Commercials and Ideals

What I would really like to talk about today are the TV commercials I see when watching Moses y los Diez Mandamientos (Yes, I watch a telenovela with my Bolivian mother every night [it’s for the anthropological thrill, I swear]). One such commercial is for Resfrianex, a brand of cold medicine (tu resfio ya fue!). It's a rather timely showing, as apparently some 1 million of the 10 million Bolivians currently has a cold (or so says my mother). Anyway, it goes like this: an attractive, young, stylishly-dressed man (Andrés Wiese) walks into a pharmacy, and is greeted by an attractive, young, skinny, long-haired woman (Santa Cruz model Anabel Angus). She checks his temperature and decides he needs said brand of cold medicine. In summary, she is super smitten with him, and at the end (once he got better because of the medicine) they bump into each other while he is walking his Golden Retriever (first one I have seen in La Paz). Point being, buy Resfrianex because A) Andés Wiese does and B) you do not want to have a cold when you bump into Anabel Angus on the street. But this is where it gets really interesting. Why did the company decide those two models would sell their product better than, say, “everyday people” from off the street? What does that say about the aspirations and attitudes of the audience? What is presented in as desirable, and how did that “ideal” come to be? Of course, this commercial is likely played across Bolivia, so the audience is indeed varied, yet it feels significant that they should use a model from Santa Cruz instead of the winner last year’s Cholita pageant to sell their product. (You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoJUqp9gmag)

Another entirely different set of commercials come out of Santa Cruz. The above sounds like something that one could find in most Western cultures, but these two are entirely unique to Bolivia, as they are selling land for two different districts of Santa Cruz. That is, two large swaths of land they have paved a road through and claim have bus systems. To sell the land for Urubé, they have three actors who dress and talk in such a way as to represent someone from La Paz (a man dressed in “typical” 55-year old, La Paz attire), Cochabamba (a woman dressed up as a Cholita), and somewhere else I haven’t yet been able to place (an older, whiter man that to me looks like Donald Trump [a coincidence, I’m sure] who wears a baseball hat with a long, floppy bill, a yellow t-shirt, and overalls). The entire commercial is silly, and the actors are caricatures (obviously meant to be humorously relatable) of the cities or people they represent. They mention how easy it is to come from their respective places, how great the new settlement will be, and overall certainly express the “excitement” of moving to Urubé. As an outsider, I’m fascinated by these caricatures. What do they say about how Bolivians understand their own? Is there a reason Santa Cruz should announce its cheap land via TV commercial? How do commercials like these play into a larger picture of internal migration, if there is one? How effective are advertisements like these? Do advertisements like these truly vary that much from culture to culture? I would think they do, but perhaps all method is the same. Maybe it is only the presentation that is filtered by culture. I don’t know the answers, but I will continue to be distracted by these expressions as I watch Moses with my mother.