Marketing at this year's consumer electronics gathering gets racy
LAS VEGAS — A breakthrough in consumer electronics marketing occurred this week. Apparently for the first time at CES, a white lace bustier, matching stockings and high-heels were deployed as a marketing tool.
They were deployed on a slender, young, apparently blonde woman who, apparently agreeably, posed for pictures with a more or less continuous line of multicultural nerds, all male, who clearly thought that it was for moments like this that 3-megapixel cell phones, Treos and digital camcorders had been invented.
If only they’d been able to get their hands on Apple’s new iPhone, which was unveiled, rudely, 415 miles away at Macworld in San Francisco, the moment might have been a climactic one.
The lingerie was on display in a booth dedicated to Accelevision, which could this week legitimately claim to be the “leader in mobile entertainment.”
But others gave the pioneer a run for its money.
My.vu displayed its personal media viewer along with a blonde woman in a black miniskirt, belt and deeply scooped black knit top, on matching platform heels. “Your personal entertainment just got more personal,” gushes their Web site. Indeed.
Vonage continued its retro, early ’70s schtick with a trio of young women in orange-and-white minidresses and white patent-leather, knee-high platform boots, reminiscent of that era when airline stewardesses, as they were then called, were emblems of hip, free-spirited sexuality.
At the Hypnotic booth, the car audio unit of DB Research, was yet another blonde woman, this one pony-tailed, in acrylic high-heels, and a nearly sheer, very short, backless black dress, festooned with stings of silver beads. She was autographing large posters of herself, and with a practiced smile posing for pictures with still more CES attendees.
Phoenix Wireless by contrast went upscale. The company resells brand name mobile batteries, holsters, hands-free headsets, antennas and other stuff. At its CES booth, one brand name was especially prominent: “Rugged Equipment.” But almost within arm’s reach was a decidedly unrugged, willowy brunette. She had the beauty and grace of a trained professional model, as she wore a confection of a dress in fuscia silk, gathered in a slight ruffle from the hem to the midsection, where it met a plunging V-neck. She wore strappy gold lame heels. According to a sign, the dress was by Nicole Miller of New York. Rugged’s Nubuck Universal Pouch would have looked out of place for sure, though.
“Sex sells.” That’s something that both Hollywood, Calif., and Fifth Avenue, in New York, readily agree on. But Silicon Valley, for all its hipness, has been markedly prudish in its advertising. High-tech companies have used the metaphors of desire to describe things, and usually do so without innuendos or double entendres, but only the subtle suggestiveness of “cool” and “hot,” which oddly mean exactly the same thing, “sexy” and sometimes a bit more daringly, “slick.”
Skin, so necessary to the massage, has rarely been part of the message in high tech. Cameras caress only the mirrored surface of a new mobile phone or a flat panel monitor.
Increasingly, people do populate these ads, often in carefully calibrated multicultural percentages, aglow with multimedia euphoria, as if sharing a communal techstacy. Microsoft ads seem to have so many people that the company must have a permanent office at the Screen Actors Guild. But almost without exception, every one of them is fully and demurely, if stylishly, clothed.
“Here we are, just everyday folks like you, wearing our clothes like you,” the ads suggest. “But, you know, we have our Treo, our Vaio, our Pearl, our SLVR, our enterprise business software. And we are connected. We are living the life, the digital life. We are empowered. We are loving it.”
Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo this week at CES gave the kind of speech the company prides itself on. It was about how Nokia’s mobile phones and handheld computers, with broadband wireless, are “fully mobilizing the Internet,” empowering the deepest human desire: to “communicate.”
But for the companies at CES, even Nokia, “communication” is technique, pure and simple, a function of engineering, of industrial design, of market research, of calculation. Their commercials reflect this bias: “gender” and “ethnicity” are given their due but without the messiness of “sex” and “race.”
Based on the commercials we see from the world of CES, one would never, ever know, or even entertain the possibility, that digital lifestyle devices would be used to view porn, let alone create it. The porn industry in the United States remains one of the major markets for the techniques created by the consumer electronics, networking and communications companies that fill the Las Vegas Convention Center every year at this time. The same devices make it easier for drug dealers to do precisely what Nokia’s Kallasvuo says everyone wants to do: forge a community of interest that wants to stay connected, and access their content anywhere, anytime.
Take Apple’s popular and clever “Get a Mac” advertising campaign: two actors, different in style, dress and mannerisms, represent the Windows PC and the Apple Mac, simply by their gestures and dialog. Both are male, yet both are strangely unmanly. One is a bit portly, wearing a pedestrian suit and, in the one obvious cliché, eyeglasses. He’s also fussy and a bit self-important. The other is casually but cleanly dressed, leaner, untucked, self-effacing and sensitive. No prize for guessing who is which.
This is the high-tech version of “sex sells.” Apple isn’t really selling the Mac. It’s selling a curiously two-faced maleness, that appeals to both men and women in the 21st century only because of the way it contrasts to its companion stereotype.
Now imagine what this commercial would be like with females as “PC” and “Mac.” Perhaps Julia Roberts as Mac, and Camryn Manheim (the self-proclaimed “fat” actress who starred as Eleanor in the TV series “The Practice”) as PC. The stereotypes become at once far more explicit, and as a result far less appealing. Women in this ad would destabilize it, make us more aware of the underlying throb and beat of sex.
The less clever, more blatant, sex sell at CES this year is degrading. But it is precisely a degrading of something — a cheapening of something of value: authentic human sexuality, the electric complementariness of men and women in all its glorious messiness.
In a world of indirectness and irony, of evasions and rationalizations and marketing spin, that directness is almost welcome.
In a recent speech at MIT, former Xerox Chief Scientist John Seeley Brown thought aloud about a culture of amateurs, a word which derives from the Latin for “a lover of.” Lovers find ways to give of themselves, for others, for the beloved. It is giving, not sharing, that is the fundamental human calling. What we call “media” today are simple-minded ways of approximating that. But media mediate; they are literally in the middle, between. It is not direct, it is not immediate.
Communication, the “sharing of information” and increasingly of “multimedia content,” is not in fact the deepest human desire. The deepest longing of our hearts is revealed not in the image of the woman wearing a bustier in front of thousands of strangers, perhaps to pay the rent or to buy clothes for her children, but in her eyes. Face to face, unmediated, in fact naked, we have in that moment the potential see each other for what we are, for good and for ill. The simplest mobile phone, the sleekest personal communicator, the most cunningly designed user interface will never show that, will never even see it.
