Not enough advertising

There’s a series of television advertisements funded by the US Marine Corps for recruiting purposes which have been running for awhile – for at least a few years, anyway. They involve a young man – always a man, despite changes in Marine Corps recruiting directives – moving through a post-modern urban landscape, and facing a series of dystopic illusions: emojis run wild, computer-generated versions of himself as a shill for popular material goods, being tempted by luxury goods spinning in a vacuum as is often done online. The young man, growing frustrated, accompanied by narration describing the soulless inadequacy of being alive in the modern world, resolves the situation by quite violently attacking the illusionary images, with the narrator shifting to a script of finding meaning, being called, and when the young man bursts through the illusions we see him diving, in full battle gear, into a military obstacle course, emerging from the swampy water and barbed wire as a determined, scarred, but no longer uncertain Marine.

Whenever the ad pops up – for some reason recently during “Jeopardy!”, the game show where every answer is in the form of a question, and for which I’m doing an online audition on Thursday – I’m struck by how deeply existential the ads are. I mean, they could have been storyboarded by Albert Camus: you are faced by the essential meaningless of a commercialised and dehumanised world, but you have a way out. Camus would have been more my speed and argued for taking that objective meaningless and transforming its energy into helping others and fighting existential injustice, but had he been hired by the US Marine Corps as an advertising artistic director, he would have easily done the exact same thing except use the abstract notion of “homeland threats” in place of “existential injustice” and voila, the ad I see every now and again would have come to life.

The counterpoint for the ad is a separate campaign – also oddly often shown during the nightly “Jeopardy!” viewing that I enjoy with my son, as his knowledge of the world is rapidly increasing and his ability to solve the answers keeps accelerating – that interestingly shows a slightly older young man, who crosses a road only to see an illusion of himself, who attacks him and the two of them engage in man-to-man combat until one – and we don’t really know which one – is defeated, at which point the camera pulls back and reveals the battle was all in his head, that the other people in the street with him are confused by what’s just occurred – which was an attack of post-traumatic stress triggered by his service in the military. The branch of the military isn’t stated – the point of the ad is to encourage veterans who are in emotional or mental distress to seek out the resources available to them.

Both ads – point and counterpoint, as it were – rely for their effect on the knowledge we all have, that the materialist world is essentially meaningless, that we all know that the world as presented to us normally by the advertisements that inevitably bookend the US Marine Corp recruiting spot and the veteran’s mental health spot is irredeemably horrid and corrupting. But as a story arc, the two ads taken together are really quite stunning: you, young man, can find meaning in becoming a warrior – because that is the message of the US Marine Corps, the tapping into the deep human vein of belief that war is one of the true and real callings of man – but in today’s world, once you do so, you’ll either die, or the likelihood is that calling to war will permanently scar you in a world which otherwise no longer sees any real glamour, or even valour, in putting on the kit and fighting the enemy.

My strong desire as a moral philosopher is for the ad buyers behind both of these ads get together over lunchtime cocktails and the superb butter-basted steaks at Wolfgang’s on 34th Street and Park (why Wolfgang’s? I want to encourage midday drinking among midtown executives, and the steaks will kill them off faster) and coordinate their ad buys so as often as possible, they are run during the same program, ideally National Football League and English Premier League and National Basketball Association games or even better, their endless pre-, post-, and between game commentary shows, the ones which mostly attract the young men because live sports is immediate, real, and thus totally different than the materialist hellscape we all normally live in but young men confront most directly.

I don’t want them to step over themselves – in fact, ideally, the meeting shouldn’t be at Wolfgang’s bar, but at one of the six-person semi-private booths the restaurant have under one of the old subway arches that make up the below-grade, almost ideally designed steakhouse. The other people there should be a couple of network guys – one from ABC, which also owns ESPN and has a close relationship with the NBA; one from NBC, which has the EPL US contract; and one from Fox, which has half the NFL broadcast rights but also has overlap with European and Asian athletics contracts – so that the two ad buyers (US Marine and PTSD veterans’ benefits guys, respectively) and make sure that there’s always an ad that falls between the two existential ads. The best effect would be to run the Marine ad, then run an ad for Applebee’s or one of the increasingly annoying ads for Lexus or BMW or maybe an ad for new network reality or singing competition show, and then run the PTSD ad. That cozy booth, smelling of high quality gin and even better steaks and maybe a bit of personalised existential anger of the type exuded by liberal arts graduates, who read Aristotle and Camus but ended up on Madison Avenue and as network advertising schedulers for lack of anything better to do and out of their screaming inadequacy when thinking about their earning power compared to that of their parents, could thus be a place where, through basic propaganda techniques, a generation of young people could realise that meaning can be found on a battlefield and through violence, but it comes with a cost that can never be fully paid in the form of crippling, endless emotional devastation.

What would be missing from that group, of course, would be the positive side of things. I can actually easily imagine that booth coming together, and even them deciding amongst themselves to craft a season or two long subconscious campaign to install a sense of complete existential inadequacy among viewers of sports programs. What would be lacking would be the alternative – and oddly, that’s been the question humanity has been wrestling with for thousands of years. War seems oddly compelling until you think about the consequences – but being base economic creatures, as farmers or industrial workers or cube farm data analysts, is utterly without meaning. And the only other choice seems to be to either enter the bloodsport ring of trying to be of the ruling class – that is to say, to direct the warriors and skim the cream off the efforts of the economic creatures – or to create intellectual pipe dreams.

The positive ad I’d envision would suck – but then again, I’m not a Madison Avenue copy guy. What I’m trying to envision is the ad to convince young people – hell, convince people in general – that there is no way of life which is simple, no calling which will solve the existential crisis. The ad would show up randomly, not paired with anything, but would show another young man, walking across the street just like the other two, and instead of facing electronica nonsense, would see some litter, and he’d pick it up. Or he’d see a friend across the street, and he’d join her for a coffee. Or he’d see a pigeon rustling up into a tree, and he’d smile, and he’d move on. This being 2022, he’d check his phone, and realise his mom had called, or that he was on his way to see his cousin’s school play, or a text from his roommate reminding him it was his day to water the plants at the apartment but that also there was a great band playing across the street in the evening. Mundane basics but all of them beyond just himself, all of them connecting him to the real world in ways that have no materialist benefit behind them.

It’s the lack of that last category, I think, that’s at the heart of the existential crisis much of the world is facing today. We know there are historical ways to find meaning – the three classes of medieval society in the merchant, the warrior, and the priest; the more modern checkout of the public intellectual; the conflicted life of public service via activism or civil service or augmented volunteering – and of course we can retreat into a materialised domesticity and cultivate plants or cats or model railways. But none of those seem to really apply to the existential challenge of a world of material plenty – and the ancient world seems to fall down when asked about finding such meaning, whether east or west. After all, those who transcended the evils of the past were either of the upper classes (Buddha and his south Asian contemporaries), an endowed god (Christ and the saints), or underemployed intellectuals (Confucius, Mencius, Pu Yi, etc). They offered a message, but not really for the sad sack young men and women who have no or only limited family and wealth advantages, but also are never going to get a PhD. and milk it into a calling.

The ads I’ve described are of young men, which I think makes sense: young men in the past were given meaning by society, but societies have largely stopped doing so, so young men are caught most deeply in the meaning trap. And young women – and, for that matter, young queer men – at least have the meaning that can come from rebelling against past privilege, which young men in general can’t really claim. But everyone faces this eventually, even those who at least for a time are able to insert their perceived victimhood into the slot required for individual meaning.

I do look to the Mad Men to come up with the campaign, though. Today it should cross all platforms – not just live TV sporting events and commentary, but also funded Twitterati, TikTok influencers, and Instagram channels; also purchased messaging placement in Marvel and DC movie franchises; also even old school advertising media like bus sideboards and highway billboards, still some of the finest settings for distilling messages into memes of highest latency in our minds. But right now, the ads are just of the three most challenging types: the ad telling you to search for meaning in a meaningless world; the ad telling you that finding that meaning will come at a tragic cost; and the vast majority of other ads that just insidiously remind you that the materialist world is shallow, horrid, and reinforces your own sense of meaninglessness.

Come on, ad people – the expense accounts can surely support one more big splurge at Wolfgang’s, maybe even with a couple creatives joining the buyers and the schedulers. You can do it. Find the fourth way and advertise it the way America does so phenomenally, so freaking, so fucking well for the kinds of things that only encourage existential despair. I have faith in you. And I’m looking forward to watching “Jeopardy!” and having my head spin. Actually, everyone is.