Remove future lieutenant governors from the equation, and TV advertising is as civil as an English tea party. Take those Apple commercials where relaxed-fit Mac icon Scruffy McSlouchy tenderly taunts his faux Gatesian foe, Dweeby PC Guy. The latter is portrayed with such good-natured vulnerability that Apple should have just released a clip of Steve Jobs kicking baby angels because they lack the Mac's Core Duo processors; it would have been more effective. Instead, Apple's light touch turns the PC, a product with 95 percent market share, into a lovable underdog.
Why not go for the jugular? Most PCs are manufactured overseas. Bam, they're un-American! PCs put hardcore granny porn at your fingertips. Bam, they're destroying family values! The same can be said of the Mac, of course, but attack ads aren't designed to sell your product. They discourage people from buying the other guy's. According to one UCLA brain snoop, the part of your bean associated with empathy shuts down like the DMV at lunchtime after viewing attack ads. See your favorite candidate get repeatedly slimed, and you'll start to think he's kind of slimy.
Theoretically, a technique that works for products no one actually cares about (county assessors, school-board members) ought to work even better when applied to the stuff that truly makes life meaningful (Doritos, Paris Hilton, BMWs). No doubt this is what scares mainstream advertisers off: Fearful of encouraging anti-consumption of any kind, they leave attack ads to the foes of cigarettes and Schedule I narcotics.
But this is America, land of the 20 percent off. We're never going to stop spending—but if you make us believe that buying Product X is less virtuous than buying Product Y, maybe we'll stock up on the latter. Last March, GM created a website to showcase user-created commercials for the Chevy Tahoe SUV. The company was hoping for positive testimonials, but within hours, hundreds of ozone-layer fetishists were ire-bombing the site with spots linking the Tahoe to global warming, the war in Iraq and human misery in general. It was no mystery that this would happen, nor was it any mystery that GM would eventually remove such ads. What is somewhat puzzling is why bicycle manufacturers, Greyhound, Nike and countless other companies that could attack GM in ways that would benefit their own products leave such efforts to amateurs.
GM, of course, would be free to attack right back, and soon we'd have a heavily polarized, highly negative advertising environment. Just like their political brethren, some marketers would stretch facts, but many ads would contain hard-hitting truths as well, thus enlightening consumers. Companies that learned how to play the game most skillfully would dominate their industries (look at the Republicans!). And with advertisers fulfilling the investigative and advocacy roles once performed by newspapers and magazines, the latter would be free to devote all of their space, instead of just most of it, to the promotion of bright new shiny things and the latest TV hits. It's a hopelessly utopian fantasy, sure, but you can't be negative all of the time.