Pseudoschizophreniadvertisement

It's tough to be the advertisee. As raw deals go, it's one of the rawest: on the one hand, as a potential consumer, the advertisee's attention is coveted fiercely, courted endlessly, and hunted ruthlessly; on the other hand, the advertisee's only compensation for his or her attention is the perverse desire to buy the products advertised. The advertisee effectively loses twice: first when his or her attention in taken, and then when he or she rewards the marketer for the theft by buying the client's merchandise.

It would seem a hopelessly exploitative, abusive, and one-sided relationship if not for one thing: every new scheme to steal attention from advertisees begins to wear out the moment it is used. The pop-up ads that seemed clever one moment become hopelessly annoying the next. "Bugs" -- the tiny animated ad-lettes that appear in the corner of a television show to promote another program on the same network -- have stopped enticing audiences and now merely "bug" viewers.

I've always taken comfort in this cycle of marketing innovation and audience desensitization, because it assures me that no matter how advertisers surpass me in wealth, resources, and research, they will be bested forever and helplessly by one thing: my mind and body's capacity for boredom. No matter how hard they try to catch my eye (or my ear), they will inevitably come up against my psychological and corporeal inertia. Think of it as the marketing equivalent of Newton's First Law of Motion: a body at rest will not move until an external marketing force acts upon it, and then that body will get used to that force, return to a state of rest, and fast forward past the commercials.

Note, however, that this law only applies to cases in which the marketing force applied to the advertisee's body is external. It now appears that all this is about to change:

You see that billboard? You see those two boxes that look like loudspeakers on top? Those little boxes were developed by MBAs (Masters of the Black Arts) at Holosonic Research Labs, and what they do in a nutshell is send out a focused beam of ultrasonic waves at frequencies above those of human hearing which then interact with air and surfaces in the beam's path to create audible sound. The result: when you're in the beam's path, it sounds like someone is talking to you from inside your head -- and the people standing a short distance away from you can't hear a thing.

(According to some of the reports on this technology that I've read, any surface struck by the beam is used to help create these audible signals, so the sense that there's a voice in your head might not be far from the truth. On the other hand, as has been pointed out by several readers' comments to this post, this is probably less than a fair characterization of how this technology works, but which circulated nonetheless after initial reports described how those who encountered these "audio spotlights" felt as though the sound was emanating from inside their skulls. See the comments below for more details.)




A few advertisers have begun to experiment with this blatantly evil and obscene technology, but the most prominent is the cable channel A&E, which is using it in conjunction with a billboard in New York to scare the shit out of people in the hopes that this will drum up interest for its television show "Paranormal State." Whether or not this advertising experiment pays off for A&E really is beside the point, because it's the thought that counts, and the thought in this case is unforgivably devious and irresponsible: to make people on the street think they're hearing voices that no one else can hear in order to make them momentarily think that they've gone crazy because they're hearing voices that no one else can hear... which they are.

Make no mistake, though: this Baddie Nomination is not being given to a specific commercial but rather to a new technology, and that's a special honor in and of itself. We tip our hats to you, Holosonic Research Labs, for your bold contribution to a field we're calling "Ad Assault": the science of targeting a stranger's ears without his or her consent to deliver a personal advertisement that his or her neighbors can't hear. Congratulations, HRL! Your exciting technology shows enormous potential--not just for advertisers, but for police and military forces as well! Just think of how, in a few short years, crowds of peaceful political protesters will be dispersed with individually targeted blasts of deafening noise. Imagine the military interrogation techniques that will become possible when your technology is applied to a prisoner who claims to have no intel to offer: we'll see how long he lasts when interrogators can go hyper-Clockwork Orange on him and play Beethoven's 9th as if it was coming from within his own head!