This video is sponsored by Curiosity...
[SCREAMS]
Whoa! Oh, oh... Oh!
Harris Bomberguy here!
[GRUNTS]
If there's one thing everyone knows about me,
it's that I love how corporations and branding utterly dominate our culture!
The Golden Arches, the Nike tick, the...
whatever distinctive thing Burger King has.
These familiar designs help remind me I'm alive,
and the dopamine that pours from their food pipe is like the warm embrace of an attractive friend,
with maybe some benefits if they pity you enough.
And golly, isn't it great when companies extol ideas that accord with my own values?
That's like helping to spread a positive message and make the world a better place, and to show my support,
I bought a bunch of their stuff online!
I mean, you've got to support the heroes fighting for the right cause.
After all, in what other way can we actually voice support for making the world better
in a society where corporations have far more power over our world
than any of the people who actually have to live in it?
Oh, that's depressing.
That's not gonna be the point of the video, is it?
♪♪
Advertising has taken place for most of human history,
but with the invention of the printing press and popularization of the newspaper, it really took off.
Even as early as the 1800s, you couldn't read your paper for updates about the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War
without some little fucker telling you about his Bovril.
"Invaluable to Invalids and Weak Persons"?
You can't say that!
Some people think of advertisements as value-neutral;
it's just a piece of paper or some video footage conveniently letting you know about a thing that exists and what it does,
so you can make an informed decision about your potential purchase.
"Sam, I don't have to cut myself to shave close.
This is the TRAC II, the two-bladed razor from Gillette.
The blades are recessed, so it's safer."
Because as we know, humans are perfectly rational actors.
After all, capitalism works because it's just in everyone's rational self-interest to make a really good product.
No, wait, hang on. I forgot about human psychology. You can just trick people into buying things. Oops!
♪ [DJ Snake & Lil Jon - "Turn Down For What"]
It turns out that it's possible to convince people to do things
they wouldn't do otherwise, and probably shouldn't.
Advertising is really a large collection of people trying to find the most effective way
of getting you to give your money to their bosses to buy their thing.
It's a massive and very lucrative industry.
To put it the way this old cigarette commercial did,
"we're gonna get'cha."
One of the most effective ways to sell a product is to tie it to someone's sense of value, or their goals.
Owning this product will prove you're a successful person!
This product will make you irresistible to women we made up!
UUUUUUUUH
UUUUUUUUUUUUUHHH
Maybe if you ate at a fast-food restaurant more, your children would love you, you piece of shit!
But the problem is, this doesn't work forever.
Advertising has become more and more ubiquitous, and audiences stop paying attention to commercials
when they're a lot like ones they've seen thousands of times before.
You have to push these ideas harder and harder for them to work.
Over time, commercials became more and more brazen in associating their products with power and sex,
until it became so weird it's almost indistinguishable from a joke.
Take this classic Big Mac poster where the burger's on a red velvet bed,
and it says "Stop staring at me like I'm some piece of meat."
"Are you Mac enough?"
Like, man enough? Like, are you enough of a masculine manly man, man,
to get into bed with this burger, and...
just go to town, with your mouth...
But you *are* a piece of meat...
[SOUND OF BELT & ZIPPER BEING UNDONE]
Oh, I'm supposed to fuck this burge—
[IMITATES "I'M LOVIN' IT" JINGLE]
By this point advertisers had drilled so far down into the human id, they'd gone too far;
broken through all pre-existing Freudian evo psych theories
and entered directly into the darkness of the human mindmaw!
To the place where you're paying a supermodel to pretend to eat a burger in her bikini at the beach,
because maybe horny viewers will want to do a sex so badly,
they'll get hungry for a teriyaki burger!
God, that burger is definitely covered in sand at this point.
It would probably improve the flavor, though.
I love that the camera keeps cutting away before any of it ever goes in her mouth, because it's basically poison.
No, don't eat the pineapple! It's evil! Don't!
So it was clear to advertisers that a new strategy was required.
Sex might sell, but it doesn't stand out amongst a crowd of sex.
If you want people to pay attention,
you have to do something truly different.
♪ [Phil Collins - "In the Air Tonight"]
[SONG CUTS OFF, REPLACED BY HBOMBERGUY MIMICKING DRUM BREAK]
This UK commercial for Apple earphones is incredibly memorable, even a decade later.
It's probably in the top three most well-known pieces of video footage ever to grace our little isles,
just behind the old Smash commercials
and the bit where Del Boy falls through the bar.
It's so weird and devoid of anything you'd expect from an ad that it grabs your attention in a completely new way.
It's so memorable.
Except, of course, for the part where it wasn't a commercial for earphones! I made that up!
It was for Cadbury's chocolate, you gormless rube!
The last decade of marketing school graduates
are people who saw commercials like this and the power & memorability they had and went,
"Yeah, I can do that! Exactly like that! I'm gonna be weird, too!"
But the problem with everyone trying to be weird & different and stand out all at the same time is,
they kind of all stopped standing out, like, immediately.
So tons of commercials nowadays are just super out there & bizarre, and have nothing to do with the product,
but you still don't really notice or care, because you're already attuned to it.
Nowadays, the only ads that stand out are, like,
the ones that are just so bad that you remember them to make fun of them.
Let's do that now!
Remember the Schick Hydrobot?
"Hydrobot, at it again!"
Who you remember specifically because it's a really awkward and terrible way of promoting...
ANYTHING?
I don't think they sold many products off the back of this thing; people just remember it because...
[CONFUSED STAMMERING]
Transformers razor!
Y'wanna shave yourself with a razor that's gonna fucking turn into a car and cut your fucking face off?
"Free your skin"?!
I do not want to free my skin!
[LAUGHING]
But worse than that,
this goes a layer deeper.
Remember the Schick Hydro Silk robot?
You probably didn't, because you've had a trillion other deeply stupid things flashed directly into your cortex.
But I remember it all!
I remember it so you don't have to.
FEMALE NARRATOR: "Schick Hydro Silk."
Ｆｒｅｅ ｙｏｕｒ ｓｋｉｎ．
ＦＲＥＥ ＹＯＵＲ ＳＫＩＮ！
This commercial is currently unlisted from Schick Hydro Silk's channel.
I can't imagine why!
With the creation of this, uh...
...it's clear that all pre-existing methods of advertising are failing to work that well.
Plus, in a way, for the first time in a while,
there are less venues to advertise to people now than there used to be.
A lot of people don't really watch television anymore,
and consume content on their computers with ad blockers enabled, the cowards!
If you use an ad blocker, you're basically snatching the soy from my savoring mouth!
Whenever a successful method of getting your brand attention is found,
it's swiftly copied and repeated, quickly rendering it useless.
The fastest cycle I've seen is with the trend of "Weird Brand Twitter";
like Wendy's having a go at people, or Arby's making funny cardboard things,
or Sunny Delight's recent depression tweet.
These are meant to make the brand seem personal & ironic and not like a corporation who wants your attention and money,
but to a trained eye, they do the opposite.
A sizeable company's not letting their media managers run their accounts in this manner
unless they've done painstaking market research and found it to be beneficial to do.
And what's more, since it's literally free to do this,
every even vaguely savvy brand's getting in on it,
which has swiftly made it a saturated format that bores people and makes it lose the sense that this is in any way unique.
I mean, if fucking Corn Nuts are getting in on it now,
it's not gonna work anymore.
"Corn Nuts - the world's most underrated snack."
That's one way to channel the fact people don't like you!
Soon, it'll be so ubiquitous that people just tune it out like all regular advertisements,
which means marketing companies are looking for a new way to push their products into your consciousness.
And they found it in a very strange place,
and it technically happened by accident—
Keurig.
Is it "KOO-rig" or is it "KEH-rig"? "KYOO-rig"?
Ah, just... It's fine.
Look, I already recorded this bit,
so if I pronounced it wrong, whatever.
In late 2017, when American talk show host Sean Hannity came to the defense of Roy Moore...
HANNITY: "Everyone would agree— everybody. A 32 year old man pursuing a 14 year old girl is disgusting.
That is something we should all agree on. This should transcend politics.
ＨＯＷＥＶＥＲ．．．”
...Media Matters president Angelo Carusone—
Wait, what if it's pronounced "ca-ru-SOH-nee"? Oh, I should've checked!
—among others, asked coffee machine company Keurig to reconsider sponsoring Hannity's show,
and Keurig responded by tweeting that they were pulling their advertising.
At least four other companies pulled advertising from Hannity's show for supporting Moore,
but Keurig visibly tweeting about doing it,
and it getting a very large & vocal response and support for having done it,
caused a lot of sudden reactions.
In one corner of the internet, people were suddenly thinking about buying a Keurig coffee machine;
I mean, they made a stand...
...in a very minor way.
In another corner, marketing people, ad people, people whose job is to see what causes this kind of splash,
started watching closely and taking notes.
And in the saddest corner, Hannity fans went berserk!
Aw, yeah, that'll show 'em.
This video published on 12 November, one day after Keurig's tweet,
of self-appointed "Red Pill Aficionado" Angelo John Gage
destroying his Keurig coffee machine—
and making a huge mess of his garage in his pajamas...
Ah, but don't worry, he's wearing socks with his flip-flops, though. He's protected.
—has a shit ton of likes and retweets and sparked #BoycottKeurig,
a sort of pseudo-protest movement where right-wing people,
shocked and upset that a company wouldn't give money to someone they watch to sell them something they already own,
destroy their expensive functioning coffee machines they bought to spite the company for this horrendous slight...?
UH
This, internally, for Keurig was initially thought of as a terrible accident;
all these angry people harassing Keurig employees,
and even the brief though ultimately insignificant stink of a boycott.
But, secretly,
everyone was looking at how much attention Keurig was getting.
You know what shows up a lot when there's a big hashtag about boycotting Keurig going around for days?
The word "Keurig".
The story about what Keurig did, and how people feel about it.
And it turns out that this is very similar to marketing.
Some people want to support Keurig for the nice thing they did;
I mean, they took a stand by pulling some ads from one TV show for a while.
And then there's the people who suddenly realized
that they could do with a coffee machine, since everyone's talking about them lately.
And then there's the flip side of almost every boycott,
which is that people who destroyed the thing that they owned realizing that they quite liked it,
and hey, no one's really paying attention to whether or not I obey this boycott or not,
so maybe I'll just get another one!
It doesn't really make a big difference.
And then, of course, there's the simple fact that people don't tend to go on with boycotts for very long. It happens.
I hate to break it to you, but if you ever destroyed something that you own as part of a protest against a company's actions,
statistically, you bought another one.
And then you bought an extra one for one of your 2.14 kids.
Probably Kevin!
He gets all the nice things, doesn't he?
What's wrong with me, mother?!
DON'T YOU LOVE ME ANYMO—
Sure, it's hilarious. These people are deeply foolish,
and it's good on some level that sometimes advertisers don't support purveyors of a garbage ideology.
But on the serious side, the analysts watching and waiting in the background learned an interesting lesson:
All of this is a goldmine.
It's more than a commercial.
It's a realmercial.
That's my word, I just coined it. Attribute it to me! Put it in the dictionary!
When you're the focus of a discussion online,
when you're a hashtag millions can click on and check out,
when you *are* the conversation for a brief moment,
that everyone feels expected to think about and have a take,
not even an ad block can hide you.
Not even someone who doesn't watch TV can miss your message.
The exposure was massive, and it was effectively free, and...
[STARTS LAUGHING] I'm sorry. I just need to stop for a second to acknowledge how hilarious it is
that the guy, like, couldn't frame it properly for this vertical phone video,
so it keeps falling out of the fucking frame!
[LAUGHING] Ah, Jesus.
When I saw this, I told myself, "the next time something like this happens, it won't be an accident."
Nike.
For those of you who aren't aware, it's pronounced "NYE-kee".
That's right, I'm getting all high and mighty about how to pronounce the one I know how to pronoun
That's right, I'm getting all high and mighty about how to pronounce the one I know how to pronounSDJFHSHGJ
Leave me alone.
In September of last year, Nike pulled the trigger on a new commercial
celebrating 30 years of their "Just do it" slogan.
The ad featured many great and famous athletes,
but also featured, and was narrated by, Colin Kaepernick.
Colin was 30 at the time, which made him the same age as the slogan, which was neat.
I guess he's always been the same age as the slogan.
[LAUGHS] How does time work?
This is a kind of cool commercial; it's encouraging.
It prominently features and celebrates black athletes for their success,
and it tacitly endorses Kaepernick's activism,
which goes a little beyond kneeling, by the way.
He's done a lot of work and given a lot of support to organizations that do some really great stuff.
This is 100% the most tasteful and inspiring
shoe commercial I've ever seen in my life.
But the commercial's content or quality wasn't really the point.
The point was what happened next,
and we all knew what was gonna happen next.
Everyone who you can expect to be mad about people protesting police brutality got mad,
and in a show of impotent rage at a shoe company
for making bad commercial, me no like,
destroyed some of their personal property,
and started the hashtag #BurnYourNikes, and tried to start a boycott.
[READING RUBE TWEET]
[LAUGHING] My troop friend was so mad at his socks, he couldn't even...!
RUBE BURNING HIS NIKES: "Not only am I burning my favorite pair of Nikes, you are burning your sales."
You think that's gonna happen?
Over here in reality, these bizarre property-immolating protests against Nike
for daring to feature a man who said police brutality was bad
made everyone want to talk about Nike, and how cool they were being, and make fun of these people for days on end.
Nike was being given hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising
by people trying to punish them!
Nike's value went up by— are you ready for this?
$6 billion.
By jolly, guv'ner! That's a lot of shoes!
Why did I do that?
And they couldn't have done it without dozens of sad little boys
telling you just how much birdbrained little shitheads like them hate Nike!
Congratulations, kid!
- ["STAR-SPANGLED BANNER" BLARING] - "Throwing this in the fire because of Colin Kaepernick, who's now the face of Nike."
[LAUGHING] "Take this, Nike!"
He thinks he's hurting Nike by doing this!
$6 billion!
Six *BILLION* dollars!
- RUBE IN VIDEO: "Five pairs of shoes in there, all gonna let them burn." - FIVE PAIRS OF SHO—?!
You bought one of those like three days ago, right?
You can still wear them! You can just not buy more!
[DISINTEGRATING INTO HYSTERICS] He can't even shut the fucking thing properly, and the national anthem's fucking blaring!
[GUFFAWING]
Fuck! It's so good! I forgot how good it is!
[CONTINUES LAUGHING RIOTOUSLY AS ANTHEM PLAYS]
So if these angry losers almost accidentally stabbing themselves
or giving themselves third-degree burns in protest against their functioning property
were trying to disincentivize support for progressive ideas,
they accidentally did the opposite.
Instead, they guaranteed it would happen again.
Oops!
Which brings us to Gillette.
Although given my luck, it's pronounced "gil-ETT-ee".
On 13 January, Gillette released a commercial entitled
"We Believe: The Best Men Can Be".
Sorry, not a commercial. A "short film".
It's about how sexism is bad, and you shouldn't follow women around in the street when they're minding their own business,
and don't let your kid hit other kids; you know, like, basic stuff.
It's a piece that encourages men to improve themselves in the really hard way,
where you question your ingrained behaviours and think about how to encourage better ones.
It's not the sort of self-improvement advice men tend to get, frankly.
It's quite hard to parse this sort of thing at first
when you've spent your life being told the solution is to clean your room, go to the gym,
and convince yourself that being shitty to people is actually charisma & proves you have more of a personality than them.
The response was... predictable.
It's almost as if they intended for it,
and that was the point, and they wanted it to happen.
Stable clever boys, and a few girls, from all over the internet emerged
to provide an example of their version of masculinity in action
by screaming and crying that a commercial said sexism was bad.
The commercial itself— anything it said or did— didn't really matter.
A commercial gets shown a couple of times, and then it goes away.
What really mattered was this behaviour.
It made Gillette the talk of the internet for several full days,
as all of the right's thought leaders—
bit of a misnomer, they don't seem to have had any yet—
all emerged to have their own personal 2-minute hate tweet storm at Gillette,
not realizing that they were the actual commercial for Gillette.
[READING DUMB CANDACE OWENS TWEET] "The Gillette commercial is the product of mainstream radicalized feminism, and emblematic of
CULTURAL MARXISM." ♪ ["The Internationale"]
It's actually pronounced "guillotine"!
"STOP
PERVERTING
MASCULINITY.
LET LITTLE BOYS WRESTLE."
I'm sorry, Candace. It's too late.
The Marxists are going door to door and preventing boys from wrestling!
Now, I could just laugh at these rubbish tweets for another 20 minutes,
but instead we're gonna cut right to the funniest one of them all.
An account named @warroom tweeted,
"Goodbye Gillette, hello Schick."
Oh, sweet. Another gentleman ready to
ＦＲＥＥ ＨＩＳ ＳＫＩＮ！ - [SCREAMING IN BACKGROUND]
This tweet was connected to a picture he'd taken of his Gillette razor floating in a toilet.
It was shared pretty widely, so apparently this counts as a form of protest now.
But I can't help but imagine the few seconds that happened after this picture was taken.
[RUBISH LAUGHTER]
This'll show them!
[INNER MONOLOGUE] Oh.
I have to get the razor out of the toilet now.
I have to reach into the toilet with my hands and take it out.
I should have thought a bit harder about this, shouldn't I?
I can't stop marveling at the majesty of it.
Speaking briefly as a man,
whose body is in, like, the top 90 percentiles of testosterone— I've checked.
That's why I'm gonna be bald by I'm 28!
Look forward to that, future subscribers!
I really don't get it.
I don't make a habit of questioning other people's masculinity, because I think the concept is
super murky, and basically made up, and nothing's to be gained from that.
But I do think that is a statement here about
the status of modern Western men,
in the fact that millions of them seemingly dropped fucking everything to be mad at a commercial.
Like what the fuck, aren't we supposed to be hunting the mammoth? Like...
Screaming at Gillette doesn't feed the tribe, you fucking low-T beta!
I can say that, by the way, because I have more, and I'm going bald!
I have to wear it, so I get to make the joke!
Fuck you!
Anyway, Gillette, Keurig and Nike all successfully boosted their products and their image
by way of relying on backlash from weirdos, and it works.
They probably all made quite a lot of sales.
Which reminds me—
My box of stuff from all of my favorite progressive-sounding companies arrived!
Ooh, I wonder what's in it?
What's this...?
That's weird, I'm not sure what this is.
What could it possibly be? Oh, it's
CHILD LABOUR.
Aw yeah, here it comes, baby!
The generic 10-minute rant about how capitalism is bad that I do at the end of every video now!
That's right, I made yet another video to turn out to secretly be all about capitalism!
You thought I couldn't do it, but I did!
DON'T EVER QUESTION ME AGAI—
You don't need me to lecture you through Nike's history of sweatshop labour,
or their ongoing allegations of poor work conditions,
often pulling production from factories that threaten to unionize
and refusing to let the Worker Rights Consortium inspect their factories.
You don't need me to go into exacting detail about Gillette's owners, Procter & Gamble,
a giant corporation who are implicated in all kinds of stuff,
or the general way big businesses are unethical on so many levels.
I'm not even going to get into the pink tax—
the way companies like Gillette can often say vaguely progressive things,
but will happily charge women more for effectively the same product
if they think they can get away with it.
And don't even get me started on Keurig.
Their coffee isn't very nice.
And also a bunch of labour violations.
You know most of this stuff happens already, and we all know it's bad.
I'm not saying you should personally feel bad for buying the products of these companies, either.
Almost every company has something in their production chain which, if you sat and looked at it, you'd probably find unethical.
That's the world we live in, and we don't change it by feeling bad about our tacit participation;
we change it by trying to find ways of altering the way things are.
The point here is that businesses exist to make money.
Sometimes that's in the form of moving jobs to a country that does it cheaper,
often because they don't have to treat their workers as well;
sometimes it's in the form of fiddling their taxes so much
that not only did they pay less taxes than you, you technically paid *them*;
sometimes it's in the form of charging women more for pink razors;
and sometimes it's in finding new ways to make you think about buying their product.
These clips sound nice— inspirational, even.
They say things that not only do I agree with,
but which I think are normal and not in the slightest bit radical.
But they're commercials; their purpose is to sell you things.
They're a marketing strategy with little to no impact on the actual problems that threaten our world.
I mean, heck, they won't even admit their commercials are commercials anymore.
They're "short films".
It's got a cinematic aspect ratio, so you know it's classy and not an ad.
There's this sequence where they play an old Gillette ad
and symbolically break through it as if to surpass it,
but this is all window dressing designed to disguise that you are being sold something.
It's really insidious to me how completely companies are trying to mask the fact that that's what they're doing;
they're still just trying to find a way to get'cha,
and it turns out that people don't go for hiring a model to pretend to eat a sandy pineapple burger anymore.
They go for something that sounds really progressive and forward-thinking,
and that all the weirdos on Twitter seem to be mad about.
It's just like dear old dad always used to tell me:
"Son,
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism."
Actually, that's a lie. That's my fantasy.
Dad mostly just sat in the corner and read Victor Klemperer books.
But I'm the Victor Klemperer of my age, Father!
I tell everyone which video games are bad!
Brands are not our friends, but it is nice, isn't it?
I mean, I can make fun of people for buying razors just to spite some weirdos online or for liking a commercial or whatever,
but it is pretty cool that a company actually invited discussion of these issues.
Just keep in mind that there are deeper problems with these companies that we do need to talk about and solve,
and don't let them buy your allegiance by saying something vaguely progressive-sounding in a commercial.
Besides, there are better, less invasive, more genuine ways of getting your product out there to people.
Which brings me to CuriosityStream!
CuriosityStream is a subscription streaming service
that offers over 2000 documentaries and nonfiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers,
including exclusive originals made specifically for the platform.
It's created by John Hendricks, the guy who founded the Discovery Channel.
And I really enjoyed a series on there called History of Food,
which tracks the invention of cooking millions of years ago,
the development of processes like fermentation and breadmaking and how this allowed civilization to prosper,
all the way to the modern food industry and its more modern problems.
I am currently in the process of making a couple of videos about diet science & junk diets, and stuff like that,
so if you watch this series, you'll know exactly where I stole everything from!
Access to everything on the platform costs $2.99 a month, or $19.99 a year,
but if you go to curiositystream.com/hbomberguy,
your membership will be free for the first 30 days.
Hey, thanks for watching the commercial all the way through, too.
I think now would be a good time to bring up that this stuff can all happen in the opposite direction, too.
Watch out for right-wing commercials that promote traditional values, or are weirdly loving of Donald Trump.
I mean there's already, like, a watch commercial that's like a response to the Gillette thing,
where they're like, "men have it way harder, eurgh."
The next time a commercial like that comes out—
which it will, because this stuff goes any direction; marketing companies know what they're doing...
Just don't worry about it. Y'know?
Like, there are so many important problems in the world right now that are worth talking about and worth solving,
and in the scheme of that,
commercials that say something you don't like are effectively a trick to waste your time.
And your time is better spent than that, because I love you.
And there are people in your life right now, even you,
who could benefit from that time, so spend it on them instead.
You have my permission now.
[CHUCKLING] I guess.
Um, and I hope you have a really great night. Do something you enjoy.
I've been really into hummus lately. Check that out.
And look up cool time management skills, if you haven't. It turns out it's a really great thing.
I got this video out two weeks early!
Um, yeah, take care of yourselves, and have a good night, and brands are not your friends.
Um...
Thanks, CuriosityStream, for the sponsorship.
[LAUGHING]
I'm screwed. Uh...
Love yourself, and...
Take care. Bye.
Oh, I also have a Patre— oh, I forgot to...