By Nigel Beale.

"All advertising has abandoned the pastoral appeal of
yesteryear in favor of the antisocial emphasis on `power’ -
and given how pervasive advertising is today, we must now
finally recognize it as the great driving propaganda of our
system, promoting the mass attitudes essential to the culture
of consumption much as, say, Soviet propaganda long did for
Stalin, or as Dr. Goebbels did for Hitler`s rule. "

Mark Crispin Miller, Adbusters magazine, Winter `95

Yes, it sure is fun and easy to crap on advertising. Ironic that
Miller should recruit to his argument the very psychopaths that
world and cold wars were fought against in order to preserve the
right to advertise. No doubt he`d prefer us all to go around goose-
stepping in the latest, fashionably uniform, government-approved
blue work apparel.

Miller and his self-righteous, adbusting ilk, like shooters of
barrelled fish, deserve little credit for attacking such easy prey.
Capitalism, and its ugly partner consumerism, while far from
perfect, represent the least-worst form of social and economic
existence known to humankind. Trying to lay all its misdemeanours
at advertising’s doorstep is a mug’s game.

Adbusters magazine has been doing this now for some five years. Not
that it isn’t entertaining, frequently well-written, and stylishly
designed (a cross between Wired and Harpers); nor its evolution
unimpressive: from a poor, schizophrenic tree-hugging, ad-hating
alternative quarterly, to a healthy, rich, together, ad-hating
‘Journal of the Mental Environment.’

No. It’s just that I’m tired of the facile, monotonous, dubious
argument that advertising is solely responsible for, to paraphrase
Max Weber, the world of spirit losing out to a world of matter
where the human project seems encased in a leaden-ness of things.

The standard defence given by the ad and marketing industry is that
it is not responsible for our miserable condition. It merely
identifies and responds to existing needs; caters to, but cannot
create, predisposition; performs an essential informational
function; helps sustain the media; and in this complex world,
experiences genuine difficulty understanding and predicting the
behaviour of consumers.

While all of this may be true, advertising does only offer
consumers a choice from commercially viable options; does stress
only the positive; does target wealthy consumers; does raise
expectations; does use sex, love and fear to sell products; does
promote questionable stereotypes and values; and does promote
legal, though harmful, products which leaves it open to moral
criticism.

Advertising does not, however, turn otherwise rational consumers
into helpless, desire-driven purchasers of unwanted products. It
simply promotes products that critics like Adbusters dont like.
Advertising is not responsible for all the evils in our consumer
society. It is simply a tool which can be put to constructive or
destructive uses.

I’ll continue to subscribe because the magazine can be provocative
and clever. But for thoughtful commentary on advertising, I’ll turn
to the likes of Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century English
lexicographer, who extolled the virtues of money making enterprise
and defined advertisers as `givers of intelligence.’

by Nigel Beale
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Supreme Court of Canada rules that
informational advertising doesn’t work.

The Supreme Court may know the law, but when it comes to
advertising, it knows about as much as a fruit-fly does about
attention spans.

In a decision which essentially leaves the field open for
interested parties to scrap over degrees of free speech, the
Supreme Court recently struck down the 1988 Tobacco Products
Control Act. Here’s how the majority opinion’s argument goes: first
it says that there is “no direct evidence of a scientific nature
showing a causal link between advertising bans and a decrease in
tobacco consumption.”

Furthermore, because no causal link exists “whether from direct
evidence or logic and reason, between the objective of decreasing
tobacco consumption and [an] absolute prohibition on the use of
tobacco trademark[s] on articles other than tobacco products…A
complete ban on a form of expression is more difficult to justify
than a partial ban.”

In other words, because the government failed to prove that a
partial cigarette advertising ban would be less effective than a
total one (in reducing tobacco consumption), the Court deemed the
1988 Act too severe a restriction on freedom of expression, and, as
such, unconstitutional. A total ban is verboten. A partial ban is
cool.

Up to this point the Court’s ruling is reasonable. The air thickens
however when pronouncements are made about the relative
effectiveness of different types of advertising. Here’s how Madam
Justice Beverley McLachlin weighs in: “As a matter of reason and
logic, lifestyle advertising is designed to increase consumption.
Purely informational or brand preference advertising, however, has
not been shown to have this effect.”

Putting aside the obvious fact that all (not just lifestyle)
advertising is “designed” to increase consumption, it’s clear that
in the land of advertising, our Supreme Court has a decidedly
[David] “Ogilvyan” bent: one that embraces the selling power of
emotional images, and rejects another advertising guru (Rosser
Reeves)’s “logical presentation,” “unique selling proposition,”
informational approach to the art.

While it may be argued that factual messages work better for
technical products like cars and stereos, and emotional messages
for cigarettes and booze, there are way more exceptions here than
rules. Successful marketing ideas have a habit of trashing rules.
Lobbing around definitive explanations of why certain types of ads
do or don’t work, is a mugs game. There are no authoritative
answers; not even if they’re postulated by the Supreme Court of
Canada. Regulating when and where advertising can or can’t take
place is okay. Regulating “types” of advertising is preposterous.
***

Given that the industry loses close to 5,000 customers a day in the
U.S. alone (quitters and die-ers), the most promising “replacement
smokers,” aside from developing world populations, are our young
people. Most (something like 90%) start before they’re 21; many
(around 60%) start before they’re 14. Banning rock concert and main
stream sporting event sponsorships, bill-boards near school
grounds, and commercials directly targeted at youth, constitutes a
reasonable infringement on “free” speech.

Where is the tobacco industry in all of this: keeping its head
down, figuring out how it can leverage this legal victory into an
war they are really interested in winning: keeping those nasty,
unattributed warning labels off its pretty packages for ever and
ever.

by Nigel Beale

You’re at a party surrounded by black-clad arts admin types. You blurt out that art and advertising are the same thing. For the rest of the evening you’re treated like a Frenchman at a Greenpeace weenie roast. But not before being accosted with this argument:

‘”Successful” art and advertising may share, as a characteristic, the achievement of human contact, but it is here that the similarities between the two end.

The difference is in fact so profound that I’ll have to recruit some important thinkers to my argument. You probably haven’t heard of them, but still…

Essentially what drives the sharpest wedge between art and advertising is motivation. Art moves mind and soul; ads, using many of the same techniques, move product. “Real” art doesn’t sully itself with material concerns. Rather it unites us with a transcendent emotion.

James Joyce argued in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that pity and terror are important components of this transcendent or aesthetic emotion.

Pity he says, is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause.

By using the word arrest, Joyce means that this kind of emotion is “static”: the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, or go from something. The arts which excite these “kinetic” emotions (the pornographic or didactic, as he puts it), are therefore improper arts. Advertising is then improper art!

Marshall McLuhan, although claiming that advertisements are the single most rewarding source of information about a society, and are “the greatest art form in human history,” clearly supports my sharp distinction between true art, which, he says, enhances human perception and reveals the essential features of the contemporary environment, and advertising, which merely merges “individual and environment to intensify and repeat the hypnotic of that environment.” In other words, advertising is great only in the resourcefulness with which it induces certain states of mind.

And another thing, advertising is conventional. While true art rejects, or at least lives outside, all convention, advertising writ large is the quintessential expression of capitalist convention. While advertisements, relative to each other, do of course strive for unconventionality, no matter how clutter-cutting they may be, they’re still within the “kinetic” emotional envelop.

So there! Go sit in the corner you uni-dimensional philistine.’

***

What to say, aside from “oh yea?” Try this:

Not content with inspiring simply one “emotion,” today’s leading advertisers are this century’s true artists. They are the true experimenters, the true envelop pushers. They’ve come closest to wedding the “un-wedable”: eliciting a bona fide, isolated, static emotional response, while at the same time setting off long-fused kinetic fireworks. Benetton’s work offers a great example.

It’s full of energy, contradiction and confusion. It mixes sullied and unsullied motives; suffering and commerce; journalism, art and advertising; reportage and fashion; and static and kinetic emotions; Now that’s exciting, creative and unconventional. So what if it makes money for its “patron”. True artists don’t have to be like you, mired in misery, poverty, and self-absorbtion.

Of course advertising is art. One can gaze as literary historian Leo Spitzer observed, “with disinterested enjoyment” at an ad, without believing a word it says. In fact, many ads are more successful aesthetically than they are commercially.

And by the way, guess what Leopold Bloom (who, no less of an authority than biographer Richard Ellmann claims, is a depiction of James Joyce himself) the protagonist in Ulysses, does for a living? He’s an advertising salesman.

This article first appeared in Strategy Magazine.

By Nigel Beale

Strategy , 1996

It is a truth (to bastardize Jane Austen) universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a good libido needs to party, drink and get laid. Anything that interferes with the unbridled pursuit of these activities will, as a matter of course, be top of mind. Enter AIDS. For obvious reasons this modern-day plague has dramatically altered the lifestyles of the young and restless.

It doesn’t take genius, or polls for that matter, to understand why AIDS terrifies the non-monogamous among us. It does takes courage and leadership to tackle this terror, both of which Molson and Levi Strauss possess. In undertaking their respective social/relationship/philanthropic marketing programs (which, as I understand the field, means positive corporate involvement in issues which resonate with customers, employees and/or communities) Molson and Levi Strauss share a commitment to fighting the same disease. They are motivated however by different reasons.

MOLSON

In a presentation to I.A.B.C. Capitale in Ottawa last month, Charles Fremes, a senior V.P. with Molson, described why his company is involved in the HIV-AIDS issue. The answer: Numbers and brand preference.

According to statistics presented by Fremes, death due to AIDS is a major, fast growing cause of “lost years of life” for Canadian men. It also costs the Canadian economy a lot of money: some $2 billion in lost earnings from 1989 to 1992.

In each of Golfarb’s past four annual omnibus polls, AIDS has ranked among the top five concerns of Canadians. Eight out of ten agree with the statement: “Anyone can get AIDS.” Molson’s focus group testing uncovered similar thinking among young Canadians. After jobs, AIDS ranked tops above all other key concerns. AIDS was also identified as the most important issue that a company could address.

“I’d like to tell you that we acted at the outset on this research, which showed all these good reasons for getting involved and clearly pointed the way to a social marketing opportunity…alas it would not be true” said Fremes. “What sparked our initial involvement was a phone call from a Toronto group requesting beer for a fundraising party.”

The call led to an ongoing program of high profile, visible events featuring dancers, opera singers, actors, artists, photographers, comedians, fashion designers, hockey and baseball players, and rock bands, the proceeds from which have gone toward fighting AIDS.

As Fremes put it, “Since Molson’s business, after beer, is marketing and public relations, and since (AIDS) groups have a real need for support in their fundraising and communications, we felt we could not only address an important need, but do it in a way which matched our core corporate strengths.

While deliberately seeking a controversial issue, Molson has not, to date, disseminated AIDS-related messages on its packaging. The preference is to raise funds for local AIDS groups so that they can handle advocacy and education themselves. Since 1991 $1.2 million has been raised.

Some may criticize Molson’s involvement as opportunistic…AIDS, because it hits the rich and famous particularly hard, is a high profile “trendy” disease. If it remained a serious epidemic, but died as an issue of importance to Molson’s target audience, the company would probably not remain involved. To my mind, this doesn’t diminish Molson`s exemplary behaviour. The company`s primary responsibility is to its share holders; confronting AIDS makes good business and social sense.

LEVI STRAUSS & CO.

I recently had the chance to speak with Levi’s Manager of Corporate Communications James Toccacelli about his company`s impressive reputation as a combatant of AIDS in the workplace. I asked why he hadn’t hooked up with Molson to tackle the issue. His answer was that creating brand preference was not a major consideration in Levi’s social investment philosophy.

Rather than relying on polling data and seeking out opportunities to promote it’s involvement, LS&Co.’s approach has been low-key: to fulfil certain long established commitments it has made to society and to the communities in which it operates. Good P.R. line? Certainly, but genuine I think, and borne out by the literature.
The company commits some $700,000 annually in Canada to charitable giving. These monies are invested in both national and local programs designed not to make waves with target audiences, but `to leverage social change.’ In 1993, LS&Co.’s world-wide giving budget totalled $15 million.

Corporate giving focuses on improving the lives of the poor and under-served in communities where employees live and work, and on dealing with issues where opportunities for corporate leadership exist. The objective of Levi’s AIDS program is to help reduce risks so as to prevent spreading of the disease; it targets hard-to-reach groups such as street kids, and works with the Canadian AIDS Society to produce an `AIDS in the Workplace’ manual for national distribution.

Perhaps, because it is a privately held company, owned in large part by descendants of the original owner, Levi, more than Molson, can afford to take what might be described as a truer philanthropic approach to AIDS.

Regardless of motivation, the fact that these two companies are fighting this menacing disease is a credit both to themselves and to our oft maligned capitalist system.

by Nigel Beale. April 21/95

Last week CBC brass called together producers and reporters from across the country for a head-banging session in Ottawa. The closed door symposium covered important topics such as ethics and the media, the role of the media, the media and citizenship…the media and the media… you name it. But not one formal word about the future.

A bit like the captain of the Titanic, upon hearing the crack of the iceberg, calling a meeting of crew members to discuss the impact that shipping has on strengthening the cultural and commercial ties between the old and new worlds…okay, so its an important topic, but if everyone’s wetting themselves about who gets to sit in the lifeboats, the significance tends to pale.

Not that the CBC should be likened to the Titanic. As top executive put it toward the end of the event, the future looks bright. Maybe we won’t need shades, but technology should open up many new, creative, less expensive distribution and production doors. Despite these rosy possibilities, public broadcasting in Canada is in disarray. Here’s a brief review of how we got where we are, and some suggested solutions:

“To make good things popular and popular things good.” This simple phrase, in the ocean of eloquence that engulfs and eulogizes public broadcasting, states the case better than any other. It comes from the 1960 Pilkington Report, which entrenched the public broadcasting tradition in Britain, and ushered in an unprecedented, flourishing age in which British television became the envy of world broadcasting.

Despite being justifiably criticized as a medium singularly unsuited (sorry Moses) to serious intellectual development, television remains our culture’s principle mode of knowing itself. As a result Canadian policy makers have long struggled to put varied, representative, high-quality Canadian television programming, popular and otherwise, in front of Canadian viewers.
Unlike Britain, which as a result of the 1960 Pilkington Report, opted to expand its public broadcasting services, Canada chose the hybrid route, wedding the European with the American. Results have been decidedly mixed.

The 1968 Broadcast Act prescribed a system controlled by Canadians to safeguard and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of the country; in short to promote unity and national identity. It also called for the provision of challenging, entertaining, informative programming that catered to a wide range of audiences.

This policy has failed due to obvious conflicting objectives. Chief among them is the pitting of profit maximizing broadcasters against the CRTC, whose role, as defined by the 1968 Act, is to enforce minimum Canadian content levels on TV. The goal of private broadcasters is to provide programming with the highest possible appeal at the lowest possible cost. Producing Canadian dramatic programming is hugely expensive. Purchasing popular American programming is not. The CRTC has done little more than accommodate these goals. It’s farcical role can be likened to one of Aesop’s fables. The fox is allowed to gorge itself on plump flightless American chickens, on condition that it safeguards and nurtures a healthy little Canadian bunny rabbit colony. Fat chance.

The private sector has, true to its legitimate nature, done everything possible to avoid living up to its money-losing Canadian content obligations, despite the fact that it benefits from the use of public property (airwaves), and receives government protection in the form of tax right-offs for advertising on Canadian Stations (Bill C-58), and rules allowing for the simultaneous substitution of Canadian for U.S. signals (together worth $95 million a year according to the 1986 Caplan-Sauvageau Report).

This is not to say that commercial broadcasters have necessarily done wrong. They have simply worked within the context of a broadcasting system which, since the late 1970s has emphasized industrial over cultural development, where Canadian programming is provided increasingly by state subsidized private production. As a result Canada now has a strong, highly concentrated broadcasting industry, and television that becomes more and more American each time new technology is introduced.

This industrial approach to cultural development, coupled with fiscal crisis, has meant hard times for public broadcasting. In addition to being hamstrung by the conflicting mandates of promoting a single, nebulous national identity and culture, and catering to demands from a variety of tastes and audiences, the CBC is also under pressure to produce ‘popular’ programs that Canadians will watch and advertisers will support.

Programming that introduces Canadians to one another, that enlightens and that presents the world from a Canadian perspective, usually goes unwatched because it lacks audience appeal. This is not to say that Canadians can’t produce brilliant, popular television. The Boys of St. Vincent is as good as anything done anywhere else in the world. It’s just that while the capability exists, there remains a distinct lack of Canadian drama and entertainment available for Canadians to watch on television.

How to adequately secure a place for Canadian culture in today’s crowded television spectrum given that the public purse is tightening:

* Rationalize the existing broadcasting structure so that the private sector can concentrate on making money, and the public sector can concentrate on meeting the original intent of the Broadcasting Act.

* Instead of cajoling private broadcasters into producing programming which flouts the intent of the broadcasting act, bill them the equivalent of what they claim to be spending on Canadian content, and put the money into a fund for true Canadian production.

* Eliminate advertising from the main CBC network. Concentrate on producing and airing mostly low cost distinctively Canadian drama, entertainment and documentaries. Turn the network into a televised version of CBC radio (especially Morningside and Ideas). Put a camera into the National Arts Centre, and some of the many smaller theatres, bars, galleries and museums across the country.

* Move all national news programming production from the main CBC network to the advertiser-supported Newsworld channel.

* Get out of big time sports coverage. Sell the rights to the private sector (ie. strike a deal where the CBC gets a percentage of all ad revenues generated).

* Eliminate over-air distribution and put the CBC on cable

* Amalgamate the CBC, Telefilm and the NFB into one funding body designed to stimulate the production and airing of popular Canadian programming on as wide a cross section of channels as possible.

* Where there is adequate competition from the private sector (Toronto, Vancouver) eliminate local news programming

* Remove all American programming from the CBC schedule

* Reduce the disproportionately large amount of money going to Radio Canada, or at least use some of it to provide English subtitled French programming to English Canada, and French subtitled English programming to French Canada.

by Nigel Beale
March 27/95

It`s tangential at best. Tenuous even. It’s a real stretch. A far cry. In fact it’s damn near impossible to connect O.J. Simpson with this Ottawa column; save perhaps for the fact that he`s charged with a capital offence, and Ottawa the capital, gives offence.

A glib Torontonian (surely a redundancy) of my acquaintance recently suggested another tie: since we Ottawa folk have little else to busy ourselves with these days, watching the Juice on the Tube is, not surprisingly, a capital pastime. Confrontational? Without question. But that’s a federal-provincial story, and we here are concerned with the universal.

O.J. is hot, and there are some burning marketing issues to be covered. Since no-one in Toronto has the moxy to deal
with them – here is the Ottawa view:

Before commencing however, a word for you losers who aren’t captivated by “The Trial” Get a life. What we have here is Othello’s green-eyed monster wrapped up in the blood and gore of Titus Andronicus. The play’s the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience (if he has one) of the king. This is the stuff of high drama. The potential source of dazzling literary genius.

Take Stendhal`s brilliant 19th century novel `Le Rouge et le Noir,` for example. He was mesmerized by a similar, real life, O.J.-like trial. And boy did he harness the heat. As a result humanity now possesses some of the most seering prose ever written on love and ambition.

Incidentally, if you want great copy don’t go to the Marketing Awards, the classic works of Western Literature are the place to be. Altamira Investment’s clever use of Oscar Wilde is but a crystal on the iceberg. But enough with the high brow.

What about white bronco sales. Where are they going. If up, who’s buying them. Wouldn’t affirmative answers to these questions help advertisers put proof to George M. Cohen’s famous axiom about exposure at any cost “I don’t care what they call me, as long as they spell my name right.”

What about Ben and Jerry’s. Perhaps I’m sick, but travelling state-side several months ago I came across this famous ice-cream on the menu and ordered it because of the connection. Mind you, I haven’t gone out of my way to visit McDonald`s. But I bet the franchise that Kato and O.J. visited on that infamous night is doing brisk business. And why did Marcia Clark mention Burger King when questioning the smart-as-a-bag-of-hammers Kato Kaelin about the said visit. Have we got some payola happening here.

Speaking of Marcia (by far the smartest, least indecent lawyer in the room) apparently she’s having trouble keeping herself in decent duds these days. Why doesn’t Verace, or some such chic italian outfit like it step forward and cloth the poor women. No where near as smart as our own Liona Boyd, these fashion firms. She got a gig to play in front of the jury, plus the accompanying publicity bonanza. Nordik Trak did the same. Bet those jurists needed the exercise after having ridden the bench for so long.

But enough on content. Lets look at packaging. CNN and Newsworld are both doing commendable jobs, most notably in the music department. Which provides an entre for Neil Postman, by far this continent’s most impressive popular culture critic. Here’s what he has to say about news, music and television:

“In America, almost all news shows begin with music, the tone of which suggests important events about to unfold (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony would be entirely appropriate). The music is very important, for it equates the news with various forms of drama and ritual – the opera, for example, or a wedding procession – in which musical themes underscore the meaning of the event. Music takes us immediately into the realm of the symbolic, a world that is not be taken literally. After all, when events unfold in the real world, they do so without musical accompaniment.”

And this of course is the problem with the O.J. saga. Television serves up this rivetting, voyeuristic treat, with little care for the real personal trauma of those involved and no moral context within which to assess the fundementally important questions that are raised. Viewers are fed emotional adrenalin, and are, like victims, kept hanging in commercial purgatory from one helping to the next. The medium makes mega bucks.

While the process is fascinating, I’m grateful to be watching it from afar, in a country where privacy and individual rights (despite recent moves to the contrary) take precidence over the specious demands of “freedom of the press.”

TVOntario’s Studio 2 is Canada’s Best Newscast

by Nigel Beale

Strategy Magazine April June 6, 1999.

It happened innocently enough. Just another newscast. CBC news anchor Allison Smith, the best they’ve got, was interviewing this guy from some world policy institute about Kosovo.

Not your usual polished up, bite spitting rent-a-pundit either. This guy had a nice stack of bed-head going. His delivery was refreshingly laboured and unrehearsed, his content serious, complex, intriguing, useful and highly appropriate given the context “ very un-TV in other words. I was impressed. Television news worthy of a public broadcaster.

Then it happened. Just after world policy guy had made the first of a promised two-part observation on Russia’s involvement in the conflict “ the second having been billed as the more important “ Allison pulled the trigger. In less than two shakes of a black lamb’s tail we went from genocide to General Motors. She’d hung bed head out to dry and served us up to the sponsors. Now granted, she did, to her credit, look a little sheepish about this boorish behaviour, but sheepish really doesn’t cut it here.

Commercial TV news has this magnificent capacity to trivialise the sacrosanct, one that leaves it devoid of any legitimate claim to seriousness. Today’s CBC Television news cannot, sadly, be taken seriously either thanks to its convoluted, contradictory mandate.

Canada’s 1968 Broadcast Act prescribes a broadcasting system controlled by Canadians that safeguards and strengthens our cultural, political, social and economic fabric, promotes unity and provides entertaining, informative programming that caters to a wide range of audiences. The CBC’s impossible mandate simultaneously calls for:
* Promotion of a single, nebulous national identity and culture, Diverse, challenging programming that appeals to a wide variety of tastes, and Production of ‘popular’ shows that Canadians will watch and advertisers will support.

Back in 1995 a splash of lucidity landed in the swamp of ignored prose that engulfs public broadcasting in Canada. Making our Voices Heard? Pierre Juneau’s report on Broadcasting and Film for the 21st Century, recommended that the CBC eliminate advertising from its schedule, and that Canada adopt the British broadcasting model.

Unlike Britain, which opted to invest in public non-commercial broadcasting in the early sixties, Canada at the time chose a hybrid route, freeing the CBC to augment its Parliamentary appropriation with advertising revenues, and coaxing the private sector to provide Canadian content. While lavishing praise on the CBC’s accomplishments, Juneau’s report concludes that the hybrid approach has failed miserably.

Mounting numbers of Allison-like incidents and celebrity news anchors/reporters inclined to think themselves more important than the news they deliver (Jason Moscovich and Hanna Gartner come bursting to mind) make it easy to agree with this assessment, at least when it comes to television news

Like a good waiter, television newscasters and reporters should, ideally, appear invisible. Attentive but not imposing, helpful but not cloying, the best TV journalists are unobtrusive presenters who enhance the news viewing experience without getting in the way of it. The BBC has long set the standard in this regard. Hapless Canadian cable subscribers wouldn’t know this of course given that all they get are fleeting glimpses of this standard (via CBC Newsworld), their English language channel selection being limited to a paltry five hundred North American pseudo-options.

All is not wasteland however. There is a channel on this side of the pond that provides serious, and as a result, valuable Canadian current affairs/news programming. It’s TVOntario, and the program is called Studio 2.

Free from the imperatives of attracting mass, lowest-common-denominator audiences, Studio 2 is easily the best prime time news package currently available to television viewers in Ontario. Providing thoughtful, extended commentary and discussion with intelligence and style, Studio 2 stands as an impressive example of what the CBC might be able to offer Canadians if its mandate weren’t so screwed up.

Thanks to my buddy John W. MacDonald I am now collecting Firsts of the books McSweeney publishes. Here’s a look at the latest. Am picking them up on ebay for approx. $15 Canadian plus shipping. My favourite so far is the one with the comb in it (16 I think). The single digit editions are going for a fair amount more.

Early this morning I picked up a book on Flemish masters. One plate really captured my attention. A Franciscan Friar by Rubens. Looking into his eyes was like looking into the eyes of a living person…surprisingly moving. My thought is that this could be an interesting way for people who are lonely, or feel separated from other human beings, to make a connection, to feel affection and love. I’ll scan the sucker and post it shortly.

By Nigel Beale

Once the waves of nausea had subsided and the Gravol pills had worked their magic, all that remained was a disturbing sense of incredulity.

Yes, after walking across Lake Ontario during an electrical storm, successfully fighting off a plague 1600 rabid scorpions (the flying type) whilst strapped into a straight-jacket, drafting a version of the Constitution which left Lucien Bouchard, Pierre Trudeau, Deborah Grey and Jean Chretien locked in a four way bear-hug, soaked in tears of harmonious ecstasy, and listening to all of the recorded episodes of CBC radio’s Gilmour’s Albums ever made, back to back, I felt it was time to do something really challenging. So I made myself sit and watch the American Republican convention non-stop for one full hour. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and the most sickening.

Hard to define exactly what I saw: Part sermon, part infomercial, part pre-game show, part soap opera. I suppose the convention was really just one great, big, happy, taxpayer-funded, advertisement targeted at the same, massive, passive audience that spend five hours each night twirling the TV dial.

While my response may have been to gag, I suspect that millions were enchanted. Here’s why: Convention producers used one of the most powerful techniques of persuasion known to humankind, the myth. Myths, as author Walter Nash puts it, are stories which betoken something, they explain the elusive. They represent primitive pre-logical thought, which happen to provide high octane access to otherwise fugitive ideas. In short, myths promote the illusion that this crazy, chaotic, incomprehensible world is easy to figure out.

To borrow from my favourite media critic, Neil Postman, myths or parables usually kick off with a characterization of sin (eg. 1. a lying, philanderer in the White house, there only for personal aggrandizement, and squandering the “peoples’� money; 2. Bad breath). They then reveal methods of redemption or solutions to problems (eg. 1. Vote for honest, humble, so-what-if-I’m- divorced-and-older-than-Reagan-when-he-was-first-elected, penny-pinching, self-sacrificing war hero Bob Dole; 2. Use Scope), and conclude with a vision of heaven on earth (Bob in White house, no-one pays any taxes, everyone belongs to a loving, traditional family and lives in crime-free, abortion-free neighbourhoods; 2. Chicks/guys galore).

Setting the stage, and getting the audience to buy into “let’s pretend,� is crucial if the message of the myth (it’s time to get back to the good old days: lower taxes, smaller government, solid family values etc.) is to have any persuasive power at all. So, throughout the convention we get gripping third party endorsements from beach volleyball medalists, football players, the Gipper’s gal, war heroes, women, women, women, and a few token minorities. All talking about God, country, freedom and democracy.

Never mind that Colin Powell is pro-choice, and the party voted in favour of removing the word “tolerance� from its anti-abortion stance. Never mind that vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp was strong armed into agreeing with the party’s commitment to ending affirmative action, or that Ronald Reagan cut taxes and ended up with something like a trillion dollar deficit and a greater gap between rich and poor than at any other time in the country’s history. Just never mind. We’ve got God and the American people on our side. And we’re going to win won for the Gipper.

Presented against this emotion-laced backdrop, we get Bob Dole’s, vaseline-enhanced pre-acceptance speech video. A coup de grace which welcomes the helpless viewer into the myth. Here’s a guy who epitomizes all that is not sinful. Bob the straightforward, guileless, God-fearing, depression-hardened family fella from dusty plains Kansas, who’s abiding interest is to help every single American man, woman, and child achieve the American Dream.

Who cares that Dole’s actual speech is rife with contradiction and omission. Middle America isn’t listening. It’s already in heaven. The moral: Kick that debauched, draft-dodging sinner out of office, vote for me baby, and everything’ll be A1, yabba-dabba-doo, absolutely perfectamundo, died and gone to Disney, U-S-A, U-S-A, Okay.

And the moral of this column: Despite the nausea, a lot can be learned about successful advertising by watching American political conventions. Just look at the polls.

This article first appeared in Strategy Magazine in 1996.