To say it’s a dog’s life once described a dreary, harsh and
probably impoverished condition. Nowadays we would probably use the term “dog’s
life” to symbolize living in the lap(dog) of luxury. Spending on dogs and otherpets has tripled over the past 20 years.
Stores for training, feeding and grooming dogs seem to be proliferating
at a pandemic rate.
Dogs now serve as a major motif in television commercials
for virtually every product, including beer, snack foods, automobiles and
clothing. In these television spots, dogs can be symbols of family, of loyalty
to the pack (if not to a spouse), of good-naturedness, of goofiness, and even
of freedom.
But it is the image of a mindlessly happy slave blindly following
orders to which Travelers Insurance wants us to aspire in its new commercial
for auto and other insurance. Among the traditional values associated with
dogs, the Travelers ad favors blind obedience and easy trainability.
The commercial focuses exclusively on a dog that does
everything it’s supposed to do, and more. The visual narration unfolds in 9
vignettes of the same “good dog” being good. Since it’s a commercial for auto insurance, it
naturally takes place in a car-dependent suburban setting.
Here are the 9 vignettes:
1.
The dog covers a hole in which it has probably
buried a bone.
2.
It pulls the sprinkler to the middle of the yard
with its teeth.
3.
It wipes its front paws on a floor mat before
entering the house.
4.
Its paw grabs a water bottle that its master has
left on a table and places it in a trash bin.
5.
It drops a set of car keys from its teeth into
the key tray by the door.
6.
It looks both ways before crossing the sidewalk,
thereby avoiding a collision with a woman pushing a baby carriage.
7.
It tries to clean up spilt milk by dredging a
cloth through the white puddle with its teeth.
8.
It puts its empty food bowl in the open
dishwasher.
9.
It takes a bag of groceries in its teeth from
the back of a mini-van and carries it inside the house.
The narration subtly twists each
of these vignettes into a corresponding action that a human could, and should,
take to be a better driver or get a better rate on car (and home) insurance.
The phrases include, “safe driver,” “loyal driver,” “accident forgiveness,”
“rewarded for good behavior,” “recognized for doing the right thing, ” “the
good things you do, but maybe nobody notices,” and my favorite, “Travelers
wants you to be good.”
The background music is a
Speakeasy 20’s version of a song that goes “I’ve been good to you, yes I’ve
been good….”
It made me want to sit up…
…and fetch a newspaper or bring a
leash in my teeth to some human in hopes of getting a crunchy little ball of
processed meat and meal, or perhaps a scratch behind the ear.
No one can miss the metaphor: the
dog is us, at least a better version of us which is rewarded for its goodness
by lower automobile and home insurance rates.
The total identification between the dog and the ideal of human behavior
plays out in the call to action: to visit to the goodbehavior.com website.
It’s one thing to say, “She has
an elephant’s memory” or “He’s crazy like a fox,” but the Travelers “good dog”
ad, which is part of a whole series of ads in which dogs symbolize humans,
takes the analogy beyond the comparison of a single trait to an
all-encompassing idealization of humans mindlessly doing the right thing.
That right thing is defined by
Travelers not only as a set of driving behaviors, but a set of consumer
behaviors as well: How else do we explain the presence of loyalty as one of the
“good boy” behaviors proposed in the commercial, when loyalty has nothing to do
with safe driving? Product loyalty is,
after all, the holy grail of marketers. A more encompassing view of what
constitutes a “good boy” imbues the imagery, which resides in a world of
suburban consumerism, replete with ranch-style home, gas-guzzling automobile,
dish washer, plastic water bottle and other
disposable paraphernalia of suburban excess. To Travelers, to be a “good
boy” requires that one not only drive safely, but to obey all the rules for
good consumerism like customer loyalty and mindless acquisition . In another
context, “the good dog” might morph to something savage such as the “good Nazi”
or “good Soviet,” but Travelers has something a little less overtly violent in
mind: just be a happy idiot.