Glory and BBQ Sauce in Athens

By Matt Taibbi, AlterNet. Posted August 30, 2004.

The vile Dallas-based restaurant chain Chili's launched a new national TV ad campaign in time for the Olympics. Entitled "Inspiration" and produced by the Austin agency GSD&M, it features former Olympic gymnastics champion Dominique Dawes, a plate of ribs, and some new insight into the nature of sport and the quest for glory. Here's how the ad's climax reads in the script:

Cut to Dominique performing on the beam.

Voice-over: What's the inspiration for Dominique Dawes...

Cut to footage of delicious-looking baby back ribs being prepared on the grill.

Voice-over: ...to land that perfect 10?

Cut to Dominique flipping in the air and sticking the landing.

Dominique: Barbecue sauce!

Barbecue sauce.

The gods up in Olympus must be locked up somewhere, gagged and bound; otherwise Athens last week would have been destroyed in retaliation. Or Austin, anyway. Surely it's heresy to suggest, in the week the games return to their ancestral home, that inspiration — that feeling that the ancient Greeks believed made a man holier than a priest, when it was given to him by the gods — can be a shitty plate of factory-processed ribs. The Muses must be vomiting into their cloaks and pawning their lyres for firearms: This aggression, you would think, cannot stand.

Except for one thing. The Muses themselves have already sold out. Since last October they've been working for an ad agency called Lancaster Group, which put all nine of them to work pimping a new fragrance line called "Joop! Muse" for the famous German perfume company. The participation of such old-world celebrities as Calliope (Epic Poetry), Erato (Love Poetry) and Melpomene (Tragedy) is only implied, however, as the actual muses don't get any face time in the European ads. In the modern, televised legend, the Joop! muses are replaced by Hungarian model Reka Ebergeni, who is naked except for a white scarf on her head and appears over the caption, "You are the inspiration."

Industry observers, and even some mainstream journalists, have commented at some length in the last decade or so on the increasingly desperate struggle of advertisers to find new physical spaces on which to place ads. With the old spaces — 30-second TV commercial slots, "book" ads in magazines and newspapers, billboards, and even standard Internet banners — more or less saturated to the limit of human tolerance, agencies needed to find new surfaces.

So they created them, placing particular emphasis on the so-called "zap-proof" techniques of placing ads directly inside the content, so that consumers could not change the channel or avert their eyes. They used defense technologies like the video-painting system "L-vis" to paste virtual ads onto stadium walls, tennis courts, and even moving formula cars. They tried to turn first base at Yankee stadium into a Spiderman plug; they paid celebrities to mention certain brands in talk-show interviews; and they buried anti-drug messages, fast-food themes and even feature-length stories about cars and video game characters in sitcoms, Hollywood movies, and on at least a few occasions, even television news.

This cancerous billboardizing of the physical landscape is noticed by most sane people and is even occasionally the subject of a strident editorial in major daily newspapers ("Seeing is no longer believing," hissed the Montreal Gazette). But what has been less commented upon is the phenomenon at work in the Chili's and Joop! ads: the conquering of once-virgin territories in the emotional landscape of human beings.

Just as there are no more new slots to create for 30-second ads on broadcast TV, there is no longer any room left to paste ads in prime real estate locales of the human brain like hungry, thirsty, lonely, vain, greedy, horny and my penis is too small. So advertisers have had to move farther and farther afield, away from mere physical urges and into more sparsely settled and less arable neurological regions of complex emotion and spiritual instinct. The result is usually a rhetorical non sequitur, a commercial message with absolutely no logical connection to the product: Advertisers have put plugs on AIDS/disaster victim compassion (Benetton), sexual identity confusion (those Heineken ads where men accidentally touch each other on the couch), even revolutionary politics (from yet another classical God on the rolls, Nike). Now you no longer buy only when you feel hungry or thirsty or too slow on the highway; you buy when you see a homeless person or when you feel concerned about greenhouse gases. By literally branding every concept in existence, advertisers turn the journey of the human intellect from birth to death into an endless purchasing drama, a corridor in a perpetual mall.

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