Todd Stein's Articles on Lions Roar

From computers to beauty products, Madison Avenue has discovered that spirituality sells. What is the sound of one hand reaching for your wallet? Todd Stein on the irony of enlisting spiritual themes in the service of materialism. Enlightenment, it turns out, can be found in a jar. Just ask Lancome, whose Hydra Zen “skin de-stressing moisturizer” sells for $42.50 in most boutiques. Or, if beauty products aren’t your bag, test drive a Ford Ranger pickup and “seek wisdom on a mountain top.” Along the way you can “thank heaven for 7-Eleven” and stop in for a bottle of Evian spring water, famous for its “eternal life force.” Or “seek the truth” in a glass of Heineken. Oh, and once you get to the mountain top, don’t be surprised if you run into a group of scarlet-clad Tibetan monks running Lotus Notes on their IBM laptops, two companies that were recently “joined in spiritual harmony.” If you can’t find any monks on the mountain top, look for them on the basketball court. They’ll be the ones with the shaved heads and the Nikes. With so many real and fictional spiritual teachers pitching consumer goods these days—Apple nabbed Gandhi and the Dalai Lama for its “Think Different” campaign—you might want to cancel that trip to the mountain top and seek a guru in the local shopping mall instead. At least, that’s the message coming out of Madison Avenue these days. Advertisers are hawking everything from burgers to cars by appealing, ironically, to our most immaterial yearnings. “Serenity Now” is no longer just a funny Seinfeld line; it’s the unspoken philosophy behind a distinctly nineties’ breed of commercial—the spiritual ad. Fielding an army of angels, enlightened sages and barely disguised religious figures, advertisers are hoping to cash in on the quest for inner peace by teaching us, as Chapman University sociologist Bernard McGrane puts it, that “life becomes radiant through consumption.” “If consumerism is the religion of our day, then advertising is the liturgy and the high priest,” says McGrane, a media critic and author of two books on advertising. “It has the same all-pervading quality as the church in the Middle Ages. It’s everywhere. It permeates everything from the bottom of your shoe to the back of your shirt to the car you’re driving.” As it preaches the salvation that comes through buying and having, advertising also is subtly changing how we think about spirituality and ourselves. Just as it did with sex in the fifties and sixties, advertising is well on its way to taking our highest spiritual yearnings and transforming them into the profitably banal. Appropriating spiritual images and language to sell stuff is nothing new, of course. In the old days of advertising, Xerox used monkish scribes to sell photocopy machines, and Hebrew National hot dogs claimed standards for meat exceeding the USDA’s because they had to “answer to a higher authority.” But today’s versions of these ads are far more common and they reflect a growing interest in things spiritual that spans the consumer spectrum from bestsellers (The Celestine Prophecy) and TV shows (“Touched by an Angel”) to teen jewelry inscribed with the initials “WWJD” (What would Jesus do?). In this case, Jesus would probably throw his TV out the window. Few of the rest of us do. By the time the average American reaches 20 they will have seen about one million TV commercials. For those of us who grew up in the TV age, those numbers add up to an undeniable truth: we have been programmed since childhood to seek fulfillment through buying. No less a figure than S.I. Newhouse, Jr., chairman of Conde Nast magazines, decries the rising influence of Madison Avenue. “Advertisers have taken over the world,” the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair complained to the New York Times in August. Few doubt the industry’s lengthening reach—ads are perhaps the primary socialization force on earth. The industry is all the more influential because they are designed not to appear influential. The less we pay critical, conscious attention to advertising, the more powerful its effects upon us. And it can transform anything into a part of the consumer universe, even the anti-materialist creeds of spirituality. A case in point. Flip through any recent women’s magazine and you’ll come across an ad for a new hair shampoo called Abba. A model with angelic features stands facing the viewer, her blonde hair tossed by a breeze. Straightforward enough, right? But a reading of the accompanying text hints at more. We’re told that Abba can “harness the healing power of nature,” and help you “rediscover how real beauty comes from within.” Hmm. Leaving aside the question of why you would buy a shampoo to get what can only be had from within (what ads and Zen koans have in common is that they always defy logic), let’s consider the “healing power” of Abba. On closer inspection it turns out the model is standing in a desert. Her hands are opened palm out in supplication at her sides. She is dressed in a shapeless, nearly monkish black dress. The sun lends her a halo. If none of this rings a bell, consider that Abba is the word for “father” in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. It is also the root of the honorific “abbot,” a term first applied to the desert hermits of early Christianity. The “healing power” Abba is selling will do more than cure a few split ends. It’s not enlightenment, true, but what do you want for less than $10—God? “Most marketing books tell you to go for some real estate in people’s heads,” says Doug Gilmour, president of Gilmour Associates, a Larkspur, California advertising firm that specializes in New Age-style campaigns for health food companies. “I want to go after some real estate in their souls.” Whether they aim for our souls or our karma (Finlandia Vodka and Volkswagen both hype reincarnation in their current campaigns), advertisers say they are simply mirroring the public’s current fascination with spirituality. “We are not devious people setting out to manipulate you into buying something,” says Myra Stark, senior vice president and director of knowledge management at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, one of the nation’s largest advertising firms. “We’re people who try to understand what a brand or product means to a consumer, and the consumer either connects with that image or doesn’t connect.” A consumer study initiated last year by Stark points to a less innocent conclusion. The study was designed to help Saatchi & Saatchi better understand consumer beliefs and attitudes about spirituality and their perceptions of brand names. After defining spirituality as “concern with things of the spirit, the values and the meaning of life, rather than everyday and material things,” Stark explains, the study found that when companies forge an intensely emotional bond with consumers through use of spiritual symbols, it spurs sales. Especially sales, she might have added, of those “everyday and material things.” “The bottom line is, they’re all praying for good business,” complains Marc Balet, partner in Balet & Albert, a New York ad agency whose clients include Georgio Armani and Anne Klein. “It’s like seventies’ bellbottoms. They glom on to whatever’s hot now and in another three months they’ll have moved on to the Jetsons.” It may be disingenuous of advertisers to claim they are only a mirror of society, when people pay $150 for the right brand name on their jeans and young women starve themselves to look like Kate Moss. But in hitching a ride on spirituality, the pitchpeople are definitely behind the curve, racing to keep up with the interests of their biggest meal ticket, the Baby Boomers. As the largest group of children ever in America, the Boomers were targeted by Madison Avenue from the beginning. Not surprisingly, they grew up acutely aware of themselves as consumers. Today the youngest member of the former Pepsi Generation is 35, the oldest 53, and for maybe the first time in their lives they are staring death in the face. Or at least glancing in that general direction. The result, predictably, is a sudden resurgence of interest in the spirit. While more and more of us are turning our backs on mainstream religion, our fascination with spirituality has gone through the roof. In the four years between 1993 and 1997, the number of Americans who said spirituality was important to their lives jumped from 58 percent to 75 percent—an astonishing statistical turnabout for such a short time span. “The spiritual earthquake,” as Psychology Today founding editor T George Harris calls it, has sent shock waves through the religious spectrum, kicking up forms of spirituality undreamed of a generation ago. The current crop of spiritual schools reads like a self-improvement editor’s Dream Team: creation spirituality, Eucharistic spirituality, native American spirituality, Twelve-Step spirituality, feminist spirituality, earth-based (Gaia) spirituality, eco-feminist spirituality, Goddess spirituality and men’s spirituality, as well as the traditional Judeo-Christian brand and, of course, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and all things Eastern. Advertisers, who after all are members of the culture, can’t help but notice the new fad. And what they notice, they use. “Basically, advertising is just a writer and an art director in a room, trying to come up with hundreds of ideas to pitch to the client and hoping that one sticks,” says John Lombardi, a former art director for McCann Erickson who dropped out of the business to work for the San Francisco Zen Center. “They have to produce, so they use whatever they see going on in the world around them, and they don’t make a moral distinction between using swing dancing or professional wrestling, or Zen.” But then, morality was never a big hit with advertisers. Author Thomas Frank established in his The Conquest of Cool that advertising’s great achievement in the years since the 1960s has been to incorporate the idea of dissent from the doctrine of...

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