In Norse mythology, Loki is a trickster and shapeshifter, half Aesir and half giant. He is a continued source of chaos within Asgard, but not an outright villain. The Lokasenna depicts him crashing another god’s feast and insulting the entire room, but the Thrymskvida shows him helping Thor retrieve his stolen hammer. And yet, despite this ambivalent relationship, Loki is the god most responsible for bringing about Ragnarok.
The Younger Edda depicts Baldr, reputed for his untarnished beauty. His mother, Freya Frigg, is so paranoid for his health and looks that she exacts an oath from everything on the planet, living and inanimate, that it will not hurt Baldr. Everything that she talks to promises to back off – except a sprig of mistletoe that she overlooks. Bitter with jealousy at the glorious Baldr, Loki fashions a dart out of mistletoe. One day, while the gods are playing a game of Throw Things At Baldr And Watch Them Veer Away At The Last Second, Loki hands the dart to the blind god Hodr and suggests he play too. Hodr flings the mistletoe, Loki guides it home, and Baldr is struck down dead. As punishment, Loki is caught and bound beneath the Earth under a snake which drips venom on his face. This torture contributes to Loki siding with the giants, rather than the gods, during Ragnarok.
Also, Loki is the father of, among other things, the World Serpent Jormundgandr. Raised in the land of the giants, Jormundgandr grows so large that it encircles the world. When it lets go of its own tail, on the day of Ragnarok, the world will literally fall apart.
So Loki is the trickster god. He can create pleasing illusions. He strikes at vanities. He triumphs over brawnier foes. Does that sound like anyone else we know?
Old Spice has been known for the direct, ironic earnestness of its ads for some time. Remember the Bruce Campbell ads? The hairy guy in the gym? The LL Cool J ads? Old Spice has been pushing the envelope for years. But the new ads – which I’m calling the Isaiah Mustafah ads, after the actor who appears in them – take it to an even more ridiculous level.
The world Mustafah lives in continually changes. First he’s in a shower. Then he’s on a boat. Then he’s riding a horse. In the most recent commercial, he’s on a beach, then is rolling a log, then is walking through a kitchen into a rocky river, which he dives off of into a hot tub. Mustafah displays power over his own appearance as well. He starts off wearing a towel, then wearing a sweater, then wearing a bathing suit, then jeans. The one constant seems to be that he’s shirtless and grinning. He can even transform objects with a word. “It’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again! The tickets are now diamonds!”
Like Loki’s feud with Baldr, Mustafah attacks masculine vanity. “Sadly, [your man] isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady-scented bodywash and started using Old Spice, he could smell like me.” That’s as unapologetic a slam against the viewer’s appearance as I’ve ever heard. “You’re ugly. Your only hope of looking as good as me is to smell like me.” Baldr couldn’t stand up to an assault like that.
Loki (for which read Mustafah) has also triumphed over Thor (for which read Terry Crews). Old Spice launched a similar series of ridiculous commercials at the same time, featuring actor and bodybuilder Crews flexing and screaming at the camera. These commercials, while also absurd, have not done nearly as well. American audiences prefer the soothing guile of Loki to the berserker might of Thor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrvWLdyG4Uw&feature=channel
Finally, this Old Spice commercial, like Loki, will bring about the end of the world in a cataclysmic battle.
Ever since reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I’ve been on the lookout for the commercial that will destroy America.
For those who haven’t read his po-mo doorstop, it describes (among other things) an escalating war of outrageousness between TV ad agencies at the end of the 20th century. It culminates in an ad for a hygienic tongue scraper. Foster Wallace describes an ad in which a pedestrian is offered a lick of a sidewalk vendor’s ice cream cone by a cute meter maid. As horrible as it is, he describes it in sentence fragments:
The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise. The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid’s face going slack with disgust as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers. The nightmarish slo-mo with which the mortified pedestrian reels away into street traffic with his whole arm over his mouth, the avuncular vendor’s kindly face now hateful and writhing as he hurls hygienic invectives.
These ads shook viewers to the existential core […] V&V’s NoCoat campaign was a case study in the eschatology of emotional appeals. It towered, a kind of Uber-ad, casting a shaggy shadow back across a whole century of broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely, given the vulnerable psyche of an increasingly hygiene-conscious U.S.A. in those times.
The fictional NoCoat advertising campaign is the most singly effective ad campaign in the history of television and it destroys the television industry. It creates in its audience a terrifying compulsion to buy the advertised product. At the same time, it repulses the audience so much that no one’s willing to watch TV anymore.
The form of the destructor.
Ever since reading Infinite Jest (which I did only recently), I’ve been watching the growing Sturm und Drang surrounding commercials with fascination. For one thing, they have continued to escalate anxieties much as Foster Wallace predicted. Consider the really creepy Super Bowl commercials in 2010. Or the gloomy Tiger Woods Nike commercial, which (figuratively) flagellated Tiger Woods for his sins. Commercials have always played on fears and desires. But it seems, of late, that their messaging has gone (to paraphrase The Simpsons) from the subliminal to the liminal, and perhaps as far as the superliminal.
But one thing that Foster Wallace never predicted was the notion of viral commercials.
For the first hundred years of spectrum broadcast media, commercials were an unwanted burden. They were accompanied by jingles meant to trap them in your head. They were accompanied by gorgeous models and celebrity spokesmen. As the commercial airspace grew more crowded, they escalated the ridiculousness of their imagery. And no one was immune to their effects. The same cynical hipsters who laugh at Hummer commercials fall for the slick packaging of Apple products. The Midwesterners who snicker at products for feminine needs still order more Budweiser than any other beer. Commercials are like pollution – the price we pay for the wealth of entertainment. Nobody likes them, but we could not have as many shows and movies as we have without them.
Around the dawn of YouTube, however, the younger and nimbler ad agencies realized something. “Hey,” someone said, “if we make a commercial that’s ironic enough to appeal to the 18-35 demographic, they’ll circulate it for us. And people will watch it voluntarily!” Enter the viral video.
Look at your hand. What’s this? It’s a talk by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, given at TED in June 2010.
Look again. The talk is now a prophecy of doom.
Conventional wisdom has it that “word of mouth is the best form of marketing.” This is kind of like saying water is the best way of hydrating the human body: it’s obvious until someone starts getting paid to make alternatives. You might reverse it and say marketing is a crappy way of imitating word of mouth. And it is. Celebrity spokesmodels, touting buzzwords as virtues, are cheap imitations of the recommendation of a friend.
If Clay Shirky were talking about marketing instead of picking up kids at daycare, he’d say that marketing isn’t as good as word of mouth because marketing slaps a price structure on top of what was once a generous exchange of information. Marketers imitate friendship. But because friendship’s rather precious, they have to pay someone – a publisher – for the privilege. The publisher has to, in turn, find a way to get the marketer’s message to as many viewers as possible. This is a slow and inefficient process.
Until commercials go viral.
Suddenly, the multi-billion dollar marketing industry (creative, powerful) is now hitched onto the process of word of mouth (friendly, trustworthy). What’s more, it’s accelerated by the speed of the global fiber-optic communications network (fast, reliable). It’s like the dead are besieging Asgard in Thor’s magic chariot, as opposed to a ship made out of fingernails (ick).
The three most powerful forces in the world – marketing, community and the Internet – have joined forces to make sure you know what Isaiah Mustafah smells like.
CHECK OUT THIS HILARIOUS WEDDING DANCE, MORTAL!
Why is this so dire? Because there’s no going back from it. Every producer of consumer packaged goods, the next time they sit down to renew their ad agency contract, is going to say, “We want to make a really cool video. One that’ll go viral. You know, like that Old Spice ad.” And since ad agencies justify their budgets by beating their competitors, they’ll have to come up with something even more eye-catching to top Old Spice.
How do you come up with something more entertaining and shareable than Isaiah Mustafah? I have no clue. I couldn’t have conceived of such a commercial in the first place. But I can’t stop watching it. That weird blend of charisma, absurdity and ironic earnestness have lodged in just the right corner of my brain. And 14 million YouTube users agree with me.
In less than ten years, commercials will be nonsense slurs of random images, non sequitur dialogue and explosions. Marketers will spam the Internet with thousands of ads in a day, hoping that one will go viral and validate their budget for the fiscal year. Trunk lines will groan with the effort of funneling videos of arm-wrestling pandas selling Pringles, plush UFOs with googly eyes touting Old Navy and the inimitable Geico Gecko.
And the World Serpent will uncoil its tail, Fenrir will break free from its subterranean prison, and the Fimbulwinter will begin.
