"But first, a word from our sponsor"

Twitchell, James B. 1996. “But first, a word from our sponsor.” The Wilson Quarterly. 20(3): 68–77. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Whenever a member of my paunchy fifty-something set pulls me aside and complains of the dumbing down of American culture, I tell him that if he doesn’t like it, he should quit moaning and go buy a lot of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods. And every time he buys soap, toothpaste, beer, gasoline, bread, aspirin, and the like, he should make it a point to buy a different brand. He should implore his friends to do likewise. At the same time, he should quit giving so much money to his kids. That, I’m sorry to say, is his only hope.

Here’s why. The culture we live in is carried on the back of advertising. Now I mean that literally. If you cannot find commercial support for what you have to say, it will not be transported. Much of what we share, and what we know, and even what we treasure, is carried to us each second in a plasma of electrons, pixels, and ink, underwritten by multinational advertising agencies dedicated to attracting our attention for entirely nonaltruistic reasons. These agencies, gathered up inside worldwide conglomerates with weird, sci-fi names like WPP, Omnicom, Saatchi & Saatchi, Dentsu, and Euro RSCG, are usually collections of established shops linked together to provide “full service” to their global clients. Their service is not moving information or creating entertainment, but buying space and inserting advertising. They essentially rent our concentration to other companies’ sponsors - for the dubious purpose of informing us of something that we’ve longed for all our lives even though we’ve never heard of it before. Modem selling is not about trading information, as it was in the l9th century, as much as about creating an infotainmient culture with sufficient allure to enable other messages commercials - to get through. In the spirit of the enterprise, I call this new culture Adcult.

Adcult is there when we blink, it’s there when we listen, it’s there when we touch, it’s even there to be smelled in scent strips when we open a magazine. There is barely a space in our culture not already carrying commercial messages. Look anywhere: in schools there is Channel One; in movies there is product placement; ads are in urinals, played on telephone hold, in alphanumeric displays in taxis, sent unannounced to fax machines, inside catalogs, on the video in front of the Stairmaster at the gym, on T-shirts, at the doctor’s office, on grocery carts, on parking meters, on tees at golf holes, on inner-city basketball backboards, piped in along with Muzak ... ad nauseam (and yes, even on airline vomit bags). We have to shake magazines like rag dolls to free up their pages from the “blow-in” inserts and then wrestle out the stapled- or glued-in ones before reading can begin. We now have to fastforward through some five minutes of advertising that opens rental videotapes. President Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade featured a Budweiser float. At the Smithsonian, the Orkin Pest Control Company sponsored an exhibit on exactly what it advertises it kills: insects. No venue is safe. Is there a blockbuster museum show not decorated with corporate logos? The Public Broadcasting Service is littered with “underwriting announcements” that look and sound almost exactly like what PBS claims they are not: commercials.

Okay, you get the point. Commercial speech is so powerful that it drowns out all other sounds. But sounds are always conveyed in a medium. The media of modem culture are these: print, sound, pictures, or some combination of each. Invariably, conversations about dumbing down focus on the supposed corruption of these media, as demonstrated by the sophomoric quality of most movies, the fall from the golden age of television, the mindlessness of most bestsellers, and the tarting-up of the news, be it in or on USA Today, Time, ABC, or Inside Edition. The media make especially convenient whipping boys because they are now all conglomerated into...