Between now and the summer we are going to be showcasing the best of our original research by students in the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster. If you are a Humanities student at Westminster and would like to publish your research on our blog, please do get in touch!
Our second commentary is written by our student Yuxuan. Yuxuan spent one semester at the University of Westminster as an exchange student in the School of Humanities and is now completing her BA in English Language and Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is passionate about reading and writing nonfiction and enjoys playing the guitar and listening to ASMR in her free time. In this post, she explores some problems related to ASMR commercials and wants to share her original thoughts with you.
In the last decade, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos have proliferated on social media platforms such as YouTube, building an ASMR community comprised of millions of content creators and viewers. ASMR videos are deliberately designed to induce “a tingling, static-like sensation across the skull, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to triggering audio and visual stimuli” (Barratt and Davis, 2015, p. 1), including whisper, gentle touch, and crispy sounds. ASMR videos have also been associated with forms of role-play, self-care and mindfulness, and are seen as fostering well-being and alleviating symptoms of depression and chronic pain (Barratt and Davis, 2015).
As ASMR has gained online popularity and has gained cultural awareness, direct attempts to commercialize ASMR have been made in recent advertising by Dove Chocolate, Ritz Crackers, Zippos, Ikea, and Michelob Ultra, which aim to create memorable and engaging experiences to raise awareness and increase sales, aligning with the principle of experiential marketing. In doing so, the “humanized” function of ASMR to improve wellbeing has become redirected towards the fetishizing of commodities and the pursuit of corporate profit.
This can be seen in the case of Michelob 2019 Superbowl beer commercial. The commercial attracted the audience’s attention when the roaring of fans in the Super Bowl football stadium fell to a sudden hush and Zoë Kravitz was seen sitting gracefully in the wilderness, whispering about Michelob’s Ultra beer, and performing the satisfaction of her own consumer experience. To begin with, the camera zooms in from the natural surroundings to focus on Kravitz, who wears a mysterious smile and welcomes the audience with a hushed, “Let’s all experience something together” (Gritville, 2019, 0:09). Thirty seconds later, she takes the cap off the bottle, whispers “This beer is so pure, you can taste it” (Gritville, 2019, 0:39), and then pours the beer into a glass, amplifying the fizzing sound via the microphone while saying the brand name (Gritville, 2019, 0:43). As the beer produces its pleasant sound, Kravitz leans towards the microphone on one side of the table, staring at the beer bottle, and listens (Gritville, 2019, 0:50), inviting the audience to hold their breath and listen as well. At the end of the video, Kravitz leans against the back of her chair before giving the camera a gratifying smile and a proud and slightly disdainful look (Gritville, 2019, 0:54), conveying that message that customers will regret if they do not try this beer.
On a very basic level, the use of ASMR in the commercial is obviously a promotional gimmick, intended to market the qualities of the commodity more intimately and effectively, rather than provide any therapeutic effect. In contrast to the duration of typical ASMR videos, Michelob Ultra’s beer commercial lasted for only one minute – no doubt due to the inordinate cost of advertising time during the Super Bowl – such that the haptic pleasure and soothing effects it is supposed to trigger cannot be ensured. As a consequence, in contrast to ASMR videos where content creators experiment with as many triggers as possible to generate pleasant sensory responses, only three kinds of triggers appear in this commercial: the sounds of a whispered voice, a glass bottle, and the fizzing beer. Instead of producing sensory responses, these triggers serve a purely marketing purpose, designed to expose the qualities of the commodity to its fullest.
Beer in this commercial is not merely a useful commodity: it is one that can be opened, tapped, and poured – all actions emphasized through the use of ASMR-style effects – and the effects of this are amplified through the actresses’ facial expressions, behaviors, intonation, and tone. In this way, the audience experiences the pleasure of consumption vicariously; although the commodity on screen has been consumed by the performer, the feelings associated with the act of consumption are aroused by the ASMR trigger commercials, rendering consumerism itself consumable.
At the same time, the producers of the commercial have associated the commodified qualities of the product with the wellbeing benefits of the natural surroundings and of mindfulness. Liz Taylor, the chief creative officer who conceived the beer commercial, said “When we were trying to introduce this organic beer to the masses, we wanted to find health and wellness trends” (Schonfeld, 2019, p. 4). In the first five seconds, the commercial flashes images of nature – a sunset over the ocean, clouds above the mountains, and forests – before Kravitz appears against the backdrop of green mountains. Before introducing the beer, Kravitz emphasizes this purity of the natural surroundings – “This place so pure, you can feel it” – followed by a cutaway to the forest and a stream (Gritville, 2019, 0:26). When the bottle cap is opened, a bubbling stream is shown, followed by: “This beer so pure, you can taste it” (Gritville, 2019, 0:39). In this way, the commercial constructs a connection between the commodity and nature through ASMR, by attributing the same features to beer and nature – both pure and organic – and promoting the beer in the form of ASMR, which is supposed to be beneficial for well-being. In this way, Michelob Ultra’s beer advertisement exemplifies the same exploitative ideology that Ronald E. Purser has termed “mindfulness as the new capitalist spirituality”.
Bibliography
Barratt, Emma L. and Davis, Nick J. (2015) ‘Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: A Flow-Like Mental State’, PeerJ, 3, pp. 1-17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.851
Gritville (2019) ASMR SuperBowl Commercial 2019. 4 February. Available at: https://youtu.be/EHANLwkatkA?si=V-Dm_2YtdvNbOQhb (Accessed 4 March 2024).
Purser, Ronald E. (2019) McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, Repeater Books.
Schonfeld, Zach. (2019) Inside the Rise of the ASMR Commercial. Available at: https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/inside-the-rise-of-the-asmr-commercial.html (Accessed 4 March 2024).
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