Nobody loves ads. Oh, sure, there are those commercials with enough cleverness or star power or humor to make you not-quite-resent them. (The Old Spice campaign "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" comes to mind.)
But in the end, nobody likes paying for things, especially when they have no choice in the matter. You've probably had that experience of loading up a video to show a group of people, only to have an interminable, unskippable ad play first while you chuckle awkwardly and wait out those 30 seconds that feel like eternity.
But between the ridiculousness of advertising and the sublime of poetry, there's a middle ground. (Ridiculime? Subculousness?) Presented for your consideration:
This is a video from Levi's "Go Forth" campaign from about 2009. It featured some well-photographed snippets of pretty young people mostly doing pretty young people things over pretty, nostalgic instrumental music. So far, so whatever.
But this campaign used spoken excerpts from work by American poets (all white, all male) like Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski as their ad copy. The ads were created by Wieden+Kennedy and here they are. Incidentally, one of the branches of Wieden+Kennedy also created the aforementioned Old Spice campaign.
I love that they even use one of the existent Walt Whitman phonograph recordings to score one ad spot. Because the audio is so scratchy and unintelligible, they provide subtitles to make the message clear:
I think what I love about these ads are how they subconsciously link a quintessential product of American capitalism like blue jeans with a litany of ideals, symbols and images that are shorthand for American identity. It makes buying denim seem patriotic, a re-affirmation of our existence in this space and time. There's a yearning at the heart of these videos, and that yearning can be easily assuaged by a run to Target.
It's not just jeans. Here's one from a pharmaceutical conglomerate that uses a stanza of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night":
I don't think this one is that great, honestly. (It kind of looks like the creators of "House M.D." needed to turn in a video essay for a poetry class.) But it does at least show the range of products and services employing poetry to do their work for them.
For my money, the best use of poems in commercials are reaching out for something larger and more ineffable. I think especially of this recent Apple ad using Maya Angelou's "The Human Family":
What works for me is that it's less about a product than about being a human in the world. The poem's emphasis on the joy of diversity and our essential common humanity drives home the marketing message that we're all people, we all love seeing ourselves and our loved ones represented in still and moving images. So why not embrace your humanity and buy an iPhone?
And then my most-least-favorite use of poetry in ads comes courtesy of this Infiniti car commercial in which Kit Harrington drives fast while reciting William Blake's "The Tyger" like an English teacher who's decided to break bad:
Everything about this is so hilariously tone-deaf: why the hell did they cast Jon Snow? Why the hell did they choose this weird, famous poem to shill for their car? Why did they direct the actor to sing-song faster and faster in an increasingly frenetic tone? And why for God's sake did they decide to end with the actor giving his best Keanu Reeves "Whoah"?!
It's delightfully nonsensical, and I love watching it every time.
This trend of poems in ads hasn't gone unnoticed There are quite a few articles remarking on, decrying or defending the rise of poetry in advertising. I feel that almost all of them miss the point: ads are going to happen. If not the lifeblood of capitalism, commercials are at least the respiratory system. And if advertising is an inescapable facet of contemporary life, we can at least demand that it do more than one thing at a time.
Sure, sell me your car insurance and dating sites and fast food and Shake Weights. But you're going to have to work at it – you can't just keep giving us CG animals saying some lame catch phrase. Give us poetry, some thought and attention to detail and craft and art.
So I'll end with the defining example of my obsession with advertising and poetry: Don Draper reading Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky." (Note: there is a commercial before the video plays.)
The best ads make me feel something. And isn't that the point of poetry?
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