“Ad Infinitum” is the fall 2025 edition of the Notebook Insert, our seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Multiplex asks filmmakers, critics, and artists for short-form responses to the topic at hand. In this issue, our contributors prod at the formal strategies and cultural contexts of various marketing genres.
Illustration by Michelle Urra.
Celia Young on the out-of-home ad
A representative recipe from So Yummy, the company Outfront contracts for its “Moments in Food” series on New York subway screens.
New York City’s screens won’t stop telling me what to do. On Brooklyn street corners, thin monoliths order me to soak in the sun, go on a walk, and vote for my city’s most iconic dish. Underground, flatscreen displays advise a diet of inedible chunks of pasta, courtesy of untested “recipes” beamed directly to commuters.
These screens are where brands vie for fifteen-second fragments of a New Yorker’s attention. A company called Outfront Media operates nearly 15,000 displays on street corners and in the subway, where they cycle between advertisements and PSAs. The double-sided screens of curbside call stations known as LinkNYC kiosks offer up free WiFi, charging ports, sports scores, information about city services, and of course, ads.
In between those ads and announcements, these displays drift into another form of media: half-formed filler intended only to court attention. Filler content, the awkward cousin of internet clickbait, is not meant to stand on its own, but to collect viewers that will continue to stare, slack-jawed, at a screen until an advertisement rolls around. In other words, it’s slop, meant only as a smash-and-grab for our eyeballs. And while we’ve begun to expect slop online—Shrimp Jesus, anyone?—that slow enshittification has crept onto the same screens that serve New Yorkers with crucial public service announcements.
But the problem with baiting viewers with flashing rounds of insipid clickbait is that it trains us to ignore it. We avoid inane decorating tips and useless quizzes, and then miss train times or public health bulletins. And every time a useless chunk of filler content drags our eyes back, we have another reason to look away—or to distrust what we see. Why would you believe a warning about Legionnaires’ Disease from the same screen that nearly poisoned you with a recipe for Monkey Bread? Why would you even bother to look?
Nicholas Henriquez on the jingle
Annoying, repetitive, and unforgettable by design, commercial jingles are notoriously effective (just Google “Meow Mix Guantanamo”). That they have been retreating from television since the 1970s without legislation or a disarmament treaty—perhaps only because some suits at Omnicom and IPG decided jingles were corny—should be considered a significant victory in the endless and likely hopeless war against advertisements (a word which, after all, shares a Latin root with “adversary”).
At least until Jardiance. A medication for managing type 2 diabetes, Jardiance had to pull out the big guns in 2023—both to compete with the surging popularity of GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound) and to milk the last couple years of exclusivity in its patent (which lapsed in February). The jingle they developed sounds like a passable Broadway number, except for the grating lyrics, a mess of low-information-density slogans (“Jardiance is really swell”?) in mismatched verb tenses, all wrapped in a monotonous cheeriness—potentially fatal infection of the perineum notwithstanding.
But the visuals are even worse. A faux backstage musical with Busby-Berkeley-by-way-of-AI choreography, the ad is beyond a throwback or a regression: It’s an inversion. Instead of motivating the song with the diegesis, Jardiance invents a plotless, histrionic musical to justify having a jingle (lest the song seem “corny”). Fitting, then, that the original ad (which has spawned a number of derivations) was shot at Universal Studios Florida, where the backlot was built to be part of the theme park first and only incidentally functions as an actual set. And fitting, too, for the almost uniquely American genre of the pharmaceutical ad, with its inverted (or, perhaps, perverted) mechanism of action—after all, shouldn’t your doctor be the one talking to you about Jardiance?
Debashree Mukherjee on the nationalist ad
Every young postcolonial nation speaks in two voices: hope and disillusion. The thrill of independence hums alongside frustration with those who inherit power. In 1989, an ambitious scooter commercial gave that hope a soundtrack. Its soaring choral anthem, “Hamara Bajaj,” composed by jazz legend Louis Banks with a tagline by adman Alyque Padamsee, called out to millions of middle-class Indians divided by language, geography, and religion, but united by the dream of social mobility. In less than a minute of deft montage, a modest two-wheeler became a metaphor for a nation in motion: tradition meeting modernity, family values nested inside financial ambition. And it worked. We hummed the jingle on our way to school while our parents patiently waited years for their long back-ordered Bajaj Chetak.
That once-secular “hamara” (“our”) now feels like a relic in an age of militant Hindu nationalism. But the ad’s inclusiveness was always tinged with nationalist desire—it invited us to be patriotic consumers. The past, like riding a scooter, is a balancing act.
Olivia Popp on the comfort ad
“Super fit, super fresh, super lifestyle, supergeil,” croons singer and Santa Claus doppelgänger Friedrich Liechtenstein as he pours milk over himself in a bathtub. In Germany, everyone knows the viral “Supergeil” ad (the title riffs on “geil,” a semi-slang word for “cool” or “awesome”) by Edeka, the country’s largest supermarket corporation. Their marketing trades on cheeky representations of the country’s elderly, particularly this hip grandpa, who moves from dancing down the grocery aisles to vibing at home with family members of all ages.
In Edeka’s hit Lifetime-movie rip-off “Heimkommen” (“Homecoming”) ad, a grandpa fakes his own death in order to convince his family to visit him for Christmas. In “Herren des Feuers” (“Lords of Fire”), another grandpa leads us through various eras of Western civilization, guided by the power of fire, only to descend upon his final destination: a backyard barbecue.
In each case, everything comes back to Heimat, a term that roughly refers to a Romantic concept of home and belonging, but which has historically been appropriated to take on explicitly nationalist, exclusionary connotations. Edeka’s various Großväter stir up different, but not necessarily incongruous, feelings of home. As the generation who grew up in the aftershocks of Nazism passes, and as Germany turns back toward the far right, these Edeka spots ask the question: What will Heimat become?
Mark Asch on the automobile ad
Sunday, February 23, 1997, marked the network television premiere of Steven Spielberg’s 3¼-hour Schindler’s List (1993), which NBC aired without editing for runtime or content (though the film was formatted to fit your screen). An estimated audience of 65 million tuned in—more than one in five Americans, including my twelve-year-old self, my eleven-year-old brother, my eight-year-old sister, and our parents.
The programming decision was not without controversy: then Representative Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said afterward that it “should outrage parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere.… I cringe when I realize that there were children all across this nation watching this program. They were exposed to the violence of multiple gunshot head wounds, vile language, full frontal nudity, and irresponsible sexual activity.” There might also have been concerns about another type of vulgarity, but these were allayed by a prerecorded message before the broadcast: “Because of the historic importance of this special film, there will be no commercial interruptions,” Ford Motor Company executive Ross Roberts assured us, and then introduced Spielberg himself, who thanked Ford and NBC, warned parents about the film’s content, and averred that “I made the film for this and future generations, so that they would know, and never forget, that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.”
In addition to a two-minute intermission inserted into the film, in which the Ford logo appeared alongside a Brutalist-style bathroom-break countdown clock—the blue hood ornament against a U.S. Steel–gray backdrop offering a counterpoint to Spielberg’s black-and-white feature, pierced by a single pop of red—Ford produced a new minute-long ad, which played once before Roberts’s introduction and again after the film, following a tasteful moment of black screen after the end credits. The ad, narrated by Lauren Bacall, attempted to meet the moment: an “End of History” consensus characterized by semicentennial remembrances of the Greatest Generation in general, and Shoah-themed arthouse fare ascendent on Oscar night in particular. The centerpiece of Ford’s $10 million sponsorship of the broadcast, it interspersed footage of the Ford line of cars and trucks—the rugged F-150, the sporty Mustang, the Taurus wagon that ferried me to many a youth sports contest—with images of Americans of all races and ages engaged in all manner of activities, from commuting to construction work to fly fishing, shot through a diffusion filter suspiciously similar to the one in Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. The spot is an affirmation of the very values that won the Second World War, positing a domestic heritage brand as an avatar of an inclusive heartland optimism. It was almost enough to make you forget that Henry Ford, unlike Oskar Schindler, manufactured matériel for the Nazi war machine.
Nathan Lee on the festival trailer
Whatever their ideals, ambitions, or claims on behalf of art, film festivals are a cultural product like any other and rely on forms of branding and publicity. A distinct feature of their marketing apparatus is the “festival trailer,” typically a seductive montage of clips from the lineup climaxing in a blitz of sponsors’ logos. A notably atypical trailer was devised by Jean-Luc Godard for the 2008 Viennale. Running a mere 63 seconds and making no mention whatsoever of the festival, Une catastrophe is not only the greatest of all festival trailers but to my mind one of Godard’s supreme masterpieces, the distillation of his videographic collage practice to its essence. Commissioned by longtime artistic director Hans Hurch, who had previously solicited promos from Stan Brakhage and Agnès Varda, among other luminaries, Une catastrophe splices shots from the Odessa Steps sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) to the grunts of a tennis match; lurches into oversaturated images of war machinery before mellowing out with a snippet of Schumann; obliquely nods to its context by including fragments of the 1930 German-Austrian film People on Sunday; and distributes across its montage title cards that declare “Une catastrophe / C’est la première / Strophe d’un poème / D’amour” (“A catastrophe / It’s the first / Verse of a poem / Of love”). While many of Godard’s essential video works are difficult to track down, Une catastrophe is on YouTube⎯as is an altogether sillier, but no less Godardian TV spot he made in 1991 to promote…the Nike Air Max 180.
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