Surely there must once have been a world without adverts, but advertisers would thank us to forget it.
What follows is in most part a completely untutored analysis on advertising. I defend myself only by saying that while it takes an oceanographer to detail every specific of the sea, any layman can talk about how it feels to be immersed in it.
In the modern age, we breathe in advertising like air; inevitably, unconsciously. There is a simple reason for this: advertising makes modern consumer economics possible. The simplest fundamental of economics, the one non-economists cite as smugly as non-physicists cite ‘E=MC squared’ is supply and demand. What many people forget is that ‘demand’ is not based on needs, but on wants. This simple distinction literally keeps the modern economy functioning.
One can argue, to take an example, that in today’s day and age you ‘need’ a laptop for work. But advertisers are concerned about which one you want, how one model of one brand is the greatest tablet since the Ten Commandments.
This is a rational approach: ‘needs’ are very limited for human beings (food, shelter, companionship, mobility, etc) while ‘wants’ are limited only by the imaginations of consumers and creators, i.e. are infinite.
The tension between advertisers/sellers and consumers is the concept of contentment. To be contented is the ambition of a great many people. But to advertisers, the great apocalypse of their sleepless nights would not be a nuclear holocaust, in which event they could at least market “Radiation Proof Armani Suits TM” or “Novelty Winged Two-Headed Bunnies TM”. Their worst case scenario is a world in which everyone wakes up with a true and profound sense of perfect contentment; a feeling of being happy with their job, their house, their sense of self and, in short, their life.
There is no profit in contentment. Luckily for them and perhaps less so for others, the advertising industry has won some truly startling victories through the practice of exploiting deep-seated insecurities. Yoga, a word that evokes solitude, inner peace, simplicity and contention, has been so defeated by the industry that dozens of companies offering yoga mats for about $ 100 have sprung up. The image of Che Guevara, one of the most iconic communists in history, has become one of the most popular commercial T-shirts in the world. ‘Perhaps you are not achieving the inner peace that others achieve’ they whisper, or, ‘What will other communists think of you?’ and it works.
Amongst the worst vulnerabilities targeted by advertising are the insecurities of new or uneducated parents-people who desperately want the best for their children but are bewildered on how to achieve it. One of the most tragic cases in the modern age was a Nestle advertisement campaign that convinced mothers in developing nations that their milk formula was better than mother’s milk for their kids. As a result, children died (for a number of reasons) and that multinational was steeped in controversy and even boycotted in the late 70s and early 80s.
This art is often child’s play in Pakistan, given the insecurities our people are heir to. ‘Not married yet? Perhaps it is because you are brown and ugly, and nobody in their right mind looks at you without suppressing a gag reflex, you disgusting coal-faced darkie. But do not jump off a bridge just yet; luckily, we have just the soap for you.’ Shocking no one, in India and Pakistan, Fair and Lovely has a crushingly dominant marketplace position. The reason that fair is juxtaposed with lovely (or in men’s case now with ‘handsome’) is that women do not, in a vacuum, care about being fair. But many do care about being seen as lovely. We all care about being admired. It is the same reason ads for tea show an appreciated and beloved housewife. Most would not be concerned about brands of tea, but the implication that it is an easy way to triumph over the endless demands and criticisms of a family? That, they do care about.
The standards — of beauty, popularity, domestic bliss, etc — in ads are often scoffed at as being impossible. They are supposed to be. If they were achievable people may eventually be — perish the thought — content. We all of us want certain things so badly — acceptance, desirability, positive feedback, fitness — that we will subconsciously lean towards anything that, even with blatant lies, hints it will help us achieve them.
To the list of those core and primal issues about which we all have insecurities we in Pakistan must add another: not being good Muslims. This fear lurks in our psyche and manifests itself in, for example, the criminalisation of eating outside — no matter what the circumstances — between sehri and iftari.
Since literally nothing is sacred to the advertising industry — driven as it is by the market, which suffers no other master — it should be no surprise that it has begun to target Ramzan as well. It is difficult to advertise for a month that preaches a distancing from worldly concerns, but advertisers are eagerly embarking upon this new challenge. As with yoga mats, commercial interests are trying to profit from selling something that, by definition, cannot be bought (inner peace, tranquillity, spirituality).
Ramzan apps available on your phone, says Nokia, proclaiming themselves ushers of the ‘Spirit of Ramzan;’ reducing the price of Coke to somehow enhance iftari; adverts from burger king showing a crescent moon and so on. Then there are Ramzan specials on every channel that make much of a take on the outward show of piety and turn it into everything from a game show to a sing along. The same channels that every other time of year are content to show duelling politicians screaming blood and fire at one another.
Ramzan is not like Christmas, which famously commercialised ‘holy day’. Christmas, unlike Easter, has always been an occasion removed from the religious dimension of Christianity, rooted as it is in the winter solstice pagan celebration. Second, it is just that: a celebration, rather than an extended period of piety (again, for Christians, the equivalent is Lent).
The market’s foray into Ramzan is in its infant stages. But with an industry willing to convince mothers that the milk of their bodies is inferior to Nestle, how long before the gloves come off? When we care about something, it becomes our vulnerability; and we cannot allow commercial interests to exploit this one: our spiritual identity.
The writer is a Lahore-based freelance columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]