Sunday, September 28, 2008

"It may be on a lousy channel, but the Simpsons are on TV!"

The Peripeteic Consequences of Unethical Advertising in "Mr. Plow"
Episode 68 (9F07), Season 4. Written by Jon Vitti; Directed by Jim Reardon.

Point of entry: "Advertising, whether or not it sells cars or chocolate, surrounds us and enters into us, so that when we speak we may speak in or with reference to the language of advertising and when we see we may see through schemata that advertising has made salient for us . . . . [S]trictly as symbol, the power of advertising may be considerable." -Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. 210. (As cited at http://advertising.utexas.edu/resources/quotes/PROD75_016468.html.)

Personal note: Part of the reason for the six-month delay in acting on any of 25-30 ideas I still have for this blog was my recent job change... to advertising regulation. I've been watching countless ads week in and week out, and have found the industry to be incredibly fascinating. The opinions expressed in this publication are solely my own, and do not in anyway represent those of my employer or any persons affiliated with it.

There may never have been a television character that an advertiser would love to target more than Homer Simpson: the man who celebrates New Billboard Day - "There, I got everything they told me - but I certainly won't be going to that clown college" (Homie the Clown) - and almost never fails to entertain any notion put up for sale in front of him. I hope you enjoy this item as much I enjoyed writing it, it was fun to see a classic in a whole new way.

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From its opening, "Mr. Plow" is lampooning the ubiquity and effectiveness of advertising in a consumer society: the television on television shows us the opening graphic of "Carnival of the Stars", a made-for-TV special that seems to be as much filler as we know real made-for-TV specials to be. It's introduced and populated by TV stars, and in trying to reach out to the ever-shrinking attention span of the television viewer, celebrities are named in the early going (Troy McClure, the host, who reminds people of his celebrity status by - as always - citing the recent movies he's starred in, and guest star Angela Lansbury). His introduction to the show is "tonight, we'll see...", which effectively says "don't change the channel" and thus creates the first ad seen in this Simpsons episode. When their hero Krusty the Clown is introduced - along with a timely mention of a brand of drug he is no longer addicted to - to perform the episode's first stunt (taming three Siberian tigers, who run amok and begin mauling him), the presumption of a short (and ever-shrinking) attention span is confirmed, as the children utter an indifferent "they'll be chewing on him for a while..." before changing the channel.

The goal of advertising (for this television show) is to keep people watching, or in a sense, as with all advertising, to bring about action - that action usually being consumption of a given product. The ads-within-the-shows continues as, caught in a blizzard while driving home, Homer listens to the local radio hosts, who, with nothing to talk about (as radio hosts invariably do) begin punning on the word snow in an appeal to keep people listening. After all, sometimes people need to listen to the radio: weather forecasts, school closures and more vital information in the event of a blizzard-related emergency. For the second host's poorly-written pun to be met with "You're dead weight, Marty" demonstrates the value of a snappy one-liner in the episode's early going and may be another signal that this will be a story featuring more of the same.

Due to this snow, Homer totals both the family cars in hilariously low visibility, rear-ending the one in the laneway with the one that he is driving. His quest for a new vehicle begins, then, and the many ads in the episode start to come out, each of them demonstrating another facet of the advertising-ridden world in which we live, sometimes mocking it but other times simply observing that it works, or doesn't, and perhaps unintentionally hypothesizing as to why.

Having no car, Homer begins by hitching a ride by using the universal signifier for "I need a ride", sticking out his thumb on the side of the road and advertising his need for charity. The man who catches this simplest of signals is likely among the simplest of men: a farmer (with a pig named Zeke) who knows at the very least that one can't trust a pig with a truckload of watermelons. Reciting just this cliche, he justifies his decision to allow Zeke to ride in the cab, indifferent all the while that the man giving the signal - Homer, the advertiser - is just gorging himself on the watermelons in the back. Trying to sell the idea of giving him a ride, this advertiser recognized that the driver (consumer) also had watermelons (more money) to be had, and used his credibility (obtained, in a distinction that might trouble only George Orwell, by clearly not being a pig) to get his hands on more resources.

Homer arrives at "Crazy Vaclav's", looking to buy an affordable car (from a man who looks like Stalin and a country that "no longer exists"), and he is immediately hit with the most-touted selling feature of any car: gas mileage. The sales tagline, coming in person and not by commercial, is a classically formulated tagline: "take a test-drive and you'll agree...", a sentence that the salesman finishes with an unintelligible burst of a different language (beginning with "Zagreb") that proves just how meaningless such a product claim is. The product doesn't have to do anything: you just have to agree or feel that it does in order to purchase it.

Striking out here, Homer then goes to the Springfield Auto Show, and, entering a draw to win a new car, asks the most ridiculous question of the model standing beside it: do you come with the car? Everyone knows that she does not, but drawn to a product by an attractive actor, they are called to act themselves and enter the draw. That Homer and the man behind him in the line actually ask the same question points to whether or not this works - are they interested in having the car? Or are they admitting they were drawn in by the woman, forgetting the product entirely? That the woman can be considered as up for grabs as the car makes an object of her while simultaneously personifying an ad - as she is as empty as one - and she can offer the same sheepish giggle at he who dares question her function, batting her eyelashes and (as an ad should) effectively "just looking pretty".

In their travels, Bart and Lisa come across the shows more notorious exhibits: Bart finds and takes a stash of cash in the glove box of the car that once belonged to murderous robbers Bonnie and Clyde (despite Homer's insistence that Bart show some respect), but not before Lisa makes a much more informative visit to "Fourth Reich Motors".

All companies have a history, some of them perhaps better than others. While General Motors was spurred on by their construction of engines for the machines that took part in the Second World War, the Axis powers' war campaigns supported the fledgling Volkswagen and Mitsubishi. While the salesman draws attention to another highly-vaunted feature that makes cars desirable - safety considerations in the vehicle's construction - Lisa notices a human crawling away from the crashed car in the test video and remarks as much. While exaggerating automotive xenophobia at the height of the "buy American" years, this scene shows at the very least that even the best PR can't make one forget that Hitler nationalized the German auto industry on his way to committing his future attrocities.

Homer, meanwhile, comes across the batmobile (and the Krusty Weiner-Mobile - a play on Oscar Maier's that ironically features this son of a rabbi advertising pork), reuniting with the children just in time to meet another celebrity, Adam West, who goes through a litany of promotional materials in an attempt to convince the children that he is Batman. The original Batman television series - as we are thankfully more aware thanks to Frank Miller and the Christopher Nolan-directed films - was a blemish on the product's name, and, like the dubious history of auto companies, best forgotten by everyone around the brand, as it does not make a good selling point.

Backing away from the suddenly frightening Mr. West, all these ads having filled only the first quarter of the episode, the action of the episode begins in earnest when Homer comes across the plow that will soon be his. And in classically delusional and consumerist fashion, he immediately fantasizes about how much better his life will be if he buys this product, dreaming of plowing protestors out of the President's way.

Sensibly, though, Homer says "ah, can't afford it" and begins to turn away. Advertising - in the form of the salesman - will always disagree, though, and attempt to convince you that you can indeed... or that at the very least, you will be emasculated if you don't buy the product. It should come as no surprise that advertising plays on our insecurities, but the threat of emasculation - as Freud (sort of) said when he talked of the castration complex - is quite possibly the greatest motivator for a male to consume, or frankly (and Freudian-ly) to do anything at all. The salesman not only ridicules Homer, he presents a pie-in-the-sky vision of this truck not costing money, but being an investment, a tool with which one can make money. Sucked in by the rare on-the-spot ad (for what is advertising if not simply sales pressure over distance?) and unable to take the taunts of the salesman and much to Marge's chagrin, Homer buys the plow.

Advertising has been referred to as "the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward" (by Robert W. Sarnoff, on the same utexas.edu site as is listed above), and true to this analysis, Homer is - as so often over the course of the series - once more an entrepreneur. It is now up to him to get his business going, and inevitably, he will have to advertise. He dispenses with the disapproval Marge displayed upon his purchase of the truck, claiming that she sold short the effect of flyers and the "flashy jacket" reading "Mr. Plow" on the back.

When Homer's advertising fails, however - not because people aren't getting the message, but by a simple twist of fate (a gust of wind) - interestingly enough he encounters Barney, dressed in a humiliating adult sized diaper and baby bonnet handing out flyers for a nearby store. Barney is an alcoholic, and (thanks to Homer, we learn later) a complete failure in his life because of it. This makes, perhaps, an interesting comment about the "ground floor" of advertising. And though personal experience doesn't count when theorizing, I landed in advertising when I failed at something too - graduate school - and I have to say that the first few months I may not have looked much better than Mr. Gumble. Advertising is, in its simplest form, an attempt to sell over distance, and those who are good at it make a great living: so great, in fact, that if not selling over distance (via TV/Radio/Internet/Print ads), the only jobs in advertising are local gimmicks staffed by temps, students and those looking for a quick buck. Perhaps the advertiser's reputation is safest because they are known in the community, and they can afford to spend little on local promotion - even if, in a town like Springfield or any other, the local business is at the end of the day the advertiser's bread and butter.

Barney points out to Homer that such local advertising is gainless, though: "no one reads these things", he says, and we see him attempting to make people listen. The only comment he gets on his entusiastic promotion is from one man who calls Barney disgusting, perhaps telling us that local advertising is tacky, cheap and sometimes in poor taste compared to the mass advertising with which we are now so familiar.

Homer tries many different ways to advertise, with the flat-out funniest being the special reading he performed in church... in which he proceeded to ask that people patronize his business. While Rev. Lovejoy tells Homer that this is incredibly low, to advertise from the pulpit is not unheard of: in fact, the scripture he was reading was to be an epistle from St. Paul - one of many letters the man wrote to people around the region imploring them to see (the perhaps overblown) "way, truth and light" and become Christians. (Put another way: this was the first direct-mail advertising.)

It is finally Lisa who brings the best idea to Homer - isn't it always? - when she suggests that he simply purchase some cheap commercial time on channel 92. Flipping to this channel for an example, we see Captain McAllister (affectionately known as just "the Sea Captain" to most, I admit that I had to look his name up) in a standard infomercial-for-record-sets to promote his self-produced recording "Sea Chanteys".

Homer purchases the commercial time - the absolute cheapest spot, the one latest at night (as Bart reveals when he asks Homer who is watching TV at 3:17 a.m.) and right before the station goes off the air until morning - and we see the commercial about to be watched by only "alcoholics, the unemployable [and] angry loners". It is a terribly low-budget mess - which captures Grampa Simpson ditching his role to go lie down - but a seemingly honest ad which features the whole family. It's a somewhat intelligently-devised ad too, going not for image points but rather the basics, including (1) a premium offer, (2) a catchy jingle, and (3) the made-up questions from the prospective (or imagined) consumers to put concerns at ease: "Are you tired of having your hands cut off by snowblowers? And the inevitable heart attacks that come with shovelling snow?", which the kids meet with an emphatic "uh-huh" before Lisa breaks in with "But I'm a real tight-wad... can I afford this service" (a question which - if you can manage to take it seriously - is designed to give even the most skeptical peace of mind.)

It is reasonable to presume that Homer devised this succesful ad by accident, perhaps repeating a pattern recognizable from his large consumption of television if no actual technique is present. The lack of technique in local commercials is often endearing, however - Toronto's pawn-shop mogul Russell Oliver or "Idomo furniture guy" provide good examples - and accordingly, Homer does manage to drum up some business. He becomes successful, which in turn engenders resentment - Nelson pushing "Plowboy" Bart into the snow when Homer averts a snow day by getting the bus to school - and envy in Barney.

The product that Homer purchased, therefore - the plow - was actually as heroic as the ads made it seem. The service Homer provided was in its way heroic as well, much as his ads (in which he literally kicked out Old Man Winter) had promised. In addtion to financial success, Homer gains Marge respect, and in telling him she was proud of him, she also asks him to wear the Mr. Plow jacket in the bedroom. Marge shows here that she has become a victim of an inflated brand value, having (literally) fantasies in which a desirable man wears a given brand - in the same way that some may imagine a desirable man as wearing underpants reading "Calvin Klein" on the waste band, or a desirable women in nothing but her partner's favourite sports team's branded jersey, perhaps?

Regardless, the success brought about with good, honest advertising puts Homer in a position of authority, and when Barney states that he wishes he was also a "hero" (as Moe calls Homer), Homer uses a well-worn cliché that resembles the U.S. Army's recruitment slogan - "get out there and be the best damn Barney that you can be" - to encourage Barney to be an entrepreneur as well.

Homer's advertising had become slightly unethical, however: he offered a t-shirt as a premium offer which was not a Mr. Plow t-shirt (as the commercial implies), but a tattered, old (advertising) t-shirt reading "Stockdale for Veep". He also fudged the questions a little to exaggerate the value of the service, and ignored Bart's question about having proper business licenses. Advertising here became more than the traditional "selling over distance", and began to inflate the value of the product and elide restrictions on his business growth. This, combined with Homer's somewhat boastful advertising to Barney ("Well, wishing won't make it so..."), might be the hubristic moment that inevitably leads to Mr. Plow's downfall.

But Barney buys the product: a plow, yes, but also the dream of material wealth as embodied by Homer. Homer effectively (if inadvertently) talks up the idea, advertising this way of life to Barney and filling Barney's imagination with that hope that a good ad always does. And it is from here that Barney's business - a rival snow-plowing outfit under the name Plow King - begins to chip away at Mr. Plow's success by using more effective but less ethical advertising in the race to the bottom that advertising inevitably becomes.

After telling Homer that there is "nothing wrong with a little healthy competition", Barney proves that the competition is anything but: he shoots out Homer's plow's rear tires after saying this, and in metaphorical manner, Barney does this again, literally beating Mr. Plow (well, a cardboard cut-out in his image) with a baseball bat in his ad. Not only is it an attack ad, he then brings in a celebrity endorsement - Linda Ronstadt - who seeks to get involved in the fun of bashing the competition. This aggressive advertising continues when she sings a jingle for Barney, but one that - unlike Homer's, which just said his own name (and his name again) - is abusive and libellous and features her calling Mr. Plow a "loser" and alleging that he is a "boozer". In a manner not unfamiliar to those who make political ads, Barney is projecting his own worst trait onto his competition in order to pre-emptively deflect negative attention... after all, who would hire a snow plow driver who is a known drunk?

Homer takes offense, and asks Barney a simple "how could you?", pointing out all that he's done for Barney, which leads into a flashback: teenaged Barney is depicted as hyper-intelligent, studying for the SATs and set to score very high and get into Harvard, when in comes Homer with beer stolen from his sleeping father. Barney objects, and Homer tosses him a tagline: "Mellow out, man". Peer pressure and ad pressure are remarkably similar in this moment, as Barney says he'll try the product (the beer) just to get Homer off his back.

We try new products - a recent example, I can say that I remember trying Coke Zero - only because we are inundated with advertising. Eventually, even though there is Diet Coke and regular Coca-Cola (not to mention the past "new Coke", a marketing success met with product failure), we will cave. Barney praises the beer like an ad's best convert - "Where have you been all my life?!? - and we see perhaps that Homer is not so innocent as we thought, and did not always participate in generally ethical advertising. Homer has a moment of dejection at the bar, which we could even see as an anagnoristic moment where he recognizes what he has done wrong, and he feels shame at having led Barney astray with booze; therefore, a dramatic reversal of fortunes - peripeteia - must follow.

Knowing all of his clientele by name and having been awarded the key to the city, Mr. Plow is a local hero before the Plow King comes onto the scene. Plow King's success comes only from effective (if unethical) advertising and he does not know his customers, as proven when he indifferently and possibly drunkenly calls Adam West "Superman" after plowing his laneway. Faced with this loss in business, Homer recognizes that he needs to regain his customers, and he turns once more to advertising.

Homer's first mistake, in pitching ideas to his kids upon Lisa's suggestion that he do something "fresh and original", is to do "a rap". (So many commercials were doing "a rap" in the early 90s, and not one of them had an ounce of authenticity, but as it was popular with the youth, this is what we saw. Dark years, I remember.) As his rap crashes and burns, Homer immediately realizes that he is out of his depth, and (in a reference to, of all things, Bewitched, and likely made to deprive real advertisers of free advertising within the episode), he consults fictional agency "McMahon and Tate Advertising" (after which a real agency appears to have now been named - http://www.mcmahon-tate.com/).

The McMahon and Tate employee reveals himself right away as a "shooter" in the ad world, promising to come up with the ad that will save Homer's business. Citing annoying radio commercials as examples of his work, Homer immediately calls the man out on his lack of ethics, punching him in the face and holding him responsible for his actions. The man is unfazed: "it happens all the time". What's more, he advertises to Homer (as all ad agencies inevitably must) by putting the sales pitch on him and guaranteeing to save his business. He can make this guarantee, as he always makes ads which are so grating and ubiquitous that people inevitably hate them, but that nevertheless work because of their memorability. This is the most profitable thing an advertising agency can consistently do.

Mr. Plow's new ad is completely out of touch with the customers he is courting and the advertiser himself: Homer doesn't even know if it was his commercial the first time he sees it. It does absolutely nothing to drum up business, but the money is clearly already gone from Homer's pocket.

Following this new commercial, we see another commercial, the first of two to come in the Channel 6 newscast. Near Widow's Peak, as reporter Arnie Pie's chopper is crashing in the blizzard, news anchor Kent Brockman is pressing him to report on the ski conditions - an aspect of the news that, aside from an opportunity to get the highest-bidding ski resort's name into the news instead of the commercial break, is of no relevance to the majority of the population watching, and certainly not newsworthy.

What we are seeing in the news broadcast is infotainment (a term I hope was coined by Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death), a term even more aptly used to describe the "upcoming Fox special 'In Search of Bigfoot'", which is depicted with footage being halted when the wristwatch being worn by the actor posing as Bigfoot appears in the shot. What is interesting here is that the Simpsons are at once promoting and mocking Fox: Kent Brockman's Channel 6 is not (known to be) a Fox affiliate, but he points to a Fox television show in his report, allowing the Simpsons to take a jibe at their own network while still getting a reminder in that we are watching Fox, thus precariously walking the line when it comes to in-program advertising. (It is for this reason that I chose the title that I did for this entry.)

Homer, meanwhile, is so controlled by his envy that he impulsively calls in a false tip to Barney to get him trapped in the storm on Widow's Peak - horribly unethical, but a way in which Homer is able to reconnect with his customers. Homer's call, interestingly enough, interrupts Barney's hot-tub date with Linda Ronstadt, just as she's talking about putting a Spanish version of the jingle on her album; and though popular songs sometimes gain even more popularity by way of commercials - remember U2's "Vertigo" among the many songs used to sell the iPod? - to actually put a jingle on an album to increase sales turns that jingle from a commercial for the advertised product into a commercial for the artist themself. As Barney said earlier, he and Ms. Ronstadt had been looking to do a project together for a while, but this is not at all about creativity or artistic collaboration even if we, as good McLuhanites, accept that advertising is the art of the 20th century.

Their collaboration is based solely on the money generated by this ad, and so too is Barney's publicity-stunt $50,000 donation to the Shelbyville Dance School. The promotion clearly worked, as the event was newsworthy enough that it has provided the stock photo that appears on Channel 6 when Kent Brockman reports that Plow King is missing, and gives us the aforementioned second ad within the newscast. The disingenuous donation may be the most effective but least ethical of all PR moves, but it ensures that Barney can be seen right away as somewhat of a local hero when the news reports him missing. (Ironically, he is not donating to any such organization in Springfield, but rather, their rival town Shelbyville, which might point to more misguided advertising acumen on Barney's end as well.)

And when the episode enters it final movement, as in the beginning it presents us with a cliche that doesn't hold up: Homer says his plow is as "sure-footed as a mountain goat" only to watch one slip repeatedly and plummet from the mountainside. Nevertheless, Homer rescues Barney, and though they decide to bury the hatchet, Homer's hubristic boast that "not even God himself can stop" two friends working together is met with a deus ex machina ending, as a booming "Oh yeah?" from the clouds ushers in a ray of sunshine and an early spring in full bloom.

It is most interesting that the characters are punished by God in the end, and a possible meaning of this immediate retribution is that it may in fact be wrong for companies to team up and attempt to completely cover their given market. This teaming up came after each figuratively or literally attempted to harm the other, and recognizing that they had met their match - as many conglomerates often will - they merge to simply save the effort and cost of competing, and to make more money together. Homer and Barney, as people, are made to pay a price for their behaviour, as both lose their businesses, but do mass-advertising corporations ever pay a similar price? An unethical ad may sink a political candidate, as this is, like Homer and Barney, a person with a reputation and a limited budget. A conglomerate, however, pays an ad agency to come up with a less-unethical ad (or, failing that, pulls out a PR offensive, writing apology letters and often making a donation to a charity affiliated with any injured parties).

A less cynical interpretation would say that the story is one of friendship overcoming hardship, but it is hard to argue that the hardship to be overcome is anything but envy; and when one considers this as a story of creating and overcoming envy, it only makes sense to see it as a story that is, more than anything else, a story about advertising. And when wars fought not with weapons but with advertising conclude, even if all the products and services are gone, the brand - thanks to the amount of literature and art created for and around it - is all that remains; fittingly, in the end, Homer's plow is repossessed, and he still has (as Marge points out) his health and his friend, he has gained just this for his effort: his own brand, Mr. Plow, emblazoned on the back of a jacket that - aside from the joy it gives Marge - might just as well say "Stockdale for Veep".

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Other Observations:

  • In Homer's fantasy of plowing away protestors for the President, one has to wonder how happy Mr. Buy American himself - George H. W. Bush - would be with Homer for using a (presumably) Japanese "Kumatsu" (like the real industrial vehicle-maker "Komatsu") truck. This episode may compensate for this, however, in the pro-(domestic) auto industry comments made by both Mayor Quimby - thanking Homer for helping people get around without resorting to public transit or carpooling - and Kent Brockman, who promises to "keep driving his old Pontiac" if the resulting Greenhouse Effect results in warmer winters.
  • Given the amount of emphasis on advertising in the episode, I had to wonder if at least one of the writers involved with "Mr. Plow" had a background in that field. As Chris Turner points out in Planet Simpson, Jon Vitti and John Swartzwelder were contributors to Army Man, the humour magazine founded by the man many believe to be The Simpsons's most influential writer, George Meyer. All episodes go through the rewrite process countless times, essentially by committee, but the contribution and cooperative relationship of this particular trio - over 90 episodes through Season 14, as Turner notes - is noteworthy in the discussion of "Mr. Plow" for two reasons: (1) Meyer has "an intense fascination" with blatantly false advertising, and (2) it was John Swartzwelder, in fact, who was a "legendarily reclusive" advertising copywriter (Turner 22-23).
  • Homer tires of the waiting game and instead wishes to play "Hungry Hungry Hippos", which is a terrible excuse for a board game, a poorly-made but exceptionally well-marketed toy. Is this proof that he has been successfully reached (duped) by these ads in the same way that the average four year-old might be?
  • Though it may be little more than comedic randomness, is it possible that the Batmobile belongs now to Adam West for no reason other than for him to inform the world - that is to say, advertise - that he played Batman first, and to accordingly assist his career?