Last Sunday, The New York Times Magazine published an article by Rob Walker about an advertising firm that is working to revive old brands (this practice is called “retromarketing”). Like Brim. Turns out that even though Brim hasn’t been commercially available in more than a decade, its slogan still lurks in the back of consumer lizard brains everywhere. 9 out of 10 lizard brains, to be exact. Evidently “Fill it to the Rim with Brim” (watch the second one, which teaches us that anomalous female lawyers may be smart enough to graduate from law school but that means nothing regarding ability to distinguish decaf coffee) wasn’t enough for the original shelf like of the product – they also had ads like this one, which clearly suggests that you need Brim to satisfy your woman, or that you date hot white women but are seriously interested in interracial lovin’, or that Brim will somehow supplant this need.
The article is good, but in my opinion it evinces insufficient disgust at the idea that our shared cultural heritage is littered with ad slogans and group nostalgia for some horrifying chemically synthesized “apple scent” in a shampoo. We recently visited a small village in Switzerland where every child can probably explain where the skulls displayed in the middle of town came from. Meanwhile, in America, we still feel like Chicken Tonight even though the stuff isn’t available on store shelves anymore (though it’s evidently a best seller in the UK and Australia) – draw your own conclusions about that.
There’s that great episode of the Simpsons where Lisa asks whether the family knows ANY songs that aren’t from commercials and they all get up and do the “Chicken Tonight dance” around the dinner table. I’d add to this the fact that it isn’t just that our understandings of history are being supplanted by jingles (and, evidently, the HISTORY OF jingles), but also that this is a nice gateway for culture jamming stuff: using songs, print media and gimmicks to accomplish non-consumer goals. It may not mean that American schoolchildren will choose history books over ring tones, but it might help influence more important choices than which “flavor sauce” one puts over which dead animal…