The value of good advertising...

     As the son of a man who once made commercial, wood-carved signs for a living and who now sells materials to commercial sign manufacturers, I have often wondered why I possess an inescapable contempt for the subject. As I’ve trekked through the vast landscape of metal, wood, and vinyl signage that is now what we collectively know as scenery, I have come to realize that my lack of enthusiasm for these man-made beacons of information and well-being might possibly be unjustifiable. Now, my attitude might be arguable if I lived in a “medieval town” (Venturi, Brown, Izenour 9), or even in a modern-day European city, but here in America, where signs seem to be the “architecture of the landscape” (13), my disposition is perhaps absurd.

     It is theorized that signs — whether billboards, names of businesses, et cetera — are manufactured as instruments of “verbal and symbolic connections” (13) that can transmit to us a “complexity of meanings through hundreds of associations in few seconds from far away” (13). I have yet to be convinced. For me, these “meanings” become nothing more than pointless babble and eye candy that I never asked for in the first place. But my waning excitement does not discount the supposed “job” of the sign or the billboard, nor does it negate the certainty that I would be lost without them. A driver 30 years ago could maintain a sense of orientation in space (9). Now, with all of the “paradoxical subtleties within the plentitude of dangerous, sinuous mazes” (9) we all travel through, it becomes difficult to know which certain commodities are truly reliable. In this day and age, how are we, as mindless “cosmobots,” diligently completing our daily tasks, supposed to know what movie we should watch, what shampoo we should use, or what cigarette we should smoke without these towering guides of commercialism?

     The thing is, I maintain an ever-present need to climb from the clutter of my all-too-familiar city life. And with this need, I can happily say that I do routinely forget most of the daily barrage of propaganda that gets thrown at me from up high. Sometimes, though — and I can’t tell you why — I forget that I can forget. I look at surrounding signs and wonder if people would listen to — or read — what I had to say if my ideas were 100 feet in the air and sprawled across the sky. I wonder how many people actually look at signs and get something more out of them than I do. I wonder how easily it would be to start my own cultural upheaval, similar to that of the infamous Billboard Liberation Front (1977- ), where, like they do, I could pull my own kinds of idealistic media pranks, altering existing signs to display my beliefs instead of those of capitalism’s (BLF). But, alas, the signs — and speculation — eventually wash away into a senseless spiral of words and colors.

     So what is it that makes a sign interesting enough to stick in one’s mind — to make someone go out and eat a certain food, buy a certain product, sleep in a certain hotel, or visit a certain resort? And am I, one who can’t — or won’t — even remember the last sign I saw, even qualified to answer this question? To attempt to uncover an explanation, I will pick a commercial sign, fairly mundane on its own, and try to analyze its function, its meaning, and its intent.

     Ah, Burger King (BK)—a Mecca of fast food delights; surely a convenience too often taken for granted. Everywhere you go you will find, atop the same Burger King structure, the same sign: the red words “Burger King,” squashed between a yellow hamburger bun. Seemingly simple, but do we actually know what we’re getting into when we enter this fine institution? If so, we must surely shuffle the thoughts away as we prepare to sink our teeth into that juicy, (hopefully) all-beef Double Whopper with cheese.

     Well, I am not going to walk right in this time. This time, I am going to look up at the fifty-foot high BK sign and read what, surprisingly, expresses most of the ideals sustained by this and many other fast food joints.

     Let’s start with the text of this grand symbol; firstly with the word “King.” A clear enough idea: the establishment boasts of being the “king” of, well, burgers. Or maybe they’re even saying that by entering the restaurant, we’ll become kings—I mean, they give out paper crowns at the counter, right?

     To break this idea down further, I want to find out who really are the kings in this culinary transaction. We, as patrons of this place, all go in and spend our hard-earned cash on food that, in any logical sense, isn’t fit for the stables. For some reason this doesn’t seem very kingly to me. To me, it seems like the real kings here are the suits — the rulers of the BK domain — sitting upstairs in their plush (beef steer) leather chairs, figuring out how to make cheaper food out of less real meat. So what does that make us? You guessed it: we have become their subjects.

     Now, on to the word “Burger.” Plain enough: a patty made up of ground beef — or “hamburger meat,” depending on where you’re eating. So, where does all of this meat come from anyway? Without getting into a long-winded socioeconomic or ecological conversation about it, the bottom line is cows. Millions upon millions of cows are slaughtered each year in order that the kings’ subjects can consume — thank you, King, for the cake! And all we can do is obey, because judging by the signs above every fast food joint — from the Golden Arches to the smiling yellow star—they are all telling us the same thing: “you are under our control, because you want our food and will pay anything for it.”

     The funny thing is, when all is said and done, Burger King, with its famous word-burger logo is the only company who blatantly lets us in on what holds all of these ideas together. Wrapped around the BK title is a yellow hamburger bun—or should I say bread? Because how I see the bread in this case, is as money. Yes, advertised most prominently above every Burger King in the universe is a cruel joke hoisted upon us by the ruling class; a joke that our greedy stomachs, it seems, will accept, because what the king provides outweighs any sort of conviction.

     Maybe in the end, signs will actually look like what they mean and Burger King’s logo will finally be truthful: a cow and a fat, capitalist tycoon sitting comfortably together between two one hundred-dollar bills. ( And the Golden Arches will be a cholesterol-clogged artery and the smiling yellow star will be Mr. Cartcher’s induction onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame… )

     So, where does my disdain for the commercial sign come from? Possibly, some answers may be derivable from the paragraphs above. What I do know, is that the forces behind these spires of “wisdom” are not easily reckoned with. But since it seems that I am only a king’s subject, destined to a life of servitude and surely unfit to question the “morality of commercial advertising” (Venturi et al. 7), maybe I should pay more attention. Maybe I should enjoy this convenience so kindly provided for my continuous enlightenment.

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