#77: Am I Manipulating You?

Ramblings on advertising, how ads make us feel, how they may contain great art despite their ulterior motives, and whether or not we should ever call ads themselves art

Currently listening to: A Sense Of Getting Closer by Max Cooper

Hello, friend.

TGIF, am I right!? And by TGIF, I mean TGI Fridays! They’ve got a special going—25% off platters for the BIG GAME this weekend!

Not actually sponsored, but holy shit, can you imagine?

That’s right! This Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!!! It’s the Super Bowl! That long foretold matchup of football giants that will be interrupted by approximately 1 hour of commercials and the Apple Music-sponsored halftime show.

And, guess what? According to a poll quoted by CBS News, 48% of viewers watch the Super Bowl just to see the ads. That’s 48% of ~127 million viewers based on last year’s viewership numbers.

Advertising. It is all around us, essentially all the time. As a copywriter, it’s a constant in my work life, too. Lately, I’ve been trying to examine my relationship with advertising as I navigate my career and our digital world that is saturated with sponsored messaging.

Some ads are funny, some are somber, some tug at the heartstrings. All ads try to make us feel things so that we: 1) remember a brand and the way it makes us feel, and 2) translate that feeling into a desire to purchase something.

Editor’s note: Before going further, I should note that my discussion of ads here in this letter will be focused on video ads, specifically.

Many (most?) ads also greatly benefit from the use of music.

In the same way the classic, gut-wrenching ASPCA ad used Sarah McLachlan’s iconic song Angel (and imagery of abused animals) to generate $30M+ in donations, other ads use music, sound, and imagery to varying levels of success. Video ads like these are essentially like short films or music videos, with the caveat that they have a commercial message accompanying them.

I’m going to drop a few videos in here for your consideration—at my day job, we regularly study spots like these to consider their craft.

ASPCA Spot feat. Sarah McLachlan (plus some background info from her)

The Sound of Y for Lyft (really nice use of ambient music and sound design)

Surfer for Guinness (directed by Jonathan Glazer)

Gorilla for Cadbury (feat. In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins)

All of these ads are examples of popular and successful spots. If you browse through their YouTube comments, you’ll see plenty of people feeling nostalgic about them, revisiting them every so often just for fun, and indicating that they have long associated a certain song with a certain brand every time they hear it.

This brings me back to the goals of advertising: companies want consumers to build connections between art they love (songs, emotional short films, silly costumes) and products/brands. Ads can create irrevocable associations, both conscious and subconscious.

So, does all of the feel a little bit… manipulative?

I’ll be the first to admit, advertising can absolutely feel and be construed as manipulative—not always in a sinister way, but usually in a there-is-always-an-ulterior-motive-that-overshadows-any-semblance-of-craft-with-a-hollow-lack-of-sincerity way.

I’ve got one more ad for you. This one is for a drug used to treat people living with hemophilia A. The ad work I do is for health and pharmaceuticals like this, so, while we often gather inspiration from other industries, the most important examples come from our own. This one really touched me.

Some quick context: Hemophilia is a rare disease, so the audience for this ad is pretty small and specific. It’s a chronic disease that people are generally diagnosed with just after birth, so they live with it their entire lives. It causes issues with blood clotting, which means that people are prone to bleeding excessively or spontaneously. This is, obviously, a parent’s worst nightmare, and means they must not only worry more often about their child getting hurt, but also about administering medication to them often (which are done via IV infusions or, in the case of the product featured here, through subcutaneous injections).

Okay. Deep breath. Tears. I’ve seen it before several times and it’s still triggering tears.

So, yes, ads sell products and build brand awareness. Ads have ulterior motives. Many ads are poorly crafted or—similar to the brain rot on our digital feeds ruled by vicious algorithms—simply designed to grab our attention and burrow deep into our brains. And far too many ads these days are AI slop.

But some ads, despite the fact they are selling something, make us feel a whole lot like great works of art do. They make us not only feel, but question ourselves, consider our places in the world, consider our relationships and the things we do to make meaning.

After watching the Hemlibra ad, even those of us who have no personal connection to the hemophilia community can empathize with their situations. We can imagine what it’s like to be a parent, to worry about someone we love, to do everything we can to help them stay safe and live a meaningful life despite the guardrails of a chronic condition. In a way, many of us may have a reaction to this ad that is not so different from our reaction to poignant films about parent-child relationships like AFTERSUN (2022) or MAGNOLIA (1999).

Do you feel emotionally manipulated by that Hemlibra ad (or any of the other ads I’ve shown you today)? Or do you simply feel and maybe even hope that somewhere out there, real people have had their lives changed for the better by any of these products? [Aside: I don’t want to get into the cost of healthcare and drugs in the US, because that is a whole other debate].

I’ve written before about author JF Martel’s art vs artifice debate (see issue #67). To recap, Martel says that artifice “foregoes the revelatory power that is art’s prerogative in order to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, a physiological stimulus, or a command.” Ads would seemingly fall squarely into this category, right?

Okay, one more video for you today and then I’m done. Consider this speech by bestselling author Brandon Sanderson (or you can read the full speech here, if you’d prefer to do so):

TL;DW: Here, Sanderson discusses his opinions on generative AI “art” and the reasons why humans make art. I enjoyed his focus on the journey of being an artist, and how beneficial it is to try and fail at making art on our own over time.

My primary takeaway from Sanderson’s speech was that a key part of what distinguishes something as art is that making it was, in itself, a journey of self-discovery. “We are the art” is what Sanderson titled this speech, because writing a novel isn’t actually about selling a finished novel—it’s about discovering a story out of thin air, meeting characters that had previously never existed, exploring places in the wildest corners of your imagination… and making all of this feel real to other people with your words.

It is never entirely about the novel—it’s also about the author’s own journey of writing and imagining and living and finding inspiration and editing and plotting and finishing just to be able to marvelously exclaim, “I did it!”

Through the act of creating art, the artist learns about themselves and realizes they are capable of more than they knew when they started.

“Art is the means by which we become what we want to be… the most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you.”

- Brandon Sanderson

Okay—returning to the ads: Perhaps ads are not art, because they are made with a singular purpose in mind: to sell. Perhaps they are not art, because they are meant to convey information and command us consumers to go live up to our market-assigned label and consume things.

But perhaps ads also have a little bit of art in their DNA. For even with ulterior motives, the creatives behind them (like me) can and do still embark on journeys of self-discovery.

Last week, I mentioned to you how I helped lead a video shoot at work. While it isn’t like these ads I’ve shown you today, and it is quite informational in nature, the process of coming up with the idea, writing a script, shooting it, and now going into post-production has already made a profound impact on me. An important part of that is not only the making of a thing, but the making of something that is it’s own little universe that didn’t exist before.

There are so many artists involved in making ads, whether it is contributing their original music, set design, costume design, photography, graphic design, acting, etc.—we would immediately label all of these things as art.

If you asked the now acclaimed film director Jonathan Glazer if he thought that his old Surfer short film for Guinness was art, what do you wager his answer would be?

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The Living Music List

Hello again, friend. The music below is not trying to sell you anything… except maybe a CD or a vinyl!

Speaking of which—it’s Bandcamp Friday! So consider this my final advertisement of today’s letter: 100% of your purchases on Bandcamp today go to the artist/label you’re buying from. Right now, you can get 25% off anything from my shop with the discount code 25for26 (discount ends this Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!)

Given that today’s letter was already a very long one and we got a sizeable stack of releases to explore, I’m going to let the music speak for itself this week.

Happy listening.

1. Beneath The Sea Of Clouds There Is Nothing But Eternity by Luke Kokoszka (album / electronic, drone) [Independent]^

   

2. Points of Inaccessibility by Rafael Anton Irisarri (album / drone, neoclassical) [Black Knoll Editions]^

   

3. Guesswork by Greg Stasiw (album / experimental, minimalist) [Hidden Harmony Recordings]^

1. Lanzarote by PSTMRD (album / electronic) [Protomaterial Records]^

   

2. The Fall-Off by J. Cole (album / rap) [Dreamville / Interscope]

   

3. Butterfly by Daphni (album / electronic) [Jiaolong]

   

4. The Call by Bellbird (album / jazz) [Constellation]

   

5. Tenterhooks by Silversun Pickups (album / rock) [New Machine Recordings]

Music List Reminders: Bold and ^ denote reader-submitted work. Bandcamp links provided first when available—if an album is not on Bandcamp, then YouTube or other streaming links are provided. List format: Title by Artist (release type / approximate genre or subgenres) [Label].

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That’s all for this week’s issue. Thank you for reading. Until next time.

Your friend,

Melted Form

Read the previous issue of The Living Music List:

#76: Life Lately

Check out my 2025 EOY list of favorite albums:

10 Albums That Will Endure (EOY 2025)

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