I can give you What You Want

There is a television advertisement running for Intel Pentium CPUs. It features a dark haired girl, kind of dancing, kind of wiggling with a sound track of "I can give you what you want". Felliciano and I were watching television when this ad came on. I suggested that the girl in the ad is linda which is Spanish for pretty. He makes a face and very much disagrees. This struck me as odd.

I looked very hard at the commercial the next few times it was on. I am under the impression that commercials are targeted toward a demographic, a section of the population that are potential buyers of the product being advertised. From what I have read, I think that ads are constructed with an enormous amount of sophistication and a deep understanding of the psychology of various demographics. I can imagine that the Intel commercial is targeted toward those individuals who actually choose which processor to put in their computer. Most people probably just purchase a computer but a small section of the population actually decides if they want AMD or Intel and so forth.

That narrow band of potential consumers would almost certainly be of great interest to Intel. They might actually be able to choose the actress in their commercial so as to match what such purchasers find most attractive. The text of the commercial has the word Multiply, the soundtrack "I can give you what you want", and the pretty girl wiggling. She is not just any pretty girl. She is the combination of the stereotype of computer geekette, librarian, and girl next door. She is plain enough to be "accessible" She is not the busty blond in a tight shirt, she wears a sweater or something. She moves perhaps in a way calculated to imply free formed fun, intelligent, attractive geekiness. I think she is really hot.

My point is that this is done in all commercials. It might be rare that a commercial is so tightly focused on my sort of background, mindset and experience, but all of these advertisements are done to put an idea into your head, and make you think you thought of it.

What you imagine to be the images of success, wealth, honesty, integrity, authority any possible thing that you might identify with or wish to identify with is very well understood by marketers. They know how you tick, they know what buttons to push to get you to buy whatever idea or image they are selling. That's their job, and they have become so good at it, that I suspect most people can not think of themselves without associating or even substituting various commercially driven artificial images with their identity. There is a power in this, a magical ability to create thoughts for others to think, to manufacture identities that individuals will buy.

"I can give you Ice Cream. I can give you anything. I can give you what you want" And baby what you want is Intel duo core Pentium.

This is real, in the world, in your face, everywhere you look, Black Magic.