Word: adman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...around Babs people are crushed by cliches. Her husband, an adman, is worn down by the slogans of his profession, so cut off from reality that he longs to dismiss the product entirely: "A structuralist's dream--advertising for its own sake!" There is a psychological as well as social basis for Bab's paranoia: her mother, whom she locks in the closet and taunts with lines like. "I'm fucking the dog, Mom" comes out and announces. "Children were given to us by you-know-who so that we could make order out of our own lives...
...Manhattan's Bettmann Archive Inc., which has more than 5 million pictorial representations covering every subject from cave painting to moon walking, he had certainly called the right place. Did he want black and white or color? "I don't want the usual thing!" barked the adman. "How about a side view?" It was one of the few requests that the archive has ever been unable to fill...
There is nothing new about using sex to sell goods. Years ago, ads were featuring well-endowed young women sprawled across the hoods of sportscars or urging Chesterfield smokers to "Blow some my way." What is new is the prurience of the pitch. Says Adman Wayne Stevens of J. Walter Thompson, one of the nation's largest ad agencies: "There's a tremendous market out there and a tremendous effort to be noticed, to be different. It seems that companies, rather than playing 'me too,' are trying look at me.' And sexuality...
...concealed about himself, and the image he tries to hang on his opponent. The methods are old but have never before been so professionally deployed. Nowadays a group the size of a basketball team dominates a campaign: the candidate, his fund raiser, his "issues" man, his pollster and his adman. The pollster leaves it to the Gallups or Harrises to record who is ahead; he minutely tests his candidate's trouble spots, his opponent's weaknesses, so that daily adjustments can be made. If Reagan seems weak with women, have him promise a woman judge; if Carter gains...
...advertising man's door, lavishly contributed by the taxpayer. Here parody news was made to look like the real thing, whether in carefully chosen snippets of a candidate looking good in a public appearance or in "negative commercials" about an opponent-an unfortunate specialty of Carter's adman Gerald Rafshoon, though hardly exclusive to him. It is a corruption of the political process to photograph a hundred voters, in an imitation of random man-in-the-street sampling, and use only the ones who say they fear that Reagan would blow up the world. Even if the viewer...