Target Acquired

By Lee

“Social experiment” is a fancy was of saying making research out of the discomfort of others. I just finished up one such experiment. In fact, the tv is muted right now because part of the thing is still oozing out of the speakers. And like all good data hunts, this one succeeded.

The experiment: Watch a season of “The Bachelor” in order to understand product sponsored polygamy.

The results: Extremely um… well predictable and traditional marketing veiled by well-seasoned platitudes.

Maybe it was the mystery of how a national network was/is able to get away with promoting modern day harems under the guise of “love”. Yeah, that’s a big part of it, that word anyhow. Let’s start with the words then. Not love though. Heart. Let’s start with heart. Every single episode, every single teaser has featured the word “heart”.  Sentences like, “I’m just following my heart”, “I put all of my heart out there”, “I have all my heart to give”, “My heart is breaking”, and on and on.

We have the physical organ of the heart which, after interpreting some of the above statements leads me to believe that these folks have serious medical conditions or at the very least have fallen prey to black market organ harvesters. If we called up a cardiologist and asked them to reference a clinical episode of a heart breaking, they’d probably ask if we were human. If we sent a cryptic text message to shady character named Doctor Smiley Knife telling him that we have all of our heart to give, there would be a quick knock at the door immediately followed by blacking out and the discovery of an abnormally large chest cavity. “Following my heart”, well yeah. That sounds like the thing is leading us around on a leash looking for the nearest hydrant… which leads to the conclusion of the matter.

What is often spoken of as the heart is misinterpreted as a targeted set of emotions. Given enough repetition and misplaced definition, the word takes said emotions rather than the reality of what it is supposed to be. What is that reality then? A description not found in the strategies of the marketing and sales meetings, where such emotions have no place. Traditional marketing says to target the market. Traditional sales says pull the trigger. It’s no coincidence that while watching the two hour season ending (on the 1st of March – we’ve effectively almost entered into Spring here in the midwest) that there are advertisements for women’s products and trailers for films aimed at women. That’s basic strategy. But there’s something more coercive happening, especially with the next season of The Bachelor (starting sometime in May – Spring supposedly ends in June), just around the corner, that is, the continual equating of new imaginary definitions with imaginary need. Add them together and what do you get? Something very real that does not exist.

If we took all of the product placements shown during this show over the past two months, wrote them down, and compared them to the impressions left by words like heart, love, faith, hope, desire, beauty, etc., we’d find a very solid diagram of just what goes on in market planning sessions. Those words are expected to be used. They are targeted. You are expected to understand those words, view their new context and, become a part of their context, and then become that target as well.

There’s the problem. When we think of people as targets, we remove dignity. When we consider others as “things” to which we push other things, we become no better than a meth dealer pushing his wares. It’s sad to know that, even though we’ve made great strides in order to understand ourselves as humanity, we continue to fall back into the same patterns of humanity we desperately try to fix. It’s sad to know that even though we recognize ourselves as targets that we make so few strides to no longer be targets. Consider for a moment, a weapon constantly fixed upon your position. Day and night. Year after year. Pretty soon, that weapon is no longer a weapon but an expectation. Pretty soon we accept the targeting and forget how to function without it.

Indeed.

Maybe the new question isn’t whether or not we’ll fix the ads or mute them in between the segments of an episode. Maybe it’s whether or not we’d be willing to fix or mute the segments of the episode to see them for the advertisements they’ve become.

Posted on March 1st, 2010