Walk Like a Mannequin

By Matt Taibbi, AlterNet. Posted September 8, 2004.

I'm not sure if there's a name yet for the disease I have, but I'm sure it will appear in the literature soon. I'm an advertising addict. Not because I like it – quite to the contrary. Most of the time, I'm absolutely horrified by it, to the point where it keeps me awake at night, and unable to stay in urban areas for more than four or five days at a time.

But I'm also totally obsessed with the advertising business and religiously consume almost every industry magazine or newsletter about the people who run it. I follow it with the same unhealthy fascination that makes me a hopeless sports fan. I even have favorite idols - players in the industry that I follow with alarming devotion. I'm about two years away from building shrines in my closet and inspiring new corollaries to the stalker laws.

One of my favorite players is having a great Barry Bonds-like summer. I'm talking about Thomas Hayo, creative director for the New York shop of the British agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, usually referred to as BBH in the biz. Hayo and his group have come up with the ultimate anthem to one of the most chilling and demented new trends in advertising – the more-human-than-human, mannequins-are-people movement. His "Urban Legend" spot for Levi's is also one of the first truly scary (as in intentionally scary) television ads in recent memory. And it gets even scarier when you think about what it means.

But first, an introduction to Hayo/BBH. A few years ago, the New York office came up with one of the industry's great masterpieces of celebrity humiliation: a campaign for Lipton's failed line of shitty instant meals, Sizzle n' Stir, with the tagline: "When you cook, you're a family." The ads featured aging C-list entertainers playing the roles of spoiled teenagers in a painful send-up of the '50s-style cozy family dinner that, of course, no longer exists today.

Sizzle N' Stir puts lovable Dad Mr. T in the mood for dumpy white blonde Mom; cheeky sis Mary Lou Retton joshes bashful bro George Hamilton about having a girlfriend; plastic surgery victim Little Richard and ex-Japanese person Pat Morita fight over how to set the table for the hideous meal ("There," says Richard, putting down one fork, "I helped!"). Fake people eating fake food in a doomed attempt to recapture an extinct lifestyle – a beautiful message all around.

BBH also did some admirably hysterical anti-drug work (you might remember the gross-out spot in which blood starts pouring out of the hot high school chick's nose during math class).

But the agency's real tour de force before this summer's scary "Urban Legend" ad was the Axe antiperspirant campaign. Like the Sizzle N' Stir spot, the Axe ad opens as a self-conscious spoof of goofy fifties marketing: dumb blonde spokesmodel on stage, wildly gesticulating with deodorant product in hand, next to a scrawny male mannequin who is naked except for his boxers.

Blonde says: "Here's a new deodorant called Axe. Spray it under your arms and across your chest to stay fresh all day long!"

As she proceeds to spray excessive amounts of deodorant on the mannequin, another blonde pops in from offstage and goes to take the mannequin's arm. Suddenly the first blonde freaks out in an angry Aretha Franklin voice: "I KNOW you ain't touching my mannequin!"

The other blonde backs off. Cue the logo and the saucy Don Pardo voice-over: "Axe. The smell the ladies love!"

This is a seriously funny ad that on the surface is gently poking fun at the business of selling.

But part of BBH's stated "philosophy" is to rely on "big ideas" that are "rooted in a fundamental truth." Well, they were on to a "big idea" in the Axe ad: the advertising industry's own Frankenstein-like love for the store mannequin.

By the time the Axe campaign was launched, the ad business had already been playing around with the idea of turning mannequins into people.

The first significant living-mannequin ad was a spot called "Cheryl N' Me," developed by a little San Francisco-based shop called Black Rocket for Conde Nast's Lucky magazine. The 90-second cinema ad tells the story of a woman whose best friend, Cheryl, is a bald mannequin she likes to take shopping. To the chords of a sunny folk song (lyric: "Cheryl and Me ... My best friend was a mannequin!"), the two have a blast shopping together – although they sometimes have to deal with occasional hurdles, as when Cheryl gets caught in a revolving door and loses her arms to an oncoming taxi.

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