“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.”
–Marshall McLuhan
As advertising grew up post-WWII North America, it attracted the best and the brightest of the society to work on campaigns that sold consumer products to a giddy nation looking audaciously towards a future of plenty for all. The new technology of television swelled the ranks of consumers and changed the message of advertising: simplistic, straight-forward information about a product was replaced by iconic image evoking an environment. One didn’t buy the product, you purchased the image that the product summoned.
If that was true in the 20th century, how about the 21rst?
Psychology, brain imaging, and market focus groups are all elements of advertising research that seeks to penetrate and forecast the purchase habits of a consumer society using all available digital technology. With billions of dollars spent in marketing research, is it then surprising that cold fusion is found in the imaginative elements of the TV landscape? The talented “creatives” that put these moments together on shows like Fringe and commercials for FedEx are tapping into a collective unconscious that now resides outside our bodies in data clouds amongst the noosphere.
A recent FedEx TV commercial called Test Shipment aired on the Golf Channel and featured a glowing blue cold fusion device that would test the integrity of transport before sending the real treasure of golf clubs.
Thanks to BBDO New York for sharing these photos of the device that was designed and built by Station Film.
In Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, McLuhan wrote:
“Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success” [pg 202]
Cold fusion has seeped out into the commons, soon to be as familiar as Coca Cola. Two decades of labor without positive recognition will be just a memory when The Product materializes from the marketplace, and high-density ultra-clean energy from the hydrogen in water spawns a merchandise line that Billy Mays could only dream of.
Cold Fusion Now!
“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”
–Marshall McLuhan
Related Links
FedEx flies cold fusion device by Ruby Carat August 31, 2011
TV show “Fringe” Features “Cold Fusion” in Opening Title Sequence by Eli Elliott February 25, 2011
Understanding Media: Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan from Wikipedia
Media Dopplers by Chad Scoville from C-theory