The Philippine Online Chronicles

Dear Cadbury Gorilla,

You were not what initiated me into advertising—it was a '90s TVC for the rat killer brand Racumin that did me in, where an army of scurrying rats died gradually on the floor, the repetitive drone of a two-syllable voice-over following the cadence of what was supposed to be their life-force or heartbeat slowing down—but you took me to a place where I began to understand where advertising could be taken.

Not necessarily by myself or by my peers in advertising and in the rest of the related so-called "creative industries"—although that is certainly the goal, to help take it where it can be taken, to make a contribution to its burgeoning corpus hurtling toward its own demise, to contribute to its implosion—but by anyone who is remotely affiliated with the circulation of capital, meaning anyone at all. By this I mean it was you who taught me the lesson of virability, that is, of a work’s ability to spread on its own with minimal effort, where ironically the real effort is in thinking how to suppress effort, how to allow others to do the work instead of having to do it oneself. For this was how I first saw you: your video effortlessly passed around online by people whose work wasn’t to pass it around, people who had nothing to do with either Cadbury as a company or the ad agency or production house that cooked you up, people who were not only willing but happy to catapult the fiction of you toward myth. There you were, a gorilla sitting in anticipation behind the drum set, almost brooding in your immense mammalian solitude, waiting for the recorded voice of Phil Collins to give you your cue.

To you I owe a clearer glimpse into the libidinal economy at work in the production and exchange of consumer goods in the light of marketing. One might think that you do more than regulate our consumption, that you regulate our desire to consume—but you have taken a step further, in fact a leap beyond that: you regulate our desire to be regulated, you regulate our desire to desire, you regulate our desire for our desire to be regulated.

The commonplace notion about TV commercials, for example, is that they are produced in order to showcase the products the commercials are supposed to sell, whetting our appetite for what we have no access to, our masochistic taste for the phantasmatic. (Flashes of imagery of the interiors of townhouses or condominium units come to mind, spaces that we think we would like to inhabit but can’t—not only because of how much they cost; not only because of the TV screens that, as screens are wont to do, keep what is on the other side ever distant; but precisely because we desire them in and for their very inaccessibility.) And yet, in this case, we see you but see none of the chocolate your ad is supposed to be an ad of, no thick sticky sweetness oozing out of its violet foil packaging, as in that comfortingly familiar but shamelessly awkward portion of the typical TVC known as the product freight. Instead, what we get is pure allegory: not the depiction of someone experiencing joy, not the depiction of joy, but joy itself referring to nothing else but pure joy. The joy of joy, joy degree zero, jouissance. We encounter no actor propelled to ecstasy by taking a bite from his Cadbury chocolate bar, and the energy with which you pounded on those drums was not made to appear as if fueled by carbohydrates culled from Cadbury bars. By simply punctuating your performance with a pack shot and the tagline “A glass and a half full of joy,” the TVC effectively equates Cadbury with everything that has transpired onscreen for the last minute and a half, and even more.

I apologize if my enthusiasm confuses you. After all, you are a gorilla—not even a real one—and all you did was bang on the drums with zest when you were supposed to. You must be wondering what consequence or impact this little activity of yours has had on me or on the field that I work in. But it is this apparent inconsequence of your actions that I find consequential; you took off from John Cage, you had nothing to say and you were saying it. Joy was not in the act of pounding on the drums while the audience wondered what you were going to do before you did what you did—and this fact alone set you apart from Andy Kaufman whose Mighty Mouse performance your TVC initially appeared to have been ripped off from. While joy in Kaufman was in the absolute absurdity of lip-synching a line from the Mighty Mouse theme (you, in a sense, arm-synched a drum line from Phil Collins), joy in you was the very idea that someone had the gall to let you loose into the world. Your absurdity was on the meta-level; it was absurd that your absurdity was turned into an ad. You were the title of that infamous 1969 conceptual art exhibition given flesh, fake and furry, “When Attitudes Become Form,” but you were braver because you weren’t even art. You were braver because you were an ad. Art has a formidable tradition of unsettling its own ontology, of questioning the coordinates that allow art to be framed as such. But advertising—advertising didn’t have the benefit, or the cop-out, of such a tradition.

This was where I found you particularly potent, brilliantly bestial—in your ability to suspend our suspension of our suspension of disbelief. Most stories downplay their artificiality so their audiences can allow themselves a kind of vulgar, unimpeded immersion into the narrative. On the other hand, ads in the traditional media (TV, radio, and print), also known as above-the-line ads, being themselves forms of interruption or intrusion into narratives (the TVC, for instance, is a break into the narrative of a TV show, and hence is usually called a gap; the radio ad is also a gap within a particular radio program; even the print ad in a magazine or newspaper is a break in the stream of information or text the publication supposedly wishes to convey), automatically call attention to their artificiality by default, allowing their audience to be suspicious of what they say right at the onset, what with ads belonging to a long tradition of verbal sophistry that tests ethical limits.

But what does the audience do with an ad that stands on a kind of ethical high-ground by saying nothing, which is what your TVC is—an ad that says nothing, an ad that says what it has to say by saying nothing? In the emptiness of your performance you indexed the very conditions of production that allowed you to perform your emptiness, raising such questions from the viewer as “How was it possible that this thing materialized into an ad?” and “How did the people who conceptualized this get away with it?” and “What compelled Cadbury as a client-company to give production money to the gung-ho creatives who thought of this?” and “Was this even really an ad?” The ontology of advertising had been put into question, giving advertising the potential to be unrecognizable and hence more effective, more dangerous.

It must be obscene to invoke Adorno here, given his ardent critique of the culture industry in the face of my unabashed (but hopefully self-critical) wallowing in it, but nonetheless he remains instructive, even prescient:

“The culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of ‘goodwill’ per se, without regard for particular firms or saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.”

Advertising has indeed become almost synonymous with public relations—in past years, there was even speculation that public relations would swallow advertising whole, that advertising was about to die—what with the rise of happenings committed in the name of virability such as the T-Mobile dance or the Cebu Pacific dancing flight attendants—actions intended to generate media buzz on their own and be passed around by those who think them worth their time to spread, actions that do not require clients to deliberately spend on media placements—but you, Cadbury Gorilla, you didn’t have to turn your back on the traditional medium of the TV to become a happening. You were inherently complex that way, despite appearing so simple: You were a happening, you generated buzz, precisely because you were launched from and into TV—visceral, violent, virtual. What was noteworthy wasn’t that you were a gorilla and that you were drumming; what was noteworthy was that you were a gorilla drumming on TV as a commercial. You weren’t a freak of a gorilla; you were a freak of an ad. Despite Adorno’s prescience, it wasn’t so much that “each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.” Each advertisement, in this instance, becomes its own advertisement instead, in hyper-correspondence; and these advertisements, in turn, become products unto themselves.

How telling that the word “happening”—now a catchy household term among advertisers—itself was coined by Allan Kaprow, an artist who, “in the spring of 1958,” Fluxus writer Dick Higgins would narrate in an essay on intermedia, “began to include live people as part of the collage” to investigate the relationship between audience and the work. Higgins continued, “the happening developed as an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies between collage, music and the theater. It is not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs.” Strangely enough, it was your adherence to and insistence on being on TV that let you out of the TV; by sticking to a medium, you were immediately between media; and thru this stasis, in Baudrillardian terms, you had metastasized, able to engage a live audience without having to literally involve live spectators in a gesture of false interactivity. You engaged the audience not by attempting to break the fourth wall, but by keeping it intact.

Yours in fanhood,

Gelo Suarez

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Cadbury's Gorilla Advert Aug 31st 2007 (macegrove)

Angelo V. Suarez is an associate creative director at Ace Saatchi & Saatchi. He is also the author of the poetry projects Batch ’97 Haiku, s&wich, & Dissonant Umbrellas: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerk, as well as the books else it was purely girls & The Nymph of MTV, & co-curator of I (Heart) Chabet, a performance work.

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