fake ads in a novel about ads

[JohnDurvin]

So I'm writing a book about how smartphones have given people short attention spans, advertising is infiltrating every part of life, and social networking has increased our communication with others but at the cost of real interaction, replacing it with viral videos and acronyms.
I had an idea, possibly high-concept. If the characters and their world are constantly bombarded by ads and footnotes and pop-ups and so on, should the reader? I'm not sure how to do it just yet, but maybe instead of exposition explaining the weird products and services of the world, could there be advertisements and sound-bytes for the bizarre junk in the margins or the footers? I'm not sure how to balance it and make it just the appropriate level of obtrusiveness, but it seems like a cool idea, anyway. Thoughts?

[Watcher55]

So I'm writing a book about how smartphones have given people short attention spans, advertising is infiltrating every part of life, and social networking has increased our communication with others but at the cost of real interaction, replacing it with viral videos and acronyms.
I had an idea, possibly high-concept. If the characters and their world are constantly bombarded by ads and footnotes and pop-ups and so on, should the reader? I'm not sure how to do it just yet, but maybe instead of exposition explaining the weird products and services of the world, could there be advertisements and sound-bytes for the bizarre junk in the margins or the footers? I'm not sure how to balance it and make it just the appropriate level of obtrusiveness, but it seems like a cool idea, anyway. Thoughts?

This is me spitballing to make sure I understand your concept:
Use the ads as chapter headers in lieu of epigrams
Insert flip page animations in the bottom corner
Include some of those folded paper pop-ups (you can prob'ly only get away with a few small ones)
Maybe one of those annoying post-card coupons they bind into magazines.

I would think you'd have to be very careful to avoid an overload. Make sure the ads contribute (I avoided saying add) to the story. You don't want to turn the novel into a novelty that's giggled over for a few months then forgotten forever.

[polymath]

Fake ad False Documents seem to me ripe for social commentary. Though like anything else central to a plot, for thematic unity's sake, they ought best be sources for character interactions with their meaning space. In other words, be causal, tension driving, and/or antagonistic, ideally all three.

And I don't mean solely incoming antagonisms. Antagonism, like loving, fighting, and teeter-totting, takes two to tango. Antagonism's two identities are purpose and problem. Insuperably striving for a goal antagonizes others into antagonizing back.

I'm a savvy consumer who can't be bothered to read or view ads most of the time. Nor do they have much, if any, subliminal impact on me. They're not even background noise. If the ads are just there in the novel, I expect I'll gloss over them the way I do with genuine ads.

Not to give away some of my A-game material, nope, not gonna do that, I have a similar concept in development. My core questions for the process are, What does technology's instant and total coverage cellphone and data access do to interpersonal relationships? What does it personally mean to my ideal audience of one? Then what do ads represent? Perhaps depersonalized mass culture material consumerism. Shallow, superficial salves for mitigating the loss of in-person personal interaction.

High-concept premises, by the way, are motifs and their meanings and emotional contexts readily and broadly, if not universally, accessible by spectators, viewers and/or readers, through self-referential parameters. A murder victim, for example, flying jetplanes into skyscrapers, a blonde, blue-eyed child kidnap victim, or worse; or in some other way primal-emotion emotionally accessible. For example, fine art painting using excrement for pigment. Nor neglect positive emotions, like joy and jubilation. Seal Team Six's payback served cold.

[sierramcconnell]

This is just an aside but, have you ever taken a social marketing, psychology class, or even desktop publishing solely for advertising? They explain how those things are setup to entice people to look at them. It might help you develop them as well. Like what colors to use with what to make you hungry, what font to use on what background, how to place it on the bag, and so forth. It's all psychology how they design packaging so that you buy that product. The music, the people, and the wrapping. Even where it's stocked is based on who paid who what and that's why the cheaper stuff is usually on the bottom or very top shelf.

But it's allll in the design.

Of course, this is making me think of the movie Looker...

[dios4vida]

I think Sierra's suggestion of advertising classes holds a lot of merit. I wrote for two years in my high school newspaper (I know, it was high school, but bear with me here...) and we took a semester to learn about desktop publishing and the placement of pictures and/or ads. To this day, I still can't hang a photo on my wall if the subject is looking out toward an empty space - it draws the eye away from the rest of the arrangement instead of to what you want them to see. So, all of that just to say that a little research and learning can help a lot to make this idea work.

As to the idea itself, I think it would be very delicate work, but if done successfully I think it would really make an impact. You'd have to be very careful with the amount - as a person who hates advertising, too many ads would make me quit reading. I also think polymath (as always) has a fantastic point - treat the ads as a character, almost. Give them purpose, drive, tension, antagonism, foreshadowing...all the things that we pour into our characters. If they're just there as a visual they'd more easily annoy the reader, but if they're treated as an important storytelling feature, then I think it would be amazing.

Good luck!!

[JohnDurvin]

For some bizarre reason, it hadn't occurred to me to use ads as epigrams for chapter headings, but yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. In a world where pop-ups, phishers, and spam-bots have come into the real world, they're treated as dangerous vermin infesting the cities, a bit like zombies but not quite that dangerous. They're an abstract force that terrifies people, although they could simply not pay attention and go about their business. The real antagonism of the story comes from the MC's creeping suspicion that it's not good how detached and childish everything and everyone has become; once his smartphone is damaged during an attack by the Resistance (who, being products of the same society, aren't quite sure what they're resisting) he disappears off the cel-phone grid and is labeled a dangerous subversive. He spends the rest of the book fending for himself, avoiding the steroid-pumped teenage policeman that's chasing him, and marveling at the pointlessness of everything he and the others had ever done. It's a sort of absurdist-dystopian thing, although like many of these stories, I'm having trouble making sure the asinine dialogs between the characters don't turn the book into what it's supposed to be satirizing.

Incidentally, should I use real-world brands or make them up? In a world where they make alcoholic whipped cream, I'm having trouble coming up with products that are absurd enough. My favorite so far is "Crazy Ocho Caffeinated Rum--now with PCP!"

[sierramcconnell]

Please tell me you'll have LOL Cats. It can't be crazy until you have LOL Cats.

[polymath]

The movie translation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep known as Bladerunner and the movie The Fifth Element both incorporate real world product ads. The risk, though, is social commentary of the derogatory variety about trademarked products can draw frivolous but stifling litigation with sufficient merit to call it into legal jurisdiction question.

A cue worth considering for the dialogues, satire is a species of irony that applies fundamental irony species to get a point across. Understatement, overstatement, verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony, comic irony, litotes, sarcasm, and some more exotic species that are nevertheless part of everyday language, antiphrasis, paralipsis, epitrope, sarcasmus, mysterismus. The challenge I see is keeping irony's subtext accessible.

Oh, and in order to be maximally persuasive and emotionally pay off, the protagonist must experience an appreciable transformation of being, and by extension readers. Dystopias aren't conventionally transformed by a protagonist's doings. Too much social apathy and entrenched status quo resistance to overcome. Besides, better the dickens you know than the unknown tyrrant replacing the overlord, eh? So the final outcome transformation must happen to the protagonist.

Let's see, a basic advertising principle insists sex sells. Keeping up with the Jones jones is about status competition for social and mating dominance. Feminine oriented advertising appeals to sexual attractiveness status competition. And masculine advertising appeals to achievement status symbolic attractiveness competition. Ostentatious displays of material wealth and sexual prowess, in other words. PCP ingredients would turn me off. There not a lot more depraved and hazardous than a PCP junky.

[Watcher55]

I would consider peppering in ads for real product names but with mutated properties (Liquid Plummer could be a bio-engineered organism that gets union scale). On the other hand, you keep the products recognizable in order to suggest the possibility of continuity from where we are now.

[dios4vida]

Incidentally, should I use real-world brands or make them up? In a world where they make alcoholic whipped cream, I'm having trouble coming up with products that are absurd enough. My favorite so far is "Crazy Ocho Caffeinated Rum--now with PCP!"

Personally, I'd avoid real world ads. The chance for offending/litigation is just too great. What I'd do would try to get very ordinary things and make then absurd, just like the alcoholic whipped cream. I think that's perfect. Make them somewhat recognizable but also not a direct parody. Otherwise people could get really irritated, and that's soooo not the response you'd want.

[hektorkarl]

Incidentally, should I use real-world brands or make them up? In a world where they make alcoholic whipped cream, I'm having trouble coming up with products that are absurd enough. My favorite so far is "Crazy Ocho Caffeinated Rum--now with PCP!"

You could also used made-up products, but tie them to current companies -- a subsidiary of Coca-Cola, a start-up funded by Google, a company run by former Facebook execs, etc.