons that reads, "The use of this product may lead to random explosions during food preparation. Thanks, have a good day."

Admittedly, I got off easy, but the burn on the bottom of my foot could have been a burn on my face, a burn on any other part of my body, or a shard of 400 degree glass in my eye. Someone should sift through the thousands of anecdotal accounts on the web and bring a class action lawsuit against these people who are still producing this volatile cookware. Geez, it sounds like such a joke! But it happens, I can attest to it! I can show you the photos of the injuries if necessary!

It's like a terrorist attack from the manufacturing industry every time that someone heats something made of this stuff up in the microwave.

I know that there are some differences in the materials, borosilicate glass  vs. soda lime glass, well someone needs to make sure that there are different trademarks for these products so people aren't putting their lives in their hands when they are baking a lasagna!

Slightly injured but making it,

Mark k. McGehee