Cru Jones Society

 

One of the only benefits of being home sick – by the way, I’m in that super awesome phase of hacking my lungs out all day on the road to recovery – is that you get to watch awesome daytime television. Even though Drew Carey is redefining levels of awful as the new “Price Is Right” host, the games are so much fun, you can’t help but still love the show. And did you know they remade “Let’s Make a Deal”? (I’m) Wayne Brady (Bitch!) is the host and people still inexplicably dress in costumes and win things like outdoor theaters and get zonked. Although it feels more sanitized than the 1970s version (what doesn’t?), I still got a big kick out of it, which is about all you can hope for on a sick day.

Of course, neither “The Price Is Right” or “Let’s Make a Deal” hold a candle to the sheer entertainment value and unintentional hilarity of a Brinks Home Security commercial. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Then you’ve obviously never had your front door kicked in Van Damme-style while you casually jogged on the treadmill, have you?

The basic premise for advertising is identifying the need of a population, trumping that need up as much as possible, and creating a narrative for why your product miraculously fulfills the aforementioned need and why a consumer should plunk down their hard-earned sheckels for your product. If you sell a product that basically no one needs, you need to invent reasons for the consumer to do so, which is where home security systems enter our discussion.

A good deadbolt lock, windows that seal up tight, homeowners’ or renters’ insurance, and tenants that aren’t blindingly stupid are basically all you need to maintain the safety of your home if you live in approximately 95% of the neighborhoods in America. No one actually needs a home security system besides the super rich, the ultra-famous, and crazy people. And even they aren’t going to need the half-assed security provided by ADT or Brinks because they’re rich enough to hire actual security guards, design a custom system, or if you’re a crazy person, you probably don’t sleep at night anyway, store your urine in jars, and clutch a shotgun to your breast 22 hours out of the day just waiting for someone to intrude. A stupid punch code and a loud noise aren’t going to provide any additional peace of mind your existing activities don’t already.

So why is private security a multi-billion dollar industry in this country? Three reasons: 1) Our news system is designed to sell advertising; 2) People are paranoid anyway; 3) Security companies are marketing geniuses. Let’s tackle these one at a time:

1) Read any study on the correlation between portrayals of violent crime in the news and people’s perceptions of the level of violence in the world, and you’ll get a stunningly disheartening picture of what influence the news has on our collective psyche. Then measure that against actual crime rates, and you’ll see just how sensationalistic our news system is. You’re on your own for looking up one of these studies since I’m coughing so much my eyes look like Cohagen when he gets sucked out in the Mars atmosphere at the end of Total Recall, but the basic gist is this: Violent crime rates have fallen consistently over the last 30 years while coverage of violent crime has risen by an even larger rate. Result: Even though people are safer than they ever have been (by far), they’re generally more afraid than ever.

Why is this? Violent crime makes for a much more compelling story on the evening news than the state legislature’s tabling of discussion on regulations governing payday lenders (something that actually happened two sessions ago that earned no coverage, but that would have substantially affected a large industry and its customers in Colorado). This happens because news stations are private entities that need to make money, and they make money by selling advertising. They get advertising by getting higher ratings, and more interesting stories yield higher ratings, and thus, more revenue, allowing them to stay in business.

I’m not advocating for a change in our system because god knows  the alternative (government-run news entities) are a hell of a lot worse – look at China – and that wouldn’t work here anyway. However, it’s important to acknowledge that our freedom of information, and in this case commerce, results in our perceptions of the world to be screwed up sometimes.

2) When we moved to Houston when I was in high school, the house my family bought had a security system in it. We didn’t install it, it was just there when we moved in. And as long as it’s there, might as well use it, right? Any idea how long we used it? A month. You know why? It’s a huge pain in the ass. Every time you open a goddamn door, the countdown starts ticking away, and god forbid you have an armful of groceries or the dog runs outside, because you’ll never remember to disarm in time resulting in a hideous BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!!!! and yet another call with the disaffected Brinks guy on the other line telling him you forgot the code again and “can you please shut this off?”

What I quickly learned after overhearing and participating in dozens of conversations about how we just turned the damn thing off was that no one else in this rich ass neighborhood could handle that thought. Everyone had a security system. Everyone. And they all used them religiously.

Why? The house we lived in was easily worth three-quarters of a million dollars and paled in comparison to 80% of the homes in our neighborhood. We lived 50 minutes north of inner-city Houston surrounded by cops, housewives, and a ton of other lookie-loos who would raise a stink if your garbage can looked different than everyone else’s, let alone if an intruder ever came to town.

And why the hell would someone who has to break into someone else’s home as their chosen lifestyle drive to the impossible-to-navigate suburbs to maintain their lifestyle where everyone knows everyone else’s business like the mayor is George Orwell? Who exactly are these people protecting themselves from? No one’s around except 25,000 other boring people who look just like you. As a corollary to the media studies I mentioned above, generally people who live in gated communities have more fear about the world than those who don’t. Do you think the same could be said about those with security systems?

3) Which brings me to the Brinks Commercials. They have synthesized everything I’ve written above into a series of mystifying 60 second commercials that perfectly prey on the fears perpetuated by our news media and the inflated sense of self-importance and paranoia of upper-middle class white people.

Let’s assume for a minute that a keypad, a loud noise, and Debbie the Time Life Operator are actual effective deterrents against home burglary and/or invasion. Anyone who lives in a neighborhood where crime is a persistent problem won’t buy your product because, let’s face it, they’re too damn poor. And if they weren’t so poor, they probably wouldn’t look to preserve their tarpaper shack in the crime-riddled hood. They’d probably just move to a better neighborhood. And super-rich people are out because they can afford real security as we already discussed. That leaves people with enough disposable income to afford the monthly payments to a security provider in order to protect a house full of moderately-priced goods in a neighborhood full of houses filled with similar moderately-priced goods near a highway allowing people to commute to places that are slightly more dangerous where they don’t have to suffer the indignity of mixing with the lesser-thans.

So how do you get around the whole “Hey, your stuff isn’t that nice, and on the off-chance someone actually robs you, homeowners’ insurance will cover it” and the “But seriously, no one will ever rob you” problems? As someone who (sadly) does some advertising for a living, I can tell you proudly (read: shamefully), that you simply tailor the problem to your target market and make the rest up.

And that’s why these Brinks commercials are so goddamned funny.

Let’s set the scene (from the commercial entitled “Treadmill”): You’re a hip young woman in her early 30s who loves things all women in their early 30s love – yoga pants, staying fit, iPods – so you’re spending your evening like you spend most others. You’re chatting on the phone (probably to one of your many girlfriends about pottery class, or white wine, or hybrid SUVs or something similar, you modern girl, you) in your spacious suburban two-story just before you work up a sweat on your treadmill while jamming out to the new Kelly Clarkson. Unbeknownst to you, two thugs dressed like Bluto and D-Day when they put the horse in the dean’s office, are sneaking up on your humble abode and peer at you menacingly through the window. They’re not dissuaded by the fact that someone’s home, they’re gonna steal your television, your stereo, and might even make a run at you if you put up a fight, little miss. So, devoid of all tact, they savate kick the door open, but thank goodness! The alarm starts blasting, the two nimrod burglars get spooked and run away, and you can thank Brinks for keeping you safe.

This sure looks familiar to everyone doesn’t it? No? How about this one (“Just To Be Sure”):

You’re a cute young girl (Notice a pattern here? Cute girls can sell anything. That’s why you find them riding John Deere tractors in bikinis despite the fact that no woman has ever ridden a tractor in her bikini since the dawn of time) and you’re gearing up to watch Twilight for the 25^th time while your parents go out for a romantic dinner. The ice cream is in the freezer, your pal is waiting on the phone so you can watch it together, and your dopey parents can’t seem to get out of the house without forgetting something. The door rattles – surely it’s just them forgetting their car keys or mom’s diaphragm or something – and as you go to investigate, a guy wearing a Unabomber costume karate kicks the door open (what is it with people making like Jackie Chan on the doors in these commercials?). You scream, he looks confused (possibly constipated) and runs away as you talk to the nice Brinks man who calls your parents. All is safe, and you have Brinks to thank yet again.

So what have we learned?

First of all, neither of these scenarios has ever happened to anyone, anywhere, ever.

Secondly, are these not the dumbest burglars of all-time? In the first commercial, you’ve got two guys lurking outside the window who actually see the woman who owns the house they presumably intend to rob. They notice she’s got her ear buds in, will likely be distracted while exercising, and instead of trying to get in and out surreptitiously, proceed to kick the blue hell out of the front door anyway drawing all the attention to themselves and triggering the alarm. Had they gone around the back and tried to maybe silently jimmy the door open , they could have maybe stolen some of this lady’s stuff without her knowing. Instead, they blast in like a Dane Cook joke and murder any subtlety they may have leveraged from this woman’s distracted state.

 

In the second commercial, the burglar is lurking around the side of the house at what seems to be approximately 7:30 at night given where the parents appear to be going. Yeah, no one’s ever doing anything at 7:30 in a suburban neighborhood on a weekend night except for everyone. Nice plan, dillhole. And how the hell did he not see mom & dad leave out the front door 15 seconds before he made like Dalton in Road House on that poor door? Are we getting a glimpse at burglars making their first attempts here? Can we not plan a little bit better here, please? Maybe try the house with no lights on or maybe don’t kick the sumbitch in like a maniac and try some tact. Who writes this shit?

Third, have none of these burglars ever seen Beverly Hills Cop II where Axel Foley disables an alarm using a stick of gum and a switchblade? Take some notes! Stu & Billy killed a whole town by simply watching Prom Night in the first Scream movie, you’d think you could learn something from the sassiest black cop ever to grace Beverly Hills.

Fourth, and this is most important, did you notice in these two commercials (and every Brinks commercial for that matter) that the burglars are always generic, middle-aged white guys? Brinks knows who its target market is here: White, upper-middle class, paranoid, liberal, politically correct yuppie buttholes. If you’re Brinks, you wouldn’t dream of offending the delicate sensibilities of your target demographic by making them suffer the indignity of implying that a person of color would commit a crime like this more than a white dude would. Oh no! We can’t fault anyone but ourselves for this crime wave! No need to bring in innocent urban victims as well!

If Brinks ever had the audacity to make an ad with a black dude or a gang of Latinos, or anything besides a dumpy , somewhat grisly white guy, the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and an army of pissed off protestors would claim racism and call for a boycott of Brinks even though people ostensibly move out of the city to avoid all the annoying diversity and surround themselves people who look more like them. This isn’t always the case, but when someone moves to an all-white, well-to-do community (particularly in the neighborhoods portrayed in the Brinks commercials), an undercurrent of racial consideration is there whether spoken aloud or not. Our world may have progressed in the last 50 years, but we’re not as far as we think.

Brinks has done a masterful job of tapping into a mainline of white guilt with these commercials. By making all of the burglars white, consumers of security systems can point to the commercials and claim, “We’re afraid of getting robbed” which is total crap instead of what they should really say, “We’re afraid of non-white people. That’s why we’ve moved 20 minutes outside town, put a gate around our community, and if those people somehow get in, we’ve got an alarm on our house too!”

Because the odds of your home getting robbed are 1-in-20 trillion (approximate), but the more we segregate ourselves, the more we become disconnected with reality, and the more we believe we’re so important we need an alarm to protect our stuff, which is stuff everyone else around us already owns as well. The less interaction you have with those that are different, the more you fear them. Brinks Home Security knows this and has made themselves rich by preying on this fear. It’s cynicism of the highest order, and their obvious skirting of the real implications of why people get security systems in the first place is annoying, but son of a bitch if these commercials aren’t gut-busting hilarious.

In general people who get security systems are delusional, and these commercials perfectly illustrate why. No one is waiting outside your house to kick in the front door and rob you while you stand there. Burglars are not this comedically incompetent, nor are they stupid enough to target your unremarkable house in your generic neighborhood with your mundane stuff. Crime doesn’t work this way. But because you live in a gated community (or any other blasé suburban neighborhood), you’re afraid of people penetrating your safe little womb of comfort and security, so you get the added security and money sink of a home security system to protect yourself. Because god knows you can’t be too careful. You never know when a middle aged white dude wearing a hoodie will blast through your front door. Better have some beeping to scare his incompetent ass away!

Congratulations, Brinks! You’ve sold middle class white America their own fear back to them. You’ve circumvented any potentially unpleasant conversations about race, power, and suburban hegemony by using boorish, inept white burglars as your ads’ antagonists. And you’ve given E Dagger a much needed laugh.

Thanks, Brinks! My sense of humor feels much safer today!

edagger@crujonessociety.com