When Personal Is Really Nothing of the Sort

It all started more than 60 years ago, when television was beginning to enter a lot of American homes. The host of the show would break from the regular show content, turn to face the camera, hold up a pack of cigarettes, and start to extol the advantages of that particular brand of cigarettes (yes, they used to have cigarette commercials on TV, and yes, rather than "breaking" to have a well-demarcated commercial that was shot on another set, the host—say, Arthur Godfrey, for anyone old enough to remember him-- performed the commercial.

The brilliant idea of the people who made TV—or the sponsors who paid for it—was to make the commercial message "personal" by having it seem that the host was speaking directly and specially to you.

By now we are so used to these devices that we don't give them any thought. If we did, we'd find them pretty ridiculous. The other day I saw a commercial for a cough remedy. A guy in bed is talking to the camera to complain that the over-the-counter medication he took didn't help his cold symptoms. Who is he talking to? Me? The cameraman? Why doesn't he say, "Hey, who are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?" Is he used to strange people in his bedroom?

And a voice explains that what he took doesn't work for coughs. Hey, who the hell is that? Not only, presumably, yet another person in the guy's bedroom—since whoever owns that voice heard what the guy said—but someone we can't see. Why doesn't the guy in bed say, "Whoa, now I've got invisible people in my bedroom!"

One thing I hate, and don't quite grasp the reason for: At some point TV "spokespersons" who do commercials began the practice of talking for a good minute or two and only then saying, "Hi, I'm Ann Hoggis Torde." Why don't they start out saying Hi and introducing themselves?

Written things are personalized to or for us, also, in ways we don't give much thought to. It's been part of technology for a long time that not only can form letters addressed to us have our names and addresses in the same type as the rest of the letter (this is a feature called "mail merge" and goes back to the early days of word processing and even before, when there started to be sophisticated typewriters that could read name-and-address records from a paper tape—if I'm remembering this stuff correctly). A similar technology lets catalogs be printed with your address, and those form letters, again, have your first name in the middle, so that, supposedly, you feel they're written personally and especially to you. Of course we don't believe that at all, but maybe when these things were first used, the recipients really believed that.

Recently I joined a web site (for which you have to pay, or subscribe) that gives you ratings of home remodeling businesses, plumbers, professional services, and so forth. Then I got a mailing from them that says, "Welcome to A___ L__, we're ridiculously happy to have you." Not just happy, but "ridiculously" happy. Wow, they must think I'm really special, I guess.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein