“During These Challenging Times”: Advertising’s Response to a Pandemic, then Protests
I don’t watch cable TV much. But when I do, I pay close attention to the rhetoric embedded in the commercials.
Not that close attention has been needed for us to sense the new rhetoric that TV ads have developed over the past few months. Or, as the ads say in a steady voice, “during these challenging times.” There’s also the dramatic and inspiring “now more than ever” to let us all know something big has been happening out there. But what? The ads have often been reluctant to come out and say what is so “challenging” or why “now” is suddenly more important than “ever.” In recent TV ads, the word “coronavirus” is nearly as unspeakable as the virus itself is invisible.
While I don’t have cable TV, the pandemic led me, like many others, to dust off my streaming subscriptions. Watching the new High Fidelity series on Hulu in late March, mere weeks into nationwide shutdowns, I saw the same Hyundai ad over and over. Hyundai has since removed the ad from its official YouTube channel, but it’s titled “Unpredictable” and I found it again here. In the opening images, a father pushes his daughter on a swing and there’s a shiny SUV parked in the background. We hear phrases like “nothing is more important than family” and the ubiquitous “well-qualified buyers.” Hyundai promises to cover payments “for up to six months” if new buyers lose their job due to COVID-19 — as if such deferred payment offers are something new and haven’t long been part of every car manufacturer’s holiday and summer bonanzas to shift as many units off their lots as possible. Seeing this ad, a more shameless and crude example of the refined messaging that marketing firms would produce afterward, I knew coronavirus and corporate interests had completed their inevitable collision.
Long after the dust of that initial collision had settled, I witnessed the endgame of marketers’ efforts during the pandemic. Restrictions had started to ease, and I visited my long-distance partner who has cable TV. Nearly every ad sent messages meant to uplift and hit the same notes about “times of uncertainty.” Aside from different brand names at the end, the ads felt indistinguishable. During my first night watching HGTV and Guy’s Grocery Games, I started tinkering with thoughts about words I kept hearing during the commercials. This is what I came up with.
Always
Always, like many absolute words, finds its power in erasure. In its ability to push aside competing possibilities. With always, there is one possibility. During commercials, it is a word that can calm anxieties and quell skepticism. Narrators in recent ads say, “At [insert company name], we have always been there for you and your family, and we’re here now more than ever.” Used like this, always folds up the present and the past. It refers to the now while it also retroacts.
Ads during the pandemic have been using always to invite us to play a believing game. Writing studies scholar Peter Elbow defines the believing game as a “disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter.” Which is, coincidentally, precisely what ads have always wanted from us — to accept every one of their ideas, and, lately, to accept that nearly every company who can afford a 30-second ad spot is now and has always been benevolent, family-oriented, flexible, compassionate, etc.
But this raises at least one obvious question: if these companies really have cared this much about customers and employees for so long, then why are we just now hearing about it all the time?
One answer is that always has become a site of competition. No company wants to risk being singled out as having not done every possible good thing. So, suddenly, they all do these good things and always have.
Also, if these companies are here for us “now more than ever,” that phrasing immediately suggests that past efforts were lesser than now. Were lesser than always. But we better not ponder this linguistic snaggle for very long. Play the believing game, make a purchase, swear our brand allegiance. Then repeat.
Home
There’s a problem with home as a word. Really, it’s a fundamental problem of all language. We use words to signify ideas, images, and feelings. Words are just signs we share. But while we can share a word with each other, we cannot share an identical set of ideas, images, and feelings. We hear a word like “car” and immediately form our own associations. One person might think of a snarling hot rod, another of a 1996 Mercury Grand Marquis, and someone else of the blocky vehicles they drew long ago on construction paper.
Home is similarly associative and hard to pin down. It can be a building, a town, a state, or a country, but also a set of feelings and actions, and we can sense it most strongly when we’re with others or even alone. For most of us, it is much more than where we usually sleep at night: it is many things all at once.
This near limitless flexibility has always presented problems for advertisers striving for mass appeal, and it still has during the pandemic. Any portrayal of home in an ad will be inclusive and exclusive, tempting and distasteful, familiar and alien. Targeted ads based on demographic data can mitigate these issues by narrowing the audience. But no amount of accurate data grants surety to advertisers.
At least momentarily, the pandemic altered the home space such that target demographics largely collapsed in one important way for advertisers. Lockdowns left many of us stuck inside our houses. We lost free access to much of the outside world, and advertisers gained access to an enormous and predictable target audience. They knew what many of our lives had become as well as where and how we were spending our time. With our society contracted like this, advertisers no longer needed to show us how to improve our lives; they only needed to show us how to improve our home lives.
Some companies were already well-positioned to craft these kinds of messages. Others were not. Clothing and lifestyle brands suddenly had to pitch their summer trends to housebound customers, and real estate companies that depend on the summertime’s warm weather to bring out buyers found themselves in a similar bind.
Selling houses has become incredibly tricky, even for an online listing service. Traditional car companies have embraced the fully-online sales model popularized by Carvana. But buying a house is far too risky for most consumers to take out a mortgage on something they’ve never seen in person. Facing this dilemma, Zillow attempted to spin the pandemic in its favor.
Their pandemic ad called “The Real Value of Home” shows one family’s day within a picturesque suburban home. Night fades out and sunlight appears. Through the windows, we see work being done, crafting activities, a family dinner, and then some TV before bedtime. No one exits or enters the house. Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” plays, the only hint of disturbance outside this idyllic refuge until the ad ends with “It’s times like these that we understand the real value of home.”
On its face, this commercial comes off as sweet and full of heart. But is it? Viewers are positioned as voyeurs. We stare from the sidewalk at this house. Gaze at the private lives of its inhabitants all day and into the night. What does Zillow want us to feel? Certainly not like stalkers. We see the full life this house provides for the family inside. The glorious sunshine that rolls daily over the roof giving way to the amber lights of mealtime around the table. Depending on our own lives during the pandemic, we are meant to feel at least one of two things: “I’m so glad I already have a house and life like that” or “I want that house and life.” For some of us, an affirmation of our good fortune; for others, something opposite of affirmation.
Zillow is playing on the inclinations we have to compare our lives with others. Jealousy is a persuasive tool. It sells lots of houses. The popularity of house-hunting TV shows is partially due to viewers’ envy. But this ad is being shown during a pandemic. The jealousy isn’t quite the same as before. Health, safety, and the luxury to stay home with loved ones all day as the virus spreads everywhere outside — Zillow knows some viewers are quietly, subconsciously yearning for these things. And Zillow is right. A supportive home space has never been more important than it has been lately.
Zillow is not alone in its depiction: many recent ads also presuppose home as a wholesome environment. But a house during the pandemic can be a stressful, toxic, and even dangerous space. As early as mid-March, reports of domestic violence had already increased and many children were hungrier without access to school-provided breakfast and lunch. Among my young college students, I had one who faced threats of being thrown out by parents afraid of catching the virus, another whose parents did force him to move out, and several more who not only lost their own jobs but whose parents lost income or were forced to shutter businesses.
Home became an obvious battleground for marketing firms. But for an unlucky many of us who could no longer temporarily escape to jobs, classes, or anywhere else, it became a much different kind of battleground.
Together
Perhaps the most common and powerful shared word across all these recent ads is together. Like many of our most persuasive words, it exists in a dyad: things are either together or they are separate. Nearby or apart. Close or far. Together stretches the rubberband from one side between these distant opposites.
In the hands of advertisers, the word has been used not only to assure us that we are “still together” and are “all together in this” but that there will come an impending snap-back to reunite us with everything we care about and reestablish society’s normal state. Or better than the old normal, because we will have made it through these trying times together.
It is odd, of course, that companies — who by their nature are in competition for our dollars — are messaging togetherness. But during the pandemic, TV ads have tried to provide us with aspirational representations of our together selves. Lit balconies that span a city block, tenants joining together to applaud our frontline healthcare workers. Seeing people like this trying to defy apartness is a reminder of the human spirit’s best potential, and it’s only ironic that large, profit-driven corporations are best positioned to package and deliver these inspiring images to our screens. And, by doing so, they have counter-balanced the political divisiveness we’ve seen playing out on news networks. Advertisers have offered the clear, uplifting, and unified messaging that press conferences and politicians’ tweets have too often failed to give.
But given all that has happened during the pandemic in the United States, clearly we are not all together. Not in how we feel about the virus’ potential to alter and end lives, nor in how we feel as lives are being cut short by racial injustice.
While We Protest: How Big Companies Show Their Support
When I began formulating my ideas about TV advertising’s new shared language during a time of viral pandemic, George Floyd had not yet been murdered by police. Justifiably frustrated people of all races and backgrounds had not yet started protesting across the world and online. The cop who did it and three others who watched had not yet been charged. Officers in Buffalo had not yet tried to callously walk over an elderly man bleeding from his head after they’d pushed him down. And our biggest companies had yet to decide if a black man’s life being extinguished underneath a white cop’s knee was enough reason to risk taking a public moral stance.
When most companies feel the need to demonstrate activism, they run into issues of scale and space. Their goals to sell us stuff outweigh any other cause. Space for publicly supporting a cause exists only in the margins of their business models.
I haven’t been watching cable TV recently, but some quick web searches demonstrate how our biggest retail companies show support for protests of racial injustice — they do so in the wedges between their products. On their homepages, they have found just enough room for hyperlinks that lead to brief blog posts. Their products take up too much space to show anything larger.
Consumerism and activism have always coexisted in this strange and shifty balance. Companies pay attention to the beliefs and opinions of their target customers. And if they thought it was in their best interests to not publicly support racial equality, their homepages wouldn’t even show us hyperlinks.
Rewind 60 years or so. Some companies dedicated whole pages of print advertising to images like this:
We should all be hoping and pushing for this latest historical moment of racial injustice to finally become a moment of real, sustained progress. But we should remember that large companies not only actively work to shape the opinions we hold of ourselves but also our perceptions of others, and we should never forget that the marketing campaigns of these companies will always reflect the morals and ideals they think will best attract and keep customers.
