Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Sometimes I’m not sure what a television ad is trying to sell me. Oh, I know what the product being advertised is, more or less. It’s the experience the ad is attempting to associate with the product that I’m sometimes unclear on. Take the ad for sportscrap that I wrote about back here. Obviously, it’s selling sportscrap. But why did the ad’s producers believe that this spot in particular would appeal to the sportscrap-buying public? Hey, I’m just a caveman, the sophisticated ways of advertising confuse and confound me, but it seems to me that any self-respecting dude who views that ad is going to be revolted. He’s going to say to himself, “I  don’t want anything to do with these mustard-spooging losers.” It’s the kind of ad that makes you want to run away from a product. Even the tone is off-putting — all sallow grays and plinkety-plinkety underplaying. No thanks.

Which brings me to Citi’s latest ad for Private Pass. Have a look:

I take it Private Pass is some kind of credit card rewards program. That’s all the thought I’m gonna put into it because, honestly, the whole thing reeks of Oprah and self-improvement and womany stuff and it makes my testosterone levels drop just thinking about it. And that’s the first thing that’s weird about the spot — it’s advertising a female-centric product but it’s ostensibly aimed at hetero men. The ad’s star is named Jack, and we know he’s not gay because we see him being dumped by his modelish, state-of-the-art girlfriend. She does it by telling him he’s boring. Not once but three times. A little boring. BORING! Boorrrrinnngg.

That’s a pretty common thing, being dumped because you’re boring. It happened to me once, and the sting of it still lingers. (I remember thinking, “Moi, boring? But I have such an impressive CD collection!”) Truth be told, I’m sure it’s happened to a lot of guys who aren’t DJs or stuntmen or characters on reality television shows. So it’s pretty canny for the ad to lead with that — because it gets a guy’s attention. He thinks, “Here is an ad that speaks to my needs!”

Or does it?

The next thing we see is Jack sitting alone in a darkened room. He’s surfing the web, presumably in an effort to improve his prospects — to make himself definitively and irresistibly not boring. But is he browsing Adult Friend Finder or Chateau Heartiste? No, he’s signing up for Citi’s Private Pass program. That, the ad implies, is all Jack needs to do in order to succeed with women. To be not boring.

It works. Jack’s new Citi-certified powers immediately snag him a date — with Marilyn. That’d be Marilyn Monroe. Specifically, a photograph of her that’s hanging in a gallery. Now, you and I might consider it odd for a man to date a photograph, but it’s okay with Jack. A lifetime of looking at porn has conditioned him for this very moment. He’s as in love with Marilyn as he was with Tawnee Stone back when he was in high school and she was still hitting the books at Lightspeed University. (Now you know why he’s named Jack.) Anyway, the date’s a success. The camera zooms in slowly, first on Jack’s face, then on Norma Jean’s. A kiss seems inevitable.

But Jack’s intent on playing the field. He’s not putting all his eggs in one man purse. He immediately goes on another date — with the hostess of a cooking show. I don’t know who this woman is but I’ve seen her face on books and on signage. She has the pleasant, faintly meaningless look of someone who’s been advertised too much — who’s been stretched thin by focus groups and polls and cadres of manicured handlers. The ad doesn’t explain what Jack is doing on her show. Mostly he seems to be serving as a prop, or perhaps as a witness and testifier to the power of this woman’s marketability. He stares at her admiringly. She smiles with a smile that looks like it requires its own support staff. And then she feeds him like Jack’s mommy used to do when he wouldn’t eat and so we pretended the spoon was a little zoomy airplane and boop all gone and wow what a good boy Jack is.

And that’s really what’s odd about the ad — it’s only superficially about Jack’s dating predicament. What it’s really about is his capacity to witness and endorse women. Hey, maybe this is what women refer to as “validation” — which is something you hear a lot about but is kind of hard for the schlong-sporting set to make sense of. Near as I can tell, validation is the positive flip side of the male gaze, that greatest of all feminist bugaboos. The male gaze demeans a woman by turning her into a potential mother and a provider of sexytime delight. But validation embiggens her. When a man validates a woman he has finally come to see her as all she has aspired to be — the reincarnation of his fourth-grade teacher. Stupid Jack — if only you’d validated your girlfriend when you had the chance! Then maybe you wouldn’t be so boring. And maybe you’d be better at long division.

Jack’s next date is with Alicia Keys. Now, few straight men are fans of Alicia Keys — except, perhaps, as a piece of ass. (There’s that damn male gaze again!) But since he’s been using Private Pass Jack has become an admirer. Or, rather, he’s become a hanger-on. Or maybe a roadie or a stalker or something. Because when we see him he’s standing timidly in the backstage area, looking a bit nervous as he watches Alicia prove to the world how ballsy and asskicking she is. Like virtually all contemporary female pop singers, Alicia’s selling an empowerment fantasy — and compared to Jack she’s Conan the fucking Barbarian. She stares directly into the camera, haloed by blue light, performing a song that’s apparently comprised of one sentence bellowed over and over again at the top of her lungs: “THIS GIRL IS ON FIRRRRREEEE!” Jack just stands there, a look of daft bewonderment on his face. He’s overcome his problems and he is validating the living shit out of this girl. It’s never been this good before, not even with Tawnee.

Now, I have to ask — what is this shit? How in the world does Jack’s getting the autograph of Alicia Keys make him any less boring? By the way, I don’t think the ad intends to imply that he’s got some sort of shot with Alicia. He’s just a schlub attending her concert. And I don’t think we’re meant to believe that his fawning over a second-tier pop tart will make him irresistible to women. If that were the case, the ad would show him attending the concert with, you know, an actual woman. No, we’re meant to see Jack’s act of validation as an end in itself. And the ad would have us believe that it’s a glorious end indeed — even if it leaves Jack alone and nursing a terminal case of blue balls.

The only reasonable conclusion is that it’s not an ad aimed at men at all. It’s an ad aimed at women whose boyfriends don’t take them to enough Alicia Keys concerts. No, check that — it’s an ad aimed at women who want to imagine themselves into Alicia’s tiny, too-pricey shoes. To be enormous and glittering and empowered and looked at. To occupy that nexus where consumerism and validation merge and combust in a great fireball of blue-haloed affirmation. (Hallelujah!) The ad is every woman’s duckfaced mirror photo writ large — a shout-out to the world that, after years of suffering and sacrifice, no gal need be satisified with not being Madonna. In this scheme Jack is just a fanboy, an accessory — sort of like Guy Ritchie. And how’s that for boring?