On Ads and Aspirations....

Some speculative and unscientific hypotheses I have developed watching the "publicidad" on Spanish TV

 

Faithful readers who are practicing their Spanish may appreciate the clips below, as they are narrated nice and slowly and clearly.  Be warned, however, that while repeated viewings will lead to full comprehension, they may also lead to a strange desire to buy beverages and cleaning products.

I'm just back from a fun but exhausting weekend in Belgium, and feeling very happy to be back in my cozy city once more, where I can see the sun.  I've been given another good archive lead, which I will follow up shortly, as tomorrow and Friday are both puentes which I plan to use for rest, recuperation, and possibly some writing time.  In the meantime, here are a few thoughts about Spanish TV which have been kicking around my head for a while (I watch way too much TV here), and which being away for a few days brought into focus.

A Russian friend of mine this weekend, in the attempt to persuade me that the world was not falling apart, said that she traced social progress through Hollywood movies because they are mass, popular culture, so once an idea is there it is never radical or elitist, but by default mainstream, and said that she traced the rise of tolerance to the ways movies were made now as opposed to fifty years ago.  I see her point, but what I didn't say at the time is that even Hollywood movies are frequently aspirational: they don't so much reflect an actual social consensus as the social consensus that the people in Hollywood wish existed.  In that respect they may be more progressive than the US as a whole.  (My friend doesn't know the US at all except from the movies, so she has no way of realizing that.)  I assume that the same is true for Spanish TV advertisements, and perhaps even more so since the point of a TV ad is even more explicitly to get people to buy stuff, so obviously the ads present an aspirational lifestyle --- a world which doesn't exist but which could if you are willing to buy X product (or a dystopia which doesn't exist but which might if you don't buy X product).  Still, to the extent that ads reflect both the preoccupations and the dreams of their target demographics, I have made a few tentative hypotheses about Spain the present day.  These are unscientific and unsupported by any hard demographic data, but I bet they could be confirmed (because I bet the highly paid people who made the ads confirmed them).  Read on for my thoughts, and for some funny youtube clips.

First: Spain's TV watchers (or most coveted shoppers) are late thirty-something parents of young children.  This is not completely a shot in the dark, since I know that Spain experienced what they call "el baby boom" in the late 1970s, after Franco's death, through the early 1980s, so there's a slight demographic bulge there (in spite of Europe's graying population generally) and as a simple echo effect, those babies are now of the age to have young children.  Also I know that during "la crisis" a lot of people put off having children for obvious economic reasons, and in the last couple of years as the economy slowly, painfully, and tortuously began to sputter back to life (or as people simply hit their late thirties and forties and biology became more urgent than economics), people have had kids.  (A further hint of this is that the upper grades of the Colegio Estados Unidos de America are very small, whereas the kindergarten and first grade classes are bulging.)

In any case, Spanish ads are full of concerns about childcare, mostly about the paralyzing fear that what a Spanish parenting guide from almost exactly one hundred years ago (that I read years ago for research and that stuck with me) calls "el pequeño tiranno" will not go to sleep, and will therefore deprive parents of sleep and socializing time.

Coca-Cola wants to reassure parents that they can safely drink sugar and caffeine free Coke Zero if they have "sueño atrasado" (delayed sleep) because of crying babies (though their unintentional message may be that couples lose all interest in intimacy because of incredible sleep deprivation):

Asevi Mio, a local floor polish brand, wants parents to know that it's ok if you have children who cry and misbehave and are generally not like the children in "los anuncios" ((other) advertisements) because (a)at least your floors will smell nice and (b)they will be so shiny that they will be the "best reflection" of real life:

The association of Spanish wine producers (Interprofesional del vino de España) has a general campaign about celebrating life's "pequeños milagros" by toasting with wine, which lists a series of "little miracles" which happen every day and which we should celebrate, the first of which is "que acuestes a tu bebé a las ocho, y se duerma a las ocho" (when you put your baby to sleep at 8:00 and it falls asleep at 8:00) which shows an attractive young couple embracing and literally crying with relief.  (The second miracle is "leaving work at 6:00 and actually leaving at 6:00" which suggests that time management is an overwhelming and real concern.)

Next observation: Some of my faithful viewers may already have noticed a trend in all three of the above ads (which believe me are repeated ad nauseam on Spanish TV).  In all of the cases young fathers are explicitly shown doing childcare or housework.  (Asevi actually calls attention to itself by having the father mention that "in most floor polish ads the person polishing the floor is always a woman" as well as that "the children never cry.")

Spain is a country which is truly obsessed with "violencia de género" (literally "gender violence" although "domestic violence" is probably the better translation), and Spaniards of good will are convinced that they have a deeply machista and misogynistic culture which they must fight diligently, and of which they should be deeply ashamed.  They should see the ads in other countries.  (There was a survey which came out recently which was widely publicized here that said that 40% of EU citizens thought that a woman's primary place was in the home, although something like 80% said that they thought the gender pay gap was unacceptable and a problem....for those few freakish women who aren't in the home, there's no reason to take advantage of them.)  While it's doubtless true that Spain (like every other country in the world) suffers from centuries of endemic sexism, it's also true that major advertising firms (who tend to be moved by hard data more than sentiment or ideology) seem to think that most Spaniards want to live in an egalitarian society as far as gender is concerned where men are equally involved in getting children to go to sleep, and women are equally implicated in the workplace.  Contrast that to the lack of racial diversity in the ads.  (Looking on youtube, there are longer versions of the Coke ad with multiple couples of different ethnicities, but the version playing on Spanish tv is the short one I linked to above.)  In terms of ads selling a dream of a middle class lifestyle surrounded by reasonably attractive and prosperous people, Spaniards are ok with having only white faces in the picture.  But they definitely don't want to fall into what they consider embarrassing stereotypes about oppressed women and hyper-macho men.

It's hard to compare these ads to ads in the US, because it's been a while since I've watched TV at home, but my impressions of the ads at home (which I may tune out more because I'm less interested in the language use) is that they're aimed at an older and richer demographic, perhaps because the trend is for younger people to simply watch things online in the US, and so TV watchers tend to be older.  (That could be related to the fact that cable is included in rent here as a standard thing -- which was a shock to me, since it never is at home, whereas little extras like water and gas are not included, which are much more commonly part of the rent in the New York.)  If cable is expensive and an older technology, so US tv watchers are older and richer, that would explain why the TV ads from home that I vaguely remember tend to be for big ticket items like cars or (ahem) age specific ones like Cialis.  Of course, all the drug ads are unique to US TV, and their demographic tends to skew old, but in general I get the impression that children in US TV ads are more likely to appear with their grandparents (who have been miraculously freed from symptoms of arthritis or allergies, or who are picking them up in an extremely cool car or similar) than with their young and harried parents.  That reminds me that one of the relatively few car ads on Spanish TV is a slightly bizarre Volkswagen spot, which once again invokes the father-child relationship, though in a somewhat strange way.

I don't mean to overly idealize Spain and there are some problematic (as well as downright weird) images here.  But if you measure progress through popular culture, and sophisticated attempts to part people from their hard earned money, they do seem to be in favor of involved and caring fathers.