Suppose for a moment that you were watching television and an ad came on where an A-list celebrity was driving a sub-compact car through the South Bronx. Let’s further assume that the actress in question has cultivated the persona of being connected to this neighborhood (her home town), and in fact has lines in the ad talking about how she draws inspiration and energy from this place. Now, knowing nothing else about the production of the video, the endorsement deal between the actress and the car company, the contract between the car company and the ad agency, or the product itself, how much of this would you accept just from seeing the commercial?
Unless you are a very innocent and trusting person, you probably don’t actually believe that a random film crew happened by as the celebrity spokesperson was driving around the Bronx; you would realize that people who get paid tens of millions of dollars each year probably don’t drive around in vehicles that cost less than $20,000 (if they drive around at all). Obviously, this is a paid appearance in which the car company is paying the celebrity to use their product in a television commercial in order to convince her fans to purchase similar products – or to convince people in general that they can be like the actress if they buy the product…
If you’ve ever learned anything about advertising or television production you would also realize that even elementary action shots will require dozens of technical people, lead and following vehicles, cooperation from local authorities, police escorts and traffic control, and enough lawyers to field an entire football team, armed with enough contracts to build a stadium. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a film crew working – or seen any one of dozens of “behind the scenes” shows over the years, you’re familiar with the idea that even something as simple as a 20-second commercial takes thousands of person-hours of field work alone. You will probably also recognize all of the clichéd images in the spot (it’s practically a catalog of images you’ve seen in movies and television programs about New York) and realize that even as an effort to establish an image or a brand it’s not a very good one…
You’d have to be a complete cynic to see this piece and wonder to yourself if any of it was actually real; if the ad agency had a production company film a woman of the same approximate size and shape driving the car around the Bronx, stage some scenes and images that scream “New York!” to people who have never been there, and then photograph the actress on a soundstage in Hollywood and CGI her image into the film, replacing the image of the stunt driver. Unfortunately, if you read this story on the Smoking Gun website, it appears that this is exactly what happened with the Jennifer Lopez spot for Fiat…
Now, no one is suggesting that celebrity endorsement are (or even should be) real; most people understand that these are paid representatives of the company who have been chosen specifically to help cast the product (and sometimes the business behind it) in a particular light. There’s even a parody of this in the movie “City Slickers,” where the owner of an ice cream company is asked why he has attractive male models portray him and his partner in the company’s television ads (he replies “If it was us, could you eat?”). I just find it amusing to learn that even my characteristically skeptical view of such offerings was actually less cynical than the work actually produced by the ad agency – which produced an anthem to the Bronx using a woman who may call herself “Jenny from the Block” but won’t actually set foot in the place…
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