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I give you a glass with something in it. I've poured it out of a dark bottle. Its a brown liquid. I tell you I made it from vegetables, but won't tell you which bits. When you cautiously sip, it tastes of nothing you recognise as normal, certainly nothing like veg. When you drink it, it leaves a gritty feeling on your teeth and you find later that it makes you nervous when drunk in even modest quantities. Its fizzy. Its Coca-Cola.

When did you stop feeling queasy at the description?

Funny things ads. Sometimes we forget what they're for. They're there to sell things, but you could be forgiven if that slips your mind as you go through your day. Ads are everywhere. They've colonised every available space, until most of us have stopped even being aware of the effect that seeing them is having.  They can tell us stories (interminable coffee soaps) or irritate us (the suitably dull "here comes the euro" campaign ). Sometimes they can even seem to tap into something in the air, like the Dancing Guinness Man and stay in people's minds  for the rest of their lives.

But how do ads work? There are whole fields of study which claim to have the answer to this question but, like most whole fields of study to have appeared in recent times, the average person could probably work it out much more clearly themselves. They work by making a product seem valuable. And the method they have always used to do that  is to try to make the rest of our lives revolve around it, or to show us distortions of our lives where that happens. They debase our real life so that the product is superior. We aspire to own it they tell us. They desperately need to obscure the fact that we have total power over their fate.

Coke is a fabulous example. It is a fizzy drink. But what do you associate with its name? The logo? Tall iced glasses on hot summer afternoons? Or Santa Claus? All these images were created carefully to infiltrate our minds and to imprint meaning where there was none before. Coke isn't a fizzy brown goop of mysterious origin, Coke is it. Always Coca- Cola. Even the Catholic Church usually likes to be a bit more circumspect about its place in the world. Can you imagine if we saw posters with pictures of a wooden cross silhouetted against a setting sun, with the tagline God is it. Every graffiti artist in the city with a black marker would be impelled to add a "sh" to the text. Not necessarily because they were anti-god, but just because the starkness of the claim would stick in our craws. The Church knows that, so we'll never see it try to run any such crassness. And yet Coke ads go unscathed.

But if a product is woven so tightly into our emotional lives that we accept its right to make claims that would seem grandiose for a religion, what happens when it behaves in a way we start to feel uncomfortable with? When Coke changed its recipe, there were riots in the streets, but not all the effects are as obvious.

Throughout the 20th century, women were used to stand beside the objects being sold to men. At trade fairs, in TV ads, in print, you couldn't have a shiny object without a smiling woman beside it. The message came through loud and clear "Buy one", the ad said, "Get one free." Except that eventually there was a odd noise from the drafting boards. Apparently some of the women had begun to feel that they didn't want to be associated with this year's Dodge or the new high-tech one blade razor.

Although advertisers have tried every way possible to get around or soften this inconvenient opposition, women continue to object to their bodies being used as commodities to sell commodities.

However, nobody ever accused the advertising world of missing a trick. If the world changes, they think, sure we'll just go with the flow. So we can't sell men things with women- that's all right. Women now hold huge purchasing power in their own right. So we just use something else to catch their attention. Something that won't complain about being made over as an ornament. A baby.

Baby running, baby nappy, baby bums. Stroke baby bum. Baby smiling at financial products. Baby (through the magic of video) explaining financial products. Baby boardrooms. Baby advertising parcel delivery service. Baby bum and leg positioned just like the women of fifty years ago, knee crooked, foot outstretched, selling cornflakes on the sides of buses. Baby as 40's movie stars? Baby Bogart, baby Bacall. Just wait and see. You'll go a long way, baby.

But what will you be worth at the end?  

The Anglophone world is a deeply pedophiliac culture, filled with conflicting messages on children's sexuality. On the one hand, the majority of people are revolted by the idea of their daughters, sons, nieces or nephews being looked at as anything but bundles of wonder. But on the other hand the same people are being made comfortable with the sight of babies in adult situations, or linked to baby-irrelevant items. When was the last time a baby bought a pension after all? 

As Ireland integrates our self closer to the cash-pipe filled with the American-British view of the world which runs directly over our heads and through our new dreams, we will eventually have to make a choice- whether we continue down a path towards Japan's mainstreaming of an industry built on lusting after children or whether we decide to mark babies, and children, as not for sale.

by
Simon McGarr
7/3/2001

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