COLUMN: The (herbal) essence of advertising

I was in the shower recently and found myself reading the back of my roommate’s bottle of shampoo (for lack of better reading material), and I came across this bold claim: “Wildly exciting is our normal!” Naturally, I was excited to get this miracle shampoo onto my head and start experiencing the wild excitement the bottle had promised. Even if the shampooing experience it provided was only moderately exciting, that would already make it worlds better than all shampooing experiences I’d ever had. Up until this point, my most exciting hair-washing experience had been when I was a kid and ate some of the shampoo that’s supposed to make your head tingle and discovered that it makes your tongue tingle too. That was interesting, but I’m sure it wouldn’t qualify as wildly exciting. Maybe mildly amusing, or just plain stupid.

So, I lathered up and waited for the excitement to begin. Maybe it would be like a drug trip, with hallucinations and seeing in five dimensions. Maybe the wild excitement would come after I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror, realizing the shampoo had made every hair I’d ever lost grow back. The TV commercials for this brand of shampoo a few years ago featured women screaming out as they used it, obviously overcome by the shampoo’s ability to please them far better than any husband or boyfriend ever could. Maybe one of these women would suddenly show up!

None of these things happened, however. The clean hair and temporarily lingering flowery scent were pretty nice, but it would have to be a really slow day for me to consider that “wildly exciting” (and I have had days that slow). Really the most excitement I got from this shampoo came from the idea I had to write a column about it.

It all led me back to a conclusion I’ve come to many times before: advertising can be very silly. Advertisers show young, skinny people enjoying life in order to sell second-rate hamburgers that lead to obesity that ends your life. To sell shampoo, advertisers claim, or at least imply, that it will bring you nearly unbearable ecstasy and make you forget that you haven’t been on a date in over a year. To sell breakfast cereal, they made cartoons with elaborate plots about a rabbit who wants to get some cereal but is always thwarted by these cruel and selfish kids, or a leprechaun who wants to keep the kids from getting his cereal but can’t, or three little elves named Snap, Crackle and Pop who live in your bowl of Rice Krispies and help Santa make toys (Is that how it went? For some reason, the few years after the tingly shampoo-eating incident are kind of a blur).

But the funny thing is that it works. Didn’t you beg your parents to buy you the cereals the rabbits and leprechauns were fighting over? Doesn’t McDonald’s continue its relentless march across the globe, with over 99 jillion served, despite the fact that giving its food to war prisoners is against the Geneva conventions? As ridiculous and silly as advertising can be, it certainly seems to work. Maybe that just means humanity is even sillier.

Devin Felix is a senior majoring in journalism. Comments can be sent to dfelix@cc.usu.edu.