Outrage Factor Sells Product, Up To A Point Calvin Klein Ads Pushed Limit, And Then Went Over The Line
What ever became of simple, clear, instructive advertising about the quality and merits of products?
If you must ask those questions, you reveal your failure to understand communications in this age of information overload, when people are exposed to so much to remember they become confused and forgetful instead.
Advertisers must make you remember their message, and they do this by creating desire on your part. Having done so, they must educate you, which is to say they must convince you that it is in your interest to buy.
Often they do this with techniques and messages that have little apparent relation to the product but much to do with the target’s psyche, such as articulating a need or arousing a feeling. Or, outraging you.
The so-called tried and true way of selling just doesn’t do that. “It’s not stylish enough to provoke desire,” says Marian Salzman of Chiat-Day Advertising, where she is corporate director for consumer insights.
Critic Bob Garfield has another explanation. As products reach parity, advertisers no longer can stress uniqueness because it might not exist. They might invent phony differences but risk detection in doing so.
This is especially so where fashion is involved. “Whatever makes people respond,” says Garfield, the critic for “Advertising Age,” an industry trade publication, “it is not intrinsic quality.”
One certain way to obtain a response is to offend popular standards. To outrage. One million dollars of ads might bring you $100 million worth of publicity, he says.
It is what Calvin Klein did with his jean ads. The ads, widely criticized as exploiting the sexuality of youngsters, went over the line, says Garfield, and the controversy threatened to damage rather than enhance sales.
What happened could, however, be repeated by advertisers in the future, sometimes because “good” advertising means pressing the acceptability limit. Klein, it seems, went too far. Others might inadvertently cross the line.
Still, the problem for Klein, who recalled the ads, might have been not so much in the concept, however distasteful it was to many people, but in the execution.
As Salzman sees it, the provocative poses of Klein ad youngsters was meant to help teens identify themselves, to give them a sense of belonging while reaffirming their uniqueness.
Salzman concedes the subtleness of this might escape adults, but she believes the message got through to the targets. The targets, of course, were the kids. “The ads were not shocking to them.” But they shocked Salzman.
“I think they (the ads) were sort of alarming, but I think a lot of youth culture is alarming,” said the thirtyish Salzman, a product of Brown and Harvard Universities. But, she added, she was not the target.
Nor, you might add, were most Americans the targets. The kids were. While the kids might not have sensed the ads as exploitative, many adults did. Americans are growing older, and much advertising is aimed at younger people.
It explains why so many middle-aged and older Americans complain that they fail to understand much of today’s advertising. Not being the targets, the message arrows fly on by them.