Now that advertisers are constantly making fun of themselves, can parody really accomplish much?
It seems like they’ve just absorbed it. Ewen: I don’t think the issue is whether parody does or doesn’t work well, it’s what we have. It’s technique and form; it’s genre. The issue isn’t whether you use it, it’s the only thing you can do. We use the language that we have available. It’s a question of how consciously you use it. Parody is about having an acute awareness of form. We live in a world where form increasingly replaces substance, and where form (appearance, self-presentation, etc.) is itself considered to be of value. The awareness of how ideas are communicated is of enormous importance in terms of how ideas will be seen, processed, and understood. That is the key to why people so reflectively use form as an element of content. Even if they don’t reflect on it, they still do it. Advertisers that use parody say it will remind people of another ad, and that was their purpose. Another other way to look at it, though, is that those ads are reflections of a world in which almost e
