Yesterday I analyzed an article by Ron Lieber in the Saturday “Business Day” section of the New York Times. I want to take a broader look at the entire section today, because it exemplifies what has been the norm in business feature reporting for decades.

The business section of virtually all American newspapers and news magazines has always sprinkled consumer finance features into true business news like recalls, market movements, mergers and economic reports.  These consumer finance features seem to always focus on solving a problem or addressing a trend.  But in fact at the heart of all of them is the selling of a product or service.

Let’s take a look at the consumer finance features in Saturday’s New York Times:

• We’ve already spoken of the Lieber article, which isn’t selling you on any product, except the subtle hint that your journey to love begins by buying an on-line ad.  The Lieber article instead, sells you on the concept that buying things is the essence of any relationship.
• “The Bean, the Pod and the Battle” sells us on buying the environmental disaster that is the home pod system for brewing espresso.
• “A Buying Guide for the Cheap” sells us on using an on-line shopping service.
• “Sizing up FreshDirect” sells us on buying food through an on-line supermarket.
• “As Private Tutoring Booms, Parents Look at the Returns” sells us on the need to get a private tutor if we want our kids to do well on the SATs and get into a good school.
• “Birth Control Doesn’t Have to Mean the Pill” sells us on intrauterine devices (I.U.D.) for birth control.

In all these articles, the writers advocate the ideology of consumerism in subtext and asides, typically with unproven assertions such as “a product that has become a must-have among the chic urbanites,” “Some physician practices are not very familiar with longer-lasting, more expensive methods…” and “since money is still no object when it comes to their children.”  The implication always is that money will buy what you want and what you want can only be bought.

The New York Times is far from alone in filling its pages with features that do little more than sell products and services.  Selling goods and services is the primary function of most news media and serves as the core topic for most feature stories in business, lifestyle, entertainment, health and other non-hard news sections of newspapers, broadcast news, consumer and business magazines, e-zines and news websites. 

While in Manhattan for two weeks on a working vacation, I’ve been taking advantage of the greatest mass transit system in the United States, the New York City subway—dingy with age, but clean, inexpensive, extremely safe and it gets you where you want to go faster than any alternative transportation option in the city.

This past weekend in a train on the East Side, I saw a fascinating billboard that exemplifies how Reagan’s politics of selfishness has completely imbued much of our public discourse.

The billboard, from the National Peanut Board, has as its theme line and branding message, “Get the energy” or “Have the energy.”  Here is how the National Peanut Board describes itself on its website: The National Peanut Board represents all USA peanut farmers and their families. Through research and marketing initiatives the Board is finding new ways to enhance production and increase consumer demand by promoting the great taste, nutrition and culinary versatility of USA-grown peanuts.

The National Peanut Board is obviously trying to say that peanuts are an “energy” food, and on one level may play off the current fad for energy drinks.  (But remember this: peanuts are good; energy drinks should be avoided at all costs!).  On the website , we learn that the slogan for the national campaign is “Energy for the Good Life.”

This particular ad has a large headline that read: “Energy to spend time with someone who will listen to you.”

And what image does the peanut board use to exemplify this message?  It’s a photo of a man with his dog on a hill overlooking a beautiful view.

There are two ways to interpret this collision of words with imagery, and both convey a solipsistic message that I believe is a variation of the Reaganistic ideology that tells us the world is a better place if every seeks his or her self-interest and that we should look for private solutions to address problems.  Solipsism, by the way, is the philosophy that the world begins and ends with the self, or, put another way, that the only thing any one can be sure really exists is one’s own mind.

 Here are my two interpretations of the imagery:

• Your dog is the only person who really listens to you
• God, represented by nature as it often has been in painting and literature through the centuries, is the only one who really listens to you. 

I think it’s easy to see that if your dog is the only one who listens to you, then you’re living in a society in which all humans care only about themselves and act only in their own self interest, to the exclusion of all other family or social concerns; in other words, Reaganism taken to its extreme.  The dog is cute, but the internal logic of the ad is brutal: No one listens to you; no one cares about you; you’re in this world by yourself; you might as well just act in your own self-interest, because no one else is going to help you and you shouldn’t help anyone else. 

Even if the Peanut Board is subtly trying to make a religious message, the analysis remains the same.  The god in the ad, if there is one, is not one that provides moral guidance, nor one that exemplifies service to others.  No, what this god does is listen to you.  You get to talk to this god and tell him what’s on your mind (that is, of course, if you have eaten enough peanuts to have the energy to talk!).

I wonder if the Peanut Board realizes that the ideological message underlying its attempt to sell peanuts is that no one should care about anyone else, since no one else ever listens.

My entry into frozen food giant Stouffer’s “Let’s Fix Dinner” marketing campaign came via a two-page, full-color ad in  AARP Magazine, the bimonthly slick lifestyle magazine of the American Association of Retired People, which claims to have the largest circulation of any magazine in the entire world.  So before taking a look at why “Let’s Fix Dinner” is a  prime example of the commercialization of relationships in contemporary society, I want to first describe the ad, which is the sizzle to the sizzle, that is, the whistle-buzzer that makes us notice the twisted messaging that is supposed to entice us to buy the product.

The right page of this two-page ad is a sexy pose of an overweight couple in their 40s, fully dressed in front of an abstract aquamarine background, but looking like they’re about to take off their clothes and do it, except she’s wearing an oven mitt.  The “VH1 pop-up video” style headline is “Are oven mitts the key to a successful relationship?” followed by a smaller headline in another typeface and different pop-up balloon, “Dinner is a great time for couples to reconnect, and catch up with each other face to face.”  At the bottom of the page is a short paragraph that starts “Amazing the difference a real meal can make,” then proceeds to sell Stouffer’s frozen “Mac & Cheese.”  The most striking thing about the ad is the carnality in the expressions of these two truly chunky people.

In the left hand ad, Stouffer’s takes a more conventional approach to advertising prepared food:  It’s a very copy-heavy ad with a photo in the top third of another middle-aged couple—very fit, light-skinned African-Americans—in the kitchen embracing while she handles a pair of tongs.  The rest of the ad is brimming with words, including four paragraphs about the four steps to connecting with your partner.  Here are the headlines for each step:

1. Slow down to reconnect
2. Make conversation
3. Keep it simple, sweetheart
4. Join the Stouffer’s challenge

“Keep it simple,” of course, means buy Stouffer’s “solutions for delicious, nutritious meals without the fuss.”  The challenge is to make a personal commitment to have dinner with your spouse more often.  For help in meeting this commitment, Stouffer’s sends you to www.letsfixdinner.com.  This left-side full-page ad also crowds in small photos of the frozen lasagna and the ever-popular, ever-chic macaroni & cheese.  As the ad says, “Add a little candlelight and you’ve got a romantic meal for two.”

While the two-page ad focuses on the romantic needs of the empty-nester, the website really is for families with children.  It is a very infotaining website, i.e., it mixes information and entertainment in a light-hearted, happy kind of way.  Among the whistles and buzzers are pages of factoids; features on real families in a kind of “reality” webcasting; a survey to take; and of course product information.  There is also a page to sign-up for the Stouffer’s “Let’s Fix Dinner” Challenge.  Once you’re signed up, you get points and entries into a sweepstakes every time you record another dinner that the entire family had together.  Last time I was on the website, it stated on the homepage that people in the challenge have reported making 98,974 family dinners.

The home page is very easy on the eyes:  the centerpiece is a rotating wide-screen box that consists of a happy image of a family or family member and three pop-up balloons, in which there are three pieces of highly structured copy, as we will see in this example:

• Balloon #1/A provocative statement: “Can placemats keep your kids off drugs?”
• Balloon #2/A factoid: “Studies show that teens in families that have dinner together five times a week are 45% less likely to drink and 66% less likely to take drugs.”
• Balloon #3/A squib of real-life conversation from one of the “real” families featured on the website: “‘Okay, I’m resolving to clear all my stuff off the dining room table so we can actually use it!’  Sarah, San Diego, CA”

There are five of these billboards that rotate onto the home page, one after the other. Four of them focus on families with children.  The empty nester one features a photo of the chubby but horny couple from the AARP Magazine ad.

Stouffer’s and its advertising mavens and mavessess put a lot of work into creating a marketing campaign and website in which every detail down to the last factoid and image focuses on making the message.

And what’s the message?  That Stouffer’s frozen dinners are delicious? No.

That Stouffer’s meals are nutritious? No. 

That these food products can contribute to a healthy weight-loss program? No. 

That Stouffer’s gives you a way to feed a family cheaply? Again, no.

That Stouffer’s is a fast way to chow down? Not exactly.

No, in fact, the central message is not about food at all.  It’s about the benefits of the family eating dinner together (something that my always busy family did about six nights a week, both when I was a child and a father).  The way that Stouffer’s facilitates this togetherness is pretty much unexplained.  It’s taken for granted that the post-modern 21st century consumer knows the product-related benefits of frozen dinners, (which in the old days used to be called TV dinners because they were used to bring the family together for the Ed Sullivan  and Dinah Shore shows).

Once again, the U.S. people face an urgent social problem, or in this case a knot of related social problems that include the transmission of basic middle class values, school performance, teenaged substance abuse and conjugal sex.  And once again, U.S. industry and commerce come up with an answer. 

And it’s always the same answer: Buy something.

Beneath Stouffer’s sophisticated attempt to attach the values of family life and interfamilial relationships to its frozen dinners is the basic ideological subtext that a commercial transaction will solve your problem, whatever it is.  And it’s so simple!  You don’t have to spend any time together chopping meat or sautéing vegetables.  No need to even boil water.  Just pop it in the microwave and serve, with candles or hip-hop music or maybe both.   

And therein lies the significance of featuring macaroni and cheese so prominently.  Mac & cheese represents the epitome of comfort food that makes us feel nice and warm inside about family life.  It is also about the easiest meal there is to make from scratch.   But it does require boiling water, chopping cheese and measuring out some milk.  And those things can be great distractions when you’re trying to work on a family relationship.  But Stouffer’s makes it even easier than making mac & cheese from scratch.  All you do is pop it in the microwave.  And now you’ve got food preparation out of the way, that’s the hard part.  The rest of building strong family relationships will be easy, because you’ve done all the hard work already – you’ve bought something.   

Target is a very savvy marketing company, and like all large marketers, it conducts a lot of consumer research and pretests all its commercials.

Yet after all of that, Target has come up with what I think is a very negative TV ad, one in which they get connected to a traumatic moment in the life of a dysfunctional family.   

Here’s a précis of the ad (and I may have some of the words in quotes wrong, but not the thoughts of those quotes nor the underlying emotional tenor):  Mom, Dad and Daughter are around the Christmas tree and Mom unwraps a large flat-screen TV.  Dad says something like, “I though Santa was watching his pennies this year” through clenched teeth to which Mom answers, again with clenching of teeth, “Santa thought we could afford it.”  Back and forth it goes, each time a tad more hostility in the voices, back and forth between Mom and Dad, with a shot of Daughter listening, a little terrified.  The last shot is of Mom, an odd mixture of happiness and terror on her face, saying, “But what if Santa got a good deal.”  Then the screen cuts to the Target logo.

The cut to Target is ambivalent, meaning it could signify two things.  But both are bad for Target, as follows:

• Either the ad is saying, avoid this tense scene about money by buying at Target.

OR

• Target has turned this mom into a heroine (but the heroine is near tears and the family seems to be falling apart right underneath the Christmas tree).

Christmas is an aspirational holiday.  We aspire to show our loved ones that we love them, which in the United States means buying them something that they really like.  There is nothing aspirational about a thinly veiled argument over money in front of the kid on Christmas morning in which both parents bandy about a symbol of childhood happiness, Santa, as if it were a symbolic rapier.  Not waiting to talk until the kids are off somewhere is certainly a sign of a dysfunctional family.  Why would Target executives think that linking to this disturbing family vignette would make people feel warm and cozy inside about buying at their stores?

I saw another new Walmart commercial that seems to be based on the new realities of the great recession and the 21st century family. 

In this one, the announcer says that it costs $45 on average to take a family (of four?) out to dinner.  Instead, the announcer suggests, with that Walmart mix of aggressive friendliness and friendly expertise, that mother (since it is a woman in the commercial) uses Birdseye frozen foods as the basis of a home-cooked meal once a month!!  The narrator concludes by triumphantly announcing that you’ll save $345 a year (the difference between the home-cooked meal and eating out times 12, I assume).

The Walmart message seems to have changed quite recently from the long-time exclamation to be happy because what you’re buying is cheap to a more nuanced plea: Walmart can help you deal with your family’s challenges.  The “you” is a woman, as there has yet to be a man shown in the two new commercials I have thus far seen.  (For an analysis of the other one, on Christmas without dad, see my November 25 blog).

But let’s peel away the explicit message, “we’ll help you save money while feeding your family” and see the underlying subtextual conversation.  I call it a conversation because Walmart is not trying to sell something.  Instead, it is responding to a reality, and in this case, the reality is the large extent to which U.S. families, especially in the middle class, eat meals out.  The storyline—once a month you cook in instead of eating out—reflects the trend of eating more meals away from home.  The average American now eats away from home six times a week.  Although the NPD Group reported in July that restaurant trips in 2009 are down almost 3% over 2008, Americans still spend 50% of their food dollars in restaurants and on average, eat out six times a week.

I’m going to end with an archetype, which is a kind of argument by anecdote.  The archetype is a generalized version of a group of people who share a number of characteristics, e.g., “he’s an archetypal first baseman—slow with power in his bat and a weak arm.” The classic archetype in politics over the past 40 years was Reagan’s “Welfare Queens.”  

The archetype I am imagining is a middle-class family in which both mother and father have professional jobs or a single mother is working and making a very good living, let’s call it six-figures in income in either case.  I have known a lot of families that fit this description and have the following weekly dinner menu: pizza one night; McDonald’s or Wendy’s on another night; some family style restaurant a third night—could be Eat ‘n Park, Denny’s or even Olive Garden.  Then there’s take-out Chinese.  We still haven’t gotten to mom and dad having a night out alone at Chez Fourstar.  Just as the subtext of one of the Walmart commercials is an appeal to the single mother, so is this one that mentions Birdseye meant to appeal to families that eat out all the time.  Otherwise, why the stress on not eating out once a month?

In its subtext, Walmart has begun, I believe for the very first time, to segment the marketplace and try to appeal to specific subgroups that have special concerns and needs.  That makes the new commercials a form of reality TV.