The Most Interesting Man in the World Has Us All Wet

Under normal circumstances I would not have much to say about Dos Equis‘ campaign, since it came out before this blog even started, but isn’t old enough to be new again, like my embarrassing Hathaway Shirt rant from when I knew very little about advertising other than David Ogilvy. I want to keep this blog from degenerating into a bunch of spec ads with minimal commentary or criticism, which it had been doing for a few weeks now, so here goes…

Actually, who am I kidding? I always have something to say about anything advertising-related, I just usually keep my mouth shut, but this campaign is interesting for several reasons.

Irony without Snark

 On the one hand it is tongue-in-cheek, but not so tongue-in-cheek as to be snarky. ‘The most interesting man in the world’ (TMIMITW) is indeed quite interesting, commercials show him doing things which are the stuff of Hemingway novels, early Bond movies and pulp fiction: 

Particularly dig the kendo reference in this one. Maclean’s mentions a ‘Wes Anderson’ aesthetic to them, to which I disagree, there’s nothing intentionally dorky about the guy at all, the stock is purposefully grainy and jerky to evoke Latin American/European period footage, the feel is meant to be heroic. It’s got more in common with Fidel Castro and those ‘Your Dad…’ Canadian Club print ads than Rushmore.

Not that Snark is Necessarily Bad…

An example of a beer campaign that is snarky-but-oh-so-brilliant is the ‘Real Men of Genius’ commercials. There are now countless iterations of this basic theme, and it’s hands-down one of the greatest beer campaigns of all time. I’m pretty sure it and Silver Bullet for Coors and other such campaigns defined the now-ubiquitous two-tone approach to beer commercials.

But there’s now too much of it.

The typical approach: focus your commercials on bodacious babes, hinting not-so-subtly at how they seem to come with the alcohol, or focus your commercials on stupid guys, hinting not-so-subtly that men are idiots and do stupid things either for beer, with beer, or after beer(s). Sometimes you combine the two, and make a commercial about a stupid guy who gets girls or doesn’t get girls because of beer.

Why ‘Staying Thirsty’ is Morally Victorious

In the Dos Equis commercials we have a reversal, TMIMITW is a role model, who is successful with women because of what is innate to his character rather than that of the beer. You could also say having lots of supermodels around comes with the territory, that you can’t be all that successful as a man in society without also being a potential lothario, but it doesn’t change the fact that these are girls he wooed on his own grounds and weren’t there for beer or provided by the beer*. He even comes out and says he ‘[doesn't] always drink beer…’ and in another commercial claims to be endorsing the beer as a favor, and not because he’s a ‘shill’. While other campaigns still emphasize ‘sexy’ and ‘fun’, these do it in a completely different light.

In contrast to campaigns that belittle men and portray them as little more than incompetent, sex-obsessed beer receptacles, Dos Equis presents manhood in a positive light. It celebrates aspects of stereotypical masculinity and adulthood which are admirable, most notably the concept of mastery. It’s a bit corny at times with its Chuck Norris-style facts long after these were funny, and the thick odor of machismo found on the website can at times be nauseating. I also get that its portrayal of women may not be any more positive than your average beer commercial, but at its core I think the message is positive. When parsed out, the social cues of drinking here are far healthier, the idea being that it’s okay to drink, but that drinking is only a component of a much richer life packed with innumerable other pursuits. Even the tagline, ‘Stay thirsty, my friends.’ is a double entendre that celebrates a healthier lifestyle than ‘take one for the team’ or ‘where there’s life, there’s Bud’.

Before Chuck Norris endorsed Huckabee, he had already lost all cultural relevancy.

 

Oh, and Here’s Some Ogilvy

Giving credit where it’s due, I think at least some of the imagery in these ads must have been inspired by Commander Whitehead and the Man In the Hathaway Shirt**. Not saying it’s any less creative or original, just musing over here. After all, George Lois just came out with a book showing how none of his ideas were produced in a vacuum. Part of what drove Ogilvy to pick the Russian Baron-type as a model for his eyepatch-wearer was because he sensed an air of sophistication, the eyepatch added a sense of danger and mystery. At their core, both Lois and Ogilvy were firm believers in the idea that great ads had to have memorable visuals and copy, hence the men who represented Hathaway and Schweppes both had striking visual features:

 

Something about this guy... new haircut?

 

 

 

 

Look at those cufflinks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More specifically, notice that these men are doing interesting things, the story and the print may be about something else, but the images are rich, powerful, and captivating. These are men who’d stand up against the Dos Equis guy and they were people guys of the time found interesting. 

These days you still have to have a story, but once in a while let’s make it a story about somebody we aspire to be, rather than somebody we think we are during a bad day.

*Hopefully this will translate into the real world of beer promotion and mean I won’t have to sit through a hockey game with Molson’s hired guns ever again. Really, while the idea of providing a free hockey game AND hot chicks might sound appealing, it’s actually just awkward, and makes me feel really creepy.

**Not an SEO-grab I promise

It’s not subliminal, it’s sublime: Art as Advertising Part 1

Art and advertising have always shared a close relationship. So why do people still carry notions of a distinction between the two? Perhaps the two most common ways to draw lines between advertising and art are:

1. That ads are made with psychologically malicious intent (i.e. to get us to buy something we don’t want) while art is the pure expression of some starving sod (i.e. it’s art and we love it because–paradoxically–the artist is so profound s/he doesn’t care what we think)*.
2. Similarly, ad people do it ‘selfishly’ for money while artists do it for the ‘goodness’ of self expression.

Reframed, and to show there’s no real class bias at work here, one might also see the two this way:

1. Art is the useless output of decadents who are happy beat one another off and contribute nothing of real value while advertising, though little better, at least attempts to perform the service of selling the products which define our prosperity.
2. Similarly, ad people do it for the ‘goodness’ of money while artists do it ‘selfishly’ for themselves.

To all of which I say BULLSHIT.

From the earliest epics to the Pompeian murals to the Sistine Chapel to Andy Warhol art has always served to sell the artist and those who buy his/her output, and art has almost always been created in the hopes of monetary remuneration. In this four-parter I will explain how the moralists who seek to frame advertising as art’s evil twin often end up with two definitions for the same thing. I will do this by showing how historically all known ‘art’ is really actually advertising before concluding with an argument for why no artist can help being an advertiser.

In the next section I will redefine (or use an alternative paradigm because somebody out there has got to have thought of this first) art and advertising in simple, pragmatic terms so that when people converse about the two they don’t have to snort at either of them.

I don’t doubt the two are still going to cross over, and in my last section I’ll get a bit moralistic myself and look at why this isn’t such a bad thing, demonstrating in the process why it’s a triumph when a piece of work is simultaneously good at being both.

In doing all of this, I hope to set out a basic way by which we can honestly judge the quality of all advertising, thereby making the work of this blog much easier.

 

One of the world's first commericals.

 

 

Art likely starts earlier than Gilgamesh, but this is the first occurence of an advertiser as a character. I will also come back to cave paintings later because they have become advertisements. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the eponymous demi-god and king of Uruk’s quest for immortality, ends with the defeated hero carving his story into the walls of his kingdom, knowing that in ages to come words and pictures will be all that is left of him.

In other words, the entire epic is literally an endorsement for advertising. We know that Gilgamesh, were he ever a real person, could never have attained physical immortality, but what he does instead is god-like. Despite his best efforts, Gilgamesh can’t be there to ensure everyone still remembers how great he is so he makes the city walls advertise him: what’s carved into the fortifications embellish his deeds, make him identifiable, and encourage readers to buy into his awesomeness. By ‘creating’ the story on the wall, Gilgamesh is an artist, by having it sell himself he becomes the first ad man.

 

 

000Next: I’ll try to tackle the art of the ancients, specifically the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, as well as China and the Americas if I have room and tell you why, for the snobs’ definition of art, the writing is on the wall.

 

*I lump the Marxist or Religious definitions of art together and will discuss them shortly.