Your Kitchen Knives Don't Work.

Deep within the ranks of products you neither want nor need is the sonic blade. This electric serrated knife oscillates when it cuts, which its makers claim makes cutting easier than with a normal knife. The goal of this infomercial is to convince us that we need the sonic blade because our normal knives simply do not work.

Is this true? Do we really need the Sonic Blade? Of course not. Humans have been using knifes to cut food for millennia. Knives are not really as bad as the Sonic Blade's makers would have us believe. A well made, sharpened knife can do almost anything you need it to. But Emson, the company that markets the Sonic Blade, wants to make you think that your knives are not good enough. Their goal is to implant an annoyance with our kitchen tools, so that we convince ourselves that our we need to replace our knives with that amazing, miraculous Sonic Blade.

The makers of this advertisement do something almost every maker of every informercial has done. They tell their viewers that what they possess is not good enough, and that if they want to make their lives so much easier, they should buy the product. In this case, the advertisers are saying that kitchen knives aren't adequate, and the only way to overcome this inadequacy is to buy the Sonic Knife.

The advertisers, however, are being very subtly dishonest. Look at the first few images in the clip. If the makers of the commercial had used a serrated knife while cutting their bread or sandwiches, they may not have turned out so "squashed" and "smushed." Most of the other foods that they used, especially the fruits and vegetables, can be cut with a normal knife without any extreme difficulty, yet they claim that to be able to cut celery and strawberries, you need a Sonic Blade.

Through intelligent tricks and some slight subterfuge, the makers and advertisers of the Sonic Blade have attempted to convince us that we need their product. The truth is, advertisers do this all the time. Every commercial or advertisement that we see is trying to convince us that something about our lives is unsatisfactory to us. We, then, must do the rest and buy their product. That way, we can make ourselves happy, at least until the next racket comes along.

Whiskey in the White House

It has become common knowledge that companies like to pay for their products to be subtly, or not so subtly, placed in popular media as a form of advertisement. Product placement, as it is called, has become a fact of life in our media and advertisement-crazed world, a fact of which many are quite critical. The goal is to be as stealthy as possible in including products in a television show or movie. However, advertisers are not always successful.

Product placement is so common that even the lefty, antiestablishment Aaron Sorkin used it in his script. For those unfamiliar with The West Wing, the character in this clip, Leo McGarry, was a very serious alcoholic. As he is talking about his drinking, the images on the screen include a shot that could have come out of a Johnnie Walker commercial of a bartender gently pouring this very expensive scotch ($30 a shot!) into a glass with two perfectly stacked ice cubes. Not only did Leo mention that he drank Johnnie Walker, giving the company a nice little name-drop, he extolled the virtues of the scotch that is aged twice as long as "very good scotch."

The goal of product placement is to be seamless. The viewer should not know that they are looking at an advertisement. That is what makes this a bad usage of the technique. Leo may be in a daze, talking about things he never talks about, but singing the praises of expensive liquor really has no place in this scene. Perhaps product placement would work better weaved in to some of Sorkin's machine-gun-like dialogue, where viewers aren't sure what the characters are saying half the time anyway.

What may be the most surprising thing about this advertisement is that Johnnie Walker thinks that even having their name associated with chronic alcoholism is good advertisement. Of all the characters in The West Wing who could have given Johnnie Walker their subtle endorsement, the man who was in rehab for alcoholism and drug abuse seems to be the least likely candidate. This says quite a bit about advertisers. They figure that consumers are more likely to associate their product with the positive description, not the negative association with any character, and they may be right.

Be like Leo McGarry and drink Johnnie Walker Blue, but don't be like Leo McGarry, and drink Johnnie Walker Blue responsibly.

Goldman Sachs: Job Creator and Economy Builder?

November 18, 2013

In one way, Goldman Sachs is rather unlucky. Because of the massive profit they made from the 2008 financial collapse, the public has a generally negative view of their organization. Goldman Sachs is part of a sort of "Axis of Evil" in Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and other financial institutions that the public blames for the Great Recession. In fact, people dislike Goldman Sachs so much that the name alone is infamous enough to turn people away from them. Indeed, I laughed out loud when I saw a Goldman Sachs commercial recently, the extended version of which is above. They claimed to be stimulating the economy, investing in small businesses, and helping the same normal people who they screwed just a few years before. It is clear that Goldman Sachs has a lot of work to do.

But they are doing it. They've ran commercials very much like this one in several places, trying to cultivate a positive reputation. They use stock phrases, much like a politician running for office, like "building the economy," "creating new jobs," and even just "small businesses." The connotation of these words is decidedly positive, but what do they actually mean? Not much, really. Goldman Sachs does not deign to explain how or where they are "building the economy," or how their programs help to reach that goal. Nevertheless, that phrase is quite effective in connecting with a public weary of a protracted economic recovery.

To "create new jobs" is straightforward enough, but through repetition by politicians and corporations alike, that phrase has reached the state of a holy motto, a mantra of our political and economic system. Do you want to be elected to Congress, your state legislature, your city council, or your local school board? Promise to create jobs. Are you a large private equity firm who wants people to like you? Say you create jobs. Is the claim true? Maybe. Does it matter? No, not really. Promising to create jobs is reification at its finest. The phrase has taken on a life of its own, to the point where it doesn't matter, in the short run, how or when jobs will be created, so long as someone says they will be.

The most significant use of language to beguile in this video is the phrase "small businesses."While this phrase is used often in politics and advertisement, its actual meaning is rather vague. What is a small business? Is it a business that is even marginally smaller than Goldman Sachs? Or is it your neighborhood coffee shop? Perhaps it is a business that has a few branches in a small locality, or a business that has many branches in a small locality, or a business that has a few branches in a large region. Is gross income a factor? What about net income? Number of customers? Maybe a small business is all of these things. In terms of the advertisement, what matters is how the consumer views a small business. Goldman Sachs wants to project the image of the "neighborhood coffee shop" small business. People from your community, local entrepreneurs creating jobs and stimulating your local economy in Small Town, USA. That image makes us like Goldman Sachs, those great job-creating, economy-building patriots. Regardless of whether that image is true, it improves their public image.

Goldman Sachs' advertising executives have been working hard. They have come up with a catch program title, something that they can advertise so that they can carry on whatever they do out of the public eye. A simple visit to their website shows their effort. Today's front page shows how Goldman Sachs is helping British small businesses (that's a key phrase) succeed and the Philippines recover from their natural disaster. Their mission statement is one long, rambling euphemism for "private equity firm," which has a negative connotation. They are using language to shape how we think. Whether it is misleading or not, Goldman Sachs is influencing the way we perceive their company. Is it working? Are people actually beginning to favor Goldman Sachs? I certainly have not seen any sign of that, but it could begin to happen. Only time will tell.