Is this really the best part of waking up?

The other morning I was hanging out at a friend’s apartment drinking a mug of Folgers coffee when I suddenly remembered a commercial I saw some 17 years before, in which a dancer wakes up in bed, yawns, stretches her long dancer’s arms, brews a nice steaming cup of Folgers coffee, and proceeds to twirl spastically around her apartment to the tune of “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” I had such a warm feeling in my stomach as I remembered that commercial; the pleasant gooiness of nostalgia settled in my brain; I felt what could only be described as joy – and in that moment I realized something: My idea of coffee, the notion that I need it every morning to “wake up,” that it is a source of pure pleasure, more than likely came from that commercial.

Art & Copy, the new documentary by Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch, Surfwise), is about advertising. But it’s not about the evils of the industry; it’s about that remarkable practice of creating and selling lifestyles in the form of a catchy jingle or a two-word slogan. It doesn’t delve into why, psychologically, advertising works but simply celebrates the fact that it does.

We’re a culture of storytellers, of information-disseminators, and advertisers are our modern-day scribes, selling us a particular version of our history. But over the past few decades, we have begun to see advertising in America as a demonic industry that does nothing more than employ devious methods to tap into people’s insecurities and bad habits in an effort to sell products. But in Art & Copy Pray explores a different version of modern advertising history. He focuses on the “good” in advertising, or at least the exciting and enlightening. For him, advertisers are artists; they’re writers; they’re thinkers. And their art isn’t merely about planting inconsequential ideas in people’s heads but using subtlety and creativity to make people believe that they need a custom or a habit, and that these customs and habits are what make us social beings. Their end goal, of course, is to advert – to turn the mind or attention to, or, more frankly, to sell a product or a brand – but it’s the means to this end that fascinate Pray.

For example, Liz Dolan, former vice president and director of global marketing at Nike, explains in the film how Nike brought recreational jogging to America. Apparently, Bill Bowerman, Nike’s co-founder, was a track and field coach who took the popular New Zealand concept of nonprofessional athletes jogging for exercise and brought it to the U.S. in the early 1960s. Bowerman wrote a book and helped set up jogging programs across the country to get folks interested. Now all Nike needed was the right shoes to fit these new “casual” athletes’ feet and the proper slogan to sell them.

Enter advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy. As W+K co-founder Dan Wieden explains, he and his partner, David Kennedy, were shopping around for a good sporty slogan for Nike’s new jogging shoe when they came across an old newspaper clipping from 1977 concerning the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore in Salt Lake City, Utah. Before facing the firing squad, Gilmore reportedly said, “Let’s do it.” One man’s famous last words became one famous shoe company’s meal ticket. Just like that: Just Do It.

So though it may be true that Nike taught Americans how to jog, it was Nike’s advertising agency that introduced Americans to a new spirit of getting things done. As Just Do It ads flew off the presses and over the airwaves, a strange thing began happening, one that, as Wieden notes, had nothing to do with exercise and everything to do with inspiration and motivation. Just Do It. People took that seriously. Some quit smoking. Others lost weight. Self-declared losers finally asked out that waitress. Wieden recalls the piles of letters that came in from women claiming they had been inspired by the ads to divorce their abusive husbands.

What Art & Copy drives home is this notion that advertising is not a one-way street. It doesn’t aim to sell just a product but a lifestyle, something people can identify with so they will continue to buy said product time and time again throughout their lives. It’s all about the bigger picture: Give people a powerful slogan and they will claim it as a motto … and keep buying your crap.

History has proven that people love having slogans to live by; they’re an abstract of something to aspire to. “Live free or die,” “Don’t drink and drive,” “Keep America beautiful,” “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth – not in your hand.” Repeat something enough times and it becomes true. It becomes a way of life, one you’ll need the appropriate (and newest) tools to continue being a part of.

At one point in Art & Copy Liz Dolan says, “[Advertising is] like air and water. It’s around you. It’s gonna happen to you.” That’s the whole issue. Advertising is ubiquitous because, in order to be effective, it has to be as natural and comforting to people as air and water. It’s why, according to one of the movie’s many filler statistics, there are 450,000 billboards in the U.S. When I see a billboard of a tasty-looking hamburger, I’m instantly hungry – despite the fact that I may have just eaten, despite the fact that I’m a vegetarian. I suppose the efficacy of advertising lies partly in its focus on suggestion rather than command. The hamburger is not outright telling me to eat it, in the way that a used-car salesman might yell at me to buy his Ford Pinto. The burger’s simply there on that board, posing in all its meaty, sandwichy glory, suggesting I might like it. The object being advertised isn’t directly in your face; it’s just waiting for you to realize you want it.

Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer of TBWA\Chiat\Day and the man behind the breakthrough “1984” ad that introduced Apple’s Macintosh personal computer during that year’s Super Bowl, best sums up this need to be told to and sold to: “[People] can’t do shit unless we make ads for them.”

Is this fair? Would Americans read more books (more non-Oprah-endorsed books, anyway) if even a smidge of those 450,000 billboards advertised them? Would Americans eat more eggplant if there were some great slogan or jingle to push the fruit (yeah, it’s one of those: a fruit masquerading as a vegetable)? These questions remain unanswered, as there isn’t much of a market these days for paperbacks or veggie-like fruits. But there is evidence to back the brazen claims of the advertising kings and queens profiled in this film: that they can sell anything to anyone at anytime, and that creativity can solve any problem.

Wells Rich Greene’s leading founder Mary Wells taught Americans how enjoyable and fun it is to fly in airplanes (the travel industry could probably stand to revisit that ad campaign). The late ad man Hal Riney, of BBDO and later Hal Riney & Partners, helped re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984 with the tearjerker “It’s Morning Again in America.” And who knew it was always all about us? Phyllis K. Robinson did. Doyle Dane Bernbach’s first copy chief coined the slogan “It lets me be me” for Clairol (ironic for a product designed to change ladies’ hair color), which led to Generation Me and, with it, millions of selfish ingrates.

It’s a bit unsettling to think that all our hopes, dreams, desires, and needs might be nothing more than ideas conjured up during a brainstorming session around a conference table – we like to believe we create our culture and our identities ourselves. But things become really unsettling once you realize that identifying with products and labels is the root of our culture. We’re Ford people and Cubs fans and Mac users. We’re runners and coffee drinkers.

And whether I realize I’m being tricked or think I’m in control of my own choices, I’m sure I will continue to be influenced by the art and copy around me. But I will never be duped into drinking Folgers again.