Why does everything look infantilized?
assemblagenyc.substack.com
assemblagenyc.substack.com
by the way, it would be most sustainable to not produce at all? that’s certainly a surprise.
i don’t spend a ton of time in spaces where would i get marketed to by this instagram garbo, so maybe i don’t understand the sensation of being spoken down to by it. but it strikes me as the equivalent of watching saturday morning cartoons and then being huffed that all the ads are for silly action figures and play doh.
They really weren't. If you look at the examples they list, none of them rely on a particularly intelligent audience. Their wording preys on the insecurities of possessing wealth and coerces the viewer with lowest-common-denominator logic. They're insulting and smarmy, pretentious but zero-sum. I read through hundreds of issues of Popular Mechanics as a kid, and even back then I wasn't dumb enough to feel "witty" for parsing an advertisement's joke. Maybe that was more obvious in the context they were published.
What I find funny is that I see nostalgia for every age of branding like this. There are postwar idealists who think all modernity is sin, there are 60s and 70s obsessives that think every advertisement should be full-page and drenched in cigar smoke, and others yet that think the gaudy trappings of the 80s and 90s were the most humanist advertising got. They're all falling for the same illusion of "sophistication" that advertising has always lacked. The fact that the author seems to think branding ever had prestige is kinda a mea-culpa for their own outrageous outlook.
Similar to how you can’t expects affordable prices from a company that hires football stars to make ads for them.
> 1. (transitive, Internet slang) To apply several beauty filters to (a picture or video of someone), typically making the subject look more made-up, potentially more feminine, and often unrecognizable.
> 2. (figuratively, sometimes derogatory) To present (something) as fashionable and glamorous, often by removing or disguising aspects which are considered unappealing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-moving_consumer_goods
> Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), also known as consumer packaged goods (CPG)[1] or convenience goods, are products that are sold quickly and at a relatively low cost.
So I read it as consumer packaged goods which are presented as fashionable and glamorous using Internet marketing and real-world branding, for what is likely generic brand quality.