Playing "Pete Campbell" in the South

By which I mean, of course, pretending that one is Pete Campbell in "The Fog" and discovering a trend long after it began trending and figuring out how to exploit it.   Because I haven't been back to or through Lousiana in over two years, yesterday I was taken aback by the different advertising environment that confronted me on the trip from Houston, TX to Natchez, MS.  First, the signage now works according to the general principle:

• if it's not for a gas station, it's for a fast food place
• if it's not for a fast food place, it's for a bail bondsman
• if it's not for a bail bondsman, it's for a strip club
• if it's not for a strip club, it's for THE LAST ADULT ENTERTAINMENT STORE FOR 70 MILES (as the one sign I remember exactly read).

Those are, it seems, the only growth industries along the Texas to Louisiana stretch of the I-10 corridor ... except I also happened to be listening to the Saints game on an AM station from New Orleans, and the commercials played during it were of an entirely different variety.  You had:

• a waste disposal company with the slogan "our business stinks, but it's picking up"
• a scrap recycling center that bragged that it's been in the recycling business since 1917
• a paint company that boasted that it not only sells 1,000 different shades of green, but that its paints are environmentally friendly
• a restaurant that noted that it was still purchasing its shrimp from green-friendly, local producers despite the BP spill

I don't want to draw any general conclusions about the advertising environs, but if we assume that, like Campbell, these people know what they're doing, Louisiana has become an incredibly strange place: everyone's fat and in jail or going to be for crimes committed at or near a strip club, but they're all committed environmentalists. 

That last bit's the kicker: I was listening to a football game on an AM station when I was being bombarded with advertising designed to appeal to people who care about the environment.  I knew the oil spill had changed the minds of many people I'd grown up with — Facebook's handy for tracking such trends — but I hadn't realized how profoundly the environmental disaster had impacted their consciousness.  Especially considering that AM radio is some of the lowest hanging fruit in the advertising world ...

Comments

[Emily]

Those signs are remarkably similar to the ones along I-40 through Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.

[SEK]

It's enough to remind you that the life of the life-distance commuter is a very, very lonely one ... and that more people are lonelier and/or more desperate making it now?

[Chester Bogus]

I noticed a similar thing when I came home from Japan. American advertisements seem to be stuffed with: 1) scams and useless things (Snuggie, Shakeweight, &c.)2) get-rich-quick/get-skinny-quick scams (Sell your gold! Go to college online!) 3) litigation (sue someone because no one else will help you) 4) medicine 5) hospitals 6) normal advertisements for things people need.

What stood out about this all to me was how much of American advertising was aimed at poor, stupid, desperate people. Contrast that to Japan where, if you are hurt or need money - you just apply at the local government office for help. If you need medicine, you just go to the hospital and get it.

Yes, there are some commercials for useless/stupid things (while I was over there, there were lots of advertisements for toupees for elderly women - seriously). But it was horrifying for me to come home to a country where people actually needed to advertise medicine, or the hospital. Aren't those things you just get when you need it? Apparently not.