The current Adidas advertisement for the European Championships in soccer is basically what Douglas Rushkoff is talking about. It features the likes of Zidane and Beckham engaging in a kick about in a typically picturesque continental market square with passers-by joining in.
The soccer stars are suitably dressed down with discreet Adidas logos on their clothes. It is beautifully composed and engaging, with none of the aggressive, macho football-as-war messages associated with Adidas's rivals. It is hard to distinguish whether the participants, aside from the players, are actors or real people enjoying the chance to save a shot from a bona fide hero.
For the media-literate generation it is perfect. It allows them to accept the advertisement on the merits usually associated with film; it allows them to appreciate that the advertising agency understands that a hard sell won't work with this particular audience, thus paying homage to their sophistication.
Rushkoff made his name with such hip titles as Media Virus and The Ecstasy Club which propagated the notion that the Internet, the multiplicity of TV channels and the increased sophistication of "GenerationX" meant that advertising as we knew it was on the way out. Agencies trying to come to grips with the emerging marketplace were like dinosaurs coming to grips with the ice age.
In this book, he refutes those arguments saying that he underestimated the gullibility of the population and the ability of the advertising world to mutate just as fast as the media platforms to deliver it.
The Internet, according to Rushkoff has degenerated into a global direct marketing tool with spam clogging up the ether. Media literacy has been subverted by a knowing nod and wink and the upping of production values and the public spectacle (in this case American football, basketball and baseball, but equally applicable to soccer) suborned by the needs of advertisers and sponsors.
In short, the proliferation of media providers has meant that the flood of advertising has reached biblical proportions and whether some can swim better than others is moot as we are all getting wet.
Rushkoff writes in a bright and breezy, but snappy American way and his gallop through the methods of sale - from one-on-one to the subliminal - makes fascinating reading. What is of more importance is the notion that the marketplace is slowly triumphing over the Internetistas, a thesis that is gaining credence among former advocates who believed it would change the world.
It has. But in the way television, radio and satellite have done before, it's fast becoming just another way of parting a consumer from his cash.
comidheach@irish-times.ie
