At any point in time, somebody’s at war, a stock market is teetering or a new global health menace is emerging that’s almost as hideous as it is hard to pronounce.
Yet here we have a Levi’s TV ad in which a guy is racing through New York in a taxi, chasing a guy on a mo-ped who has stolen a duck. Or here we have a Volkswagen commercial with two guys driving aimlessly around Los Angeles in a Golf. They stop, pick up a chair, put it in the car, discover that it stinks, drop it off and keep driving.
All the while, neither says a word. A song plays, with lyrics as articulate as: “Da da da.”
What we have here is not a failure to communicate, but the advertising industry’s latest attempt to reach Generation X. Call it Seinfeldvertising.
It’s advertising that mimics TV’s No. 1 sitcom. Advertising as entertainment. Advertising where the characters are blithely indifferent to anything going on in the world that’s not directly related to their happiness. Advertising that is amusing like “Seinfeld.” Advertising in which nothing happens.
It’s the rave of Madison Avenue. And the same creative whizzes who sold to a generation of Baby Boomers with linear, problem/solution commercials and instant-gratification slogans (“Mmm mmm good”) think that finally they have the next generation of kids all figured out.
Campaigns from Levi’s, Volkswagen, Heineken beer and ABC television, though varied in their elements, all carry this subtext of advertising anti-matter, where all that matters is that nothing matters.
“We’re at a time where we’ve been so hyped that nothing happening is something,” says Marian Salzman, worldwide director of the “Department of the Future” for ABC’s ad agency, TBWA International/Chiat Day. “We’re at hope’s edge and we don’t know if we’re going to fall in. So, when nothing happens, it’s comforting. Reassuring.”
Volkswagen’s commercial, launched last spring, has become a Generation X phenomenon. ABC and Jay Leno both have spoofed the ad, which struck such a chord with young TV viewers that they clamored for a copy of the soundtrack song, “Da da da, I don’t love you, you don’t love me, uh huh uh huh uh huh,” by the German group Trio. In August, the 1982 song was rereleased, got wide radio play and sold 50,000 copies.
“We’ve gotten an unbelievable response from our customers,” says Liz Vanzura, director of marketing for Volkswagen of America. The commercial’s tagline — “Volkswagen Golf. It fits your life, or complete lack thereof” — speaks straight to 18-to-34-year-old Generation Xers, she says.
“Our strategy was we have a lot of lifestyle ads,” Vanzura explains. “And, sure, a lot of Generation Xers have active lifestyles, but the other half of their lives they’ve got basically nothing going on.”
Small wonder that advertisers are trying to find a wavelength on which to tune in the emerging generation of consumers. The 45 million Gen Xers, born between 1965 and 1977, spend about $125 billion a year. Yet marketing attempts to categorize and sell to them have been fitful and sometimes ill-fated. Companies made the mistake of lumping them all together as “slackers” — a Boomer slur for kids they can’t understand.
One notable blunder was Coca-Cola’s OK soda (“What’s the point of OK soda?” asked one slogan for the drink. “Well, what’s the point of anything?”). It was pulled from the market after a nine-city test.
Generation X, marketers have been slow to learn, is as complicated as every preceding generation. It’s also even more diverse, and — having grown up in a 50-channel universe with MTV and the Internet — its members are more media-savvy and media-wary than America’s first TV generation.
“They’re smart, and you can’t be as direct,” says Bobby Sheehan, a New York-based director of TV shows and commercials. “A lot of what connects with them is based on innuendo, and very image-driven.”
With its fall promotional “TV is good” campaign, ABC tapped into Xers’ sense of innuendo and ironic appreciation of the medium that has helped shape their lives. One spot showed only a bug zapper. A bug flies in: “Zzzzzzzzzpt!” Then these words appeared: “TV. What Would You Watch Without It?”
In a multimillion-dollar “They go on” campaign, Levi’s — long on the cutting edge — leaps into the void with what it calls a “dream logic” series of six TV ads with idiosyncratic and overlapping stories that have the look and out-of-sequence narrative structure of the movie “Pulp Fiction.”
“We’re trying to sell without selling,” observes Mark Hogan, Levi’s director of consumer marketing. “It’s talking about people who are original, who live life on their own terms. It’s out of sequence, and there’s no resolution because life’s resolutions aren’t really that neat. The boy doesn’t always get the girl.”
Of course, there’s only so much nothingness people can take; then it becomes the somethingness of a trend, observes Chiat Day’s Salzman. And that will doom the premise that these commercials aren’t really commercials.
“You have to question how long advertisers are going to stick with this kind of apathetic message,” she says. “When we have too much anti-hype, it will become anti-hip.”
