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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Saturday, February 2, 2002
01:36 - "...And a great way to get to work."

(top) link
I just saw a Dodge commercial in which the entire Dodge lineup, all in the new trademark red, went barreling through tunnels and over bridges and through just-wet-enough-to-produce-a-roostertail race courses, with cars flipping into the air and leaping over each other; and at the very end, they all line up outside a hangar and a squadron of fighter jets swoops down through it and whooshes out past the camera.

Suddenly I was struck by an image of what it must have been like in the pitch room of the ad agency:

"And then all five cars are lined up outside the hangar, each one next to an F-15; the camera's trucking back like this, see, so you can see them all sequentially. Yeah-- and then a face-on shot of the hangar, the camera pans up, and you see the F-15s dropping down out of the sky, they come down into the hangar and fly through, see, and right out past the camera, one by one, with the cars sitting down below. Then cut to the slogan card, and out."

Can you picture an ad-man from the 60s sitting in on this session? Can you imagine what that must have sounded like?

These kinds of effects were once-- not so very long ago-- leaps and bounds beyond even the reach of filmmakers like Lucas, even given a budget the size of Western Europe's GDP and five years to do it. And now a lowest-bidder ad agency can do it for a thirty-second spot in six weeks with off-the-shelf software, and it gets run at 1:30AM in between episodes of Battlebots.

What's more, this ad is pretty darn cool. It's over-the-top, even gratuitously so, but it's also conscious of itself-- it knows it's overboard, it knows the audience knows it's overboard, so it doesn't even bother trying to appeal to one's sense of reason or rationality. It just goes all-out. But then, on the movie screen, we have Planet of the Apes.

Many have speculated about how advertising is the force which will permeate every aspect of our lives from breakfast to dreamtime, from cradle to grave. But, well, speculation is moot-- it's already right here. Why bother making a good movie when an ad is so much more effective?

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© Brian Tiemann