The Oracle of Madison Avenue

by David Benjamin

“I’m from Milwaukee and I oughta know/ It’s draft-brewed Blatz beer wherever you go!/ Smoother, fresher, less filling, that’s clear!/ Blatz is Milwaukee’s finest beer.”

MADISON, Wis.—During my strange career interlude as a public relations flack in Boston, I became an avid reader of Advertising Age, the bulging weekly chronicle of the advertising racket. This wasn’t because I aspired to a job on Madison Avenue. My interest was largely academic. After poring through an issue of this apparent “trade rag,” I realized I was privy to an almost unfailingly accurate oracle of American culture. Ad Age sussed and forecast trends in society that would not be evident to ordinary people, or the rest of the media, for months or years.

Ad Age could see more clearly into the future because advertising is the most pusillanimous and neurotic form of communication in modern society. To sell their client’s stuff to a mass audience, advertisers—ideally—must appeal to everyone, indiscriminately, and offend no one. We all know that advertisers, of course, are manipulative and often mendacious. We don’t trust ads. Ad guys know that we hold then in contempt. Hence, in defense, they are hypersensitive and reactive to the slightest breeze of change in popular attitudes, politics and fashion. When they see public perceptions about to turn a corner, the seers of advertising speed to the crossroads ahead of almost everyone, where they catch their breath, look at their watches, tap their feet and ask, “What took you so long, America?”

“Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya/ Brylcreem, you look so debonair/ Brylcreem, the gals will all pursue ya/ They love to get their fingers in your hair!”

For example, every December now, Fox News relaunches its campaign against the liberal “war on Christmas.” The network’s gasbags bloviate against the seeming imposition of secular salutations like “Season’s Greetings,” which avoid the faint religious intimations of “Merry Christmas.” But it wasn’t left-wing politicians who imposed euphemism on the birthday of Jesus. Before I was born, conservative corporations, leery of off-putting affluent Jews during the holiday shopping season, quietly edited “Christ” out of their Christmas cards and holiday ads in the daily news and weekly shoppers.

This practice was the essence of conservatism. In the year’s most lucrative month, the peddlers of Madison Avenue were pitching toys, clothes, appliances and Red Ryder BB guns to a democratic, multi-ethnic and ecumenical consumer market. They knew better than to show even the slightest favor toward any of the demographics in their purview. In markets heavily Christian—Iowa, Mississippi, Salt Lake City—they shouted “Merry Christmas!” in 72-point Cooper Black. But in New York City, Chicago, L.A. and Chinatown, “Happy Holidays” served as the better part of capitalism—fifty years before the “war on Christmas” was even a twinkle in Rupert Murdoch’s eye.

“I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid/ They’ve got a million toys at Toys R Us that I can play with/ I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid/ They’ve got the best for less, you’ll really flip your lid/ From bikes and trains to video games, it’s the biggest store there is!/ Gee whizz!”

Lately, without access to Ad Age, I depend on television commercials to tell them me where society is headed. What I see is that America is long past the era of white spokesguys voicing their sales message over images of white ladies swirling around the newest, brightest, coolest new consumable. Remember Ed Reimers saying “You’re in good hands with All State”? Remember Betty Furness in a gingham gown swinging open the door of a Westinghouse fridge, or Dina Shore enticing you patriotically into the back seat of her Bel Air … or, even better, those Old Gold cigarette packs dancing around on slim, lovely, naked white legs?

Those bygone TV ads, although monochromatic, were entertaining, captivating, even sometimes convincing. The writing, occasionally, was exceptional. The best jingles of that golden age deserve inclusion in a sort of Madman poetry anthology. For example, the one that marked the beginning of the transition from Caucasian TV to a rising tide of teeming masses went like this:

“I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love/ Grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves/ I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony/ I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company…”

In this spirit, last night, I watched a black guy lying on a Sleep Number mattress next to his white wife. I watched two gay partners cuddling on the couch sharing a bag of corn chips. I saw a brown-skinned woman (Latina? Indian?) rapturously smelling her laundry and a black guy telling his white next-door neighbor he was using the wrong brand of garbage bag.

Recently, I gave up trying to count and categorize the range of races, creeds, colors and gender variations in TV ads, because it’s easier to spot the increasingly rare incidence of the endangered all-WASP commercial. The surviving come-ons tend to be concentrated in real estate—high-end houses and reverse mortgages—and Joe Namath’s hearing aid.

All this miscegenation, race-mingling and uppitiness started before our White House reality-TV star reintroduced “blood and soil” to the American discourse. Even the bigot-in-chief hasn’t been able to stem the tide of pluralism—foreseen and sold by the ad industry—that started before he came down the escalator.

“My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R/ My bologna has a second name, It’s M-A-Y-E-R/ Oh, I love to eat it every day, and if you ask me why, I’ll say/ ‘Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A!’”

The arc of advertising has long anticipated the arc of history. As pessimistic as some of us are about the hate, xenophobia and racism in our midst, our commercial message is that we are destined to evolve into an America whose skin tone is a sort of goldish brown with religious flavors confoundingly mingling Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Native American and Hindu faiths, with a pinch of Voodoo, a Druid dram and magic mushroom chaser.

Somewhat perversely, I worry about Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones, who knows something’s happening here, but he doesn’t know what it is. I picture him, the unreconstructed American white guy who still calls black folks “colored,” who shares with JD Vance the weird belief that women should spend their lives barefoot and pregnant then die from menopause, and whose favorite TV show is re-runs of “The Andy Griffith Show” (and who has no idea, and wouldn’t want to be told, that Opie grew up to become the director of EdTV, Frost Nixon and A Beautiful Mind).

Mr. Jones, you see, depends for his amusement—for his sanity—on cable TV, which has become a veritable barrage of culture shocks for atavists and revanchists. There’s scarce refuge even on Fox News, an acquisitive enterprise that will sell commercial time to anyone, even queers, coloreds, commies and climatologists.

“ … On a highway or a road along a levee/ Performance is sweeter/ Nothing can beat ’er/ Life is completer/ In a Chevy/ So make a date today to see the USA/ And see it in a Chevrolet!”

I worry about his guy, who’s like the captive missionary in one of those William Shawn-era New Yorker cartoons. He’s in a cauldron, neck deep in warthog broth, while the native cannibals pile firewood around the pot and chant a complicated and rather lyrical funeral chant on his behalf, but he can’t understand because they’re singing in Yoruba.

And the soup he’s in is still an hour away from full boil.