subway ad tautologies
I go sliding into the crosswalk in this too-warm January, or avoid it altogether by biking, which presents its own obstacles. Namely the guy with the tire-changing service set up in the middle of the bike lane, ambling out in front of me, sometimes rolling his hose reel into the road. I yell at him. He yells at me. What seems like an impasse is in fact a begrudging encounter. We share the same City, the same paths.
Meanwhile, in the subway, a series of ads reads: Guest how you guest. Part of a campaign for a new IHG Hotels & Resorts rewards program, banners present iterations of increasing incoherence: Work how you work, Morning how you morning, Extra how you extra. All words made verbs. Permission for nothing, an empty slot for whatever identity you’ve already adopted. Even weirder, Extra How You Extra is neither aspirational nor alluring, but an inoculation of You can do anything into You do you. Maybe I’m too used to ads that are trying to brainwash me or make me want something, but here I don’t even know what I’m being encouraged to do. It sounds like I’m being told to celebrate settling for less.
The tautology of Guest how you guest reminds me of the subway ads from months ago, when Seamless and GrubHub were streamlining their brands (the companies merged in 2013, and were acquired last year by Just Eat Takeaway). One banner featured a doodle of a sandwich with the tagline EVERY SEAMLESS HERO IS A GRUBHUB HERO. Another, IN EVERY SEAMLESS BAG A GRUBHUB ORDER. Sitting on the subway, you feel like a chimp being taught new shapes and colors. Seamless is GrubHub and GrubHub is Seamless. Seamless how you GrubHub.
The City is full of subjects and predicates, words and values and brands all swapped around like a shell game. Perhaps it always has been. Walking past BAM to see a movie on Sunday, I stop in front of a window that says BAM is talks. Presumably part of a “BAM is ___” campaign, in which talks refers to speaking events they put on, it sounds cryptic and neonatal, like a half-sentient robot trying to christen itself. BAM is talks.
I asked my friend, Henry, who works as a copywriter in the City, what he makes of all this. “Someone just said to me, ‘advertising acts like everyone is lobotomized now,’” he said, adding, “All of this stuff to me is also just avoiding the task of coming up with something positive to say.” Instead of promises—even instead of lies—we are subjected to nonsensical formulas of A=A and A=B. As if we could be transported or convinced by moving words about like fridge magnets.
And what if there isn’t something positive to say at all? Last spring’s ad campaign for StreetEasy, the property rental app, nearly coincided with some of the worst rental spikes in Manhattan (per Curbed, “The net-effective median rent in Manhattan reached a new high: $3,925”). The campaign likened the grueling process of finding lodging in the City to a game of Monopoly, its ads drawn with dice and gameboards and cards, all taglined WIN the GAME of REAL ESTATE. The ads mainly featured amenities people wish they had: elevators, space, appliances (RENT AN APARTMENT WITH A DISHWASHER THAT ISN’T YOU, and so on). But one was PUT AN OFFER ON THE TABLE THAT TAKES OTHERS OFF IT, which amounted to an exhortation to bribe landlords. Or, to use Bridget Read’s neologism from last year, to offer “cuck money,” where wealthy parents and prospective tenants made offers way over the list price to secure a rental. (Read: “The tenant is not just getting fucked over by the landlord. The tenant is asking if the landlord would please fuck them over.”) Of course, the only way to WIN the GAME of REAL ESTATE is to be a landlord or a Russian oligarch. Everyone else already lost.
Total flatness, no promise of newness, no glimmer—however false—of solutions. These bizarre patterns of speech are unconvincing attempts to rebrand things that suck as things to be excited about. Seamless/GrubHub constantly does this in subway ads that wink and nod at New York specificity. Like StreetEasy, these middlemen exacerbate urban alienation and sell it back as local pride. Cooking is so JERSEY reads a Seamless ad from years ago.
Last year, American Express attempted the same with a series of empty, alliterative parallelisms using various places in New York, like WHEN YOUR FAVORITE COFFEE’S IN GOWANUS AND THE DRY CLEANER’S IN GREENPOINT. The irony of these hyperlocal ads is that they sound like they were written by people who live nowhere. How many coffee shops do they think there are? How many dry cleaners? Who is spending 40 minutes on the G train to get a $5 coffee they could get anywhere else? After dropping off their… suits? These ads don’t just incoherently appeal to city-dwellers; they conjure an incoherent City. My friend Henry again:
The strategy in all of the above ads is “connect with New Yorkers,” and rather than doing something that their target audience would like, they simply demonstrate to their target audience that they recognize them, and then expect that recognition—“look, we know what Gowanus is, and we know what studio apartments are, and we know queer people are cool, and that’s crazy that we know that stuff because we are actually a brand! Haha!”—to give way to connection. But I think what most people feel when being “recognized” by a creative strategy isn’t connection, but monitored, measured, uncomfortable, and ultimately disgusted.
Biking home, I see another ad on a bus stop: NYC LIKE A NEW YORKER. This one makes more sense, I suppose, but to me rings of further tautology, empty equations for an imaginary cohort, united in being mocked by all the VC firms trying to sell us a City they made worse. Am I a New Yorker? Do I live in New York? Do I live like a New Yorker? Do I live how I live? Do I want to? Small tautologies from an overarching pessimism: It is what it is.
I ride past LADIES DAY into night. The cars swing sharply off the avenues, braking hard not to hit the bikes. Deliveristas slow at the stoplights and glide out into the intersections, some beeping, some nearly soundless, some blasting exhaust, their urgency timed not to traffic but to the invisible networks of transaction and demand. Their red and orange bags are emblazoned with Seamless, which is now GrubHub, which has been GrubHub for ten years. They are the same and so is the message: OVER 8 MILLION PEOPLE IN NEW YORK CITY and we help you AVOID THEM ALL.
The subway slogans may be flattening, but the City itself lies at a tilt; and ease, like cleanliness, trickles downhill toward its opposite. Throughout the night the grayblack pools of carwash grime will drain beneath the street and make their way into the stinking Canal.
Even before the light turns green, the bikes thrum to life. Souped-up ebikes, electrified mountain bikes, and mopeds, all custom-rigged for this endless ferrying. Phones mounted on their handlebars, lighting up with orders. How they obscure the City. How they blink and chime with need.
ben tapeworm