Last week I ended by noting that it seems counter-intuitive that you can promise almost nothing, insinuate anything, or promise something deeply vague with an advertisement more easily than you can promise something you can't deliver. Today I'd like to ask why this is counter-intuitive. My argument below is that it does because, as a culture, we've started to develop an ironic stance toward the role of promise making in advertising altogether. I'll also argue that this doesn't put us on very firm footing as consumers.

As I noted last week, promises are a firmly entrenched aspect of our morality. They are, in the form of contracts, oaths, vows, and treaties, the guarantor of social cooperation. It is no suprise, then, when faced with a media climate of insidious strategies (vagueness, minimal promises, insinuation) to undermine the value of the promise model, consumers "buck."

For me, one of the deepest and scariest parts of coping as a human being living in our modern media climate is becoming jaded. Because we're being lied to, and because when that stops working, we get even worse treatment. It is easy to become detached, to just simply stop taking promising seriously. This trend, I think, is terrible news for us as consumers, who after all dictate what works and doesn't in branding and advertising.

Why? Well, what happens when consumers stop expecting advertising and brands to make meaningful promises? By definition, advertising becomes unintelligible. And this is happening right now, or else it has already happened. I think about it a lot, and I don't know why or how some advertising works on me exactly, at least not at a deep level. What I do know, though, is that the advertisers know that I'm trapped in this ambigious relationship to advertising, and that they've started advertising to that. I'll give my favorite example.

No doubt you have seen this Pizza Hut commercial. The plot goes something like this: Many people sit down to dinner in a fine italian restaurant. They are brought out heaping plates of pasta and (literally, macaroni and bacon - the mind reels) and glasses of presumably fine wine. They eat, they enjoy life. At the end of dinner, it is revealed to them that they have been eating... Pizza Hut! They are shocked. Awed. Their lives have changed, for the better. Finally, gourmet cuisine at a price they can afford and from a brand they can find in any city in the United States.

Accompanying audio: "Pizza Hut delivered the pasta!" Look how shocked this "real" person is. She totally thought that was pasta from this fancy restaurant.

This advertisment campaign makes wild, crazy promises. These are promises that everybody knows Pizza Hut can't keep. But, the media-aware citizen explains, these promises are self-aware: they're not lies, they're ironic. No one with any sense would believe that Pizza Hut pastas are indistinguishable from fine restaurant cuisine. And of course no one does. But it's too late: the advertising already happened. We accept the story ironically, but we still accept it.