Page 1 of 2 The great game - asset-trader style
By Julian Delasantellis
"Shall we play a game?" the Whopper, the persnickety prodigal Pentagon computer
asks David (Matthew Broderick) , the teen computer hacker who just broke into
the system in the 1983 movie War Games. After turning down what the
computer calls a "good game of Chess", David chooses the ever-popular teen
favorite, "Global Thermonuclear War" - and almost destroys civilization as a
result.
Today, with the American nuclear arsenal asleep and the former Soviet Union's
nuclear arsenal smashed, any similarly ambitioned youngster would not be
fiddling with phone cards hoping to reach the Pentagon. No, these days, the
offer of "shall we play a game?" might lead to a rousing match of "Global
Financial Asset Trader".
It's amazing these days how you don't have to know what's being
broadcast on American television to know what's on American television. Walk in
on a commercial for laxatives or other formulations to help one "feel right"
and you know that the national news is on; nothing else skews so elderly in the
ratings to offer advertisers an audience in need of such assistance. Walk in on
a commercial for veterinary technician training, or for a lawyer offering to
initiate lawsuits against supermarkets with wet floors or a broken parking lot,
and you know that you're watching programming directed at young people with
more eyes for shiny consumables than the means to pay for them; thus, the
underhanded strategems that fall apart upon the first introduction into
courtroom evidence of the grocery department's video cameras.
What if the commercials seem to feature people who maybe look a lot like you?
You know, young, but not too young, professionals of various assorted
ethnicities making breakfast for spouses and/or children, taking children to
work, then putting in a full day's work before returning home for dinner or to
watch the kids playing soccer against a sepia sunset in a golden sky. A calm,
comforting voice-over implants into your cerebral cortex the theme the
spinmeisters want to keep bouncing around in your head - "the future - you've
got to prepare for it now".
And even before the regular programming returns, you know what it is. It's the
US financial services industry come looking for some more of your money.
The answer to the question of why the US financial industry advertises as
heavily as it does - by one estimate, about $10 billion last year - is
intimately connected to the question of why any business or industry
advertises. In a 1995 book, Fables of Abundance, by sociologist Jackson
Lears, the concept of advertising is brought out of ancient history to the
present:
What do advertisements mean? Many things. They urge people to
buy goods, but they also signify a certain vision of the good life; they
validate a way of being in the world. They focus private fantasy; they sanction
or subvert existing structures of economic and political power. Their
significance depends on their cultural setting. ... Longings for release from
privation resonated with ancient religious hopes, the enduring myth of an
earthly paradise melded material abundance with the spiritual abundance of
salvation celebrating eternal ease in a nurturant land of plenty. ... The
eroticism of consumption was a complex and elusive process. In part it arose
from a self-defeating pattern of human desire - a pattern that may have been
virtually universal and timeless but that resonated especially with the
emergent market cultures of the modern West. As early as 1587, Montaigne caught
the pattern when he wrote of what he called his "sole-error". "It is that I
attach too little value to things I possess, just because I possess them and
overvalue anything that is strangely absent, and not mine." This was the
dynamic of deprivation at the heart of expanding consumption: purchase brought
momentary satisfaction followed by dissatisfaction and renewed longing. ... It
would not be until the 20th century that corporate advertisers would routinely
combine unfulfilled longings with acts of consumption seeking to dispel the
magic of recently purchased goods through doctrines of stylistic progress and
policies of planned obsolesce.
Many observers have noted what
might be called Montaigne's contradiction - not wanting what one does have in
favor of what one does not; it's the reason fast-food hamburgers are made to
look so meaty and juicy. But in the advertisements for financial services, it's
not the orange juice from the family breakfast nor children's soccer shoes that
are being pitched - it's something entirely different.
"FADE IN" as the ad copy script opens. It's morning in America again, and a
very busy one at that. The kids are running wildly around the breakfast table,
middle-aged mom's in her business suit loading her briefcase, middle-aged dad,
in business slacks and tie, is making breakfast for the whole brood. Later, he
will pack up the kids for school in the SUV, drive to one of the cubicles in
the office park, work a full day.
But something's missing. Maybe, during his long workday, dad takes a break at
the water cooler, looks up around him. Does he really want to be doing this,
every morning, 50 weeks a year, for the next 30, maybe 50 years? If not, he had
better get some retirement counseling from his local investment company
professional; pretty darned quick.
"What a lucky break!" dad thinks; he just saw an ad for a local brokerage
during the golf match over the weekend. The spot showed a friendly faced
broker, about the same age and wearing an equally understated wedding ring as
himself, operating out of an office in a traditional, brick storefront in the
older part of town - not in a bland, soulless suburban office park like where
he works; where he knows the merchants who are hawking all manner of the
foulest mendacities operate all around him. This broker, dad knows, can be
trusted, and trust sure is a dammed sight more important than a cheap brokerage
fee on a stock trade.
Or maybe the pitch will head off towards other, more critical psychological
receptors. Frequently the ads show financial responsibility and planning for
the future as tasks - like coaching Little League baseball or organizing
neighborhood crime watches - that actually make the American man a man. One
advertisement drops all pretense with this pitch; it shows men carrying through
the day a roughly 1.5 meter long woodcarving of the current value of their
retirement portfolio, say, "$650,247" or "$2,785,144." Obviously, those with
the biggest numbers are walking around with the biggest smiles and the widest
strides.
Or, as Rose (Kate Winslet) inquired in Titanic, "Do you know of Dr
Freud, Mr Ismay? His ideas of the male preoccupation with size might be of
particular interest to you."
But with the turn of the wheel of the sociological zeitgeist, another new pitch
is being thrown off the mound of the financial services industry. This one is
addressed towards American women.
It's the same morning in an American kitchen, but dad is nowhere to be found.
Mom is both prepping for work and getting the kids ready for school, to be
followed by a frantic rush to drop the kids off at school or day care, a long
workday earning less pay than the males in her office, and finally, the reverse
of the morning's stress - heaven help her from the dirty looks she will receive
from the other mothers if she is but a few minutes late picking up her kids.
Back at home, the youngsters play wildly while she frantically cooks dinner or
once again orders pizza; then dinner gets wolfed down, maybe there are a few
minutes helping one child with homework; then off to bed, to do the same thing
again the next day, then again, then again and again, ad infinitum.
Obviously, a man had at one time to be involved with this family, but no more.
Mom's ringless fingers attest to this. In the immediate aftermath of World War
II, it would have been assumed that dad had been lost in the war, but now most
people would know something else is going on. Through an abandonment, or
through a formal divorce, dad has chosen to not be part of this family.
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