Humor me on this one. This is all about my own confusion, so it may be more obtuse a read for you than I intend. By the end, maybe you can help me.

I recently received, from a major retailer, another email in a daily conga line of marketing blasts seeking to separate me from my money. Ok I admit it, I have a newborn baby soft spot for designer bags, but in this economy just staring at images of pretty things I want but don’t need has had a positively soothing effect on my consumer psyche (and not spending money irresponsibly always makes me feel warm and fuzzily kumbaya, if only with my balance sheet and myself). So it’s like a junkie fixing with methadone. But, it works for me. Then, this HORROR! I froze in my tracks like a deer in headlights and stared at this advertisement… but not at the bag for sale.

What exactly is this picture saying?

Are you being serious, high-end-retailer-hawking-Marc-Jacobs ad agency? What exactly is this picture saying? This bag is large and heavy enough to hold all your old weighty emotional junk in your trunk? Fashion Slave Stooped From Shouldering Weight of Designer Guilt? And really, what is that pseudo-religious imagery supposed to be suggesting? Ever the optimist (not to mention foodie), I hoped against all hope that there was a tube of SPF 100 and a delish sammy in there for that poor girl. But realistically, I doubted there was much more than reams of shape-giving tissue paper — and yet, her burdened stance.

Still, I found that I was obsessed with the need for meaning…to make sense of this tragedy. What could be in that bag that was so heavy it was weighing this poor pale girl down, straining her abs, and messing up her hair so? Consumer debt? Anorexia? The burden of carrying a bag and chain that was relatively bigger than her frame on her inevitable way to a chiropractor? This is all hypnotizing me to buy the bag, the MJ lifestyle — how? I found, after years of marketing to others, and my own advertising-to-consumer deep conditioning, that…I want to be sold on beauty. Whether this ad agency is or not, I am being quite serious here: I was genuinely surprised by my reaction, my conditioning.

Searching for Meaning in All the Wrong Places

This strange advertising image succeeded, hands down, by making me:

1. stare at it long and hard. I didn’t delete the mail immediately -- eyeball time every advertiser drools for;
2. stop and examine the message, and the needs to which the image was supposed to appeal, much deeper than I normally would have (as a dyed-in-the-wool bag maven) if it were just a pretty bag. (Hey, maybe all this advertising contortion is because that bag is so fugly — reverse desire psychology, dang it!)
3. actually click to see if the pricing of the bag mirrored a Boho chic, downsizing-for-your-own-good visual message. (I was really stretching for meaning here… but not really, given this retailer’s average pricing).

In this down economy, where everyone is a bit more cautious of how they spend their hard-earned money, do any extra-creative, out-of-the-box images make you stop and think? What do these ads make you feel, or inspire you to do? Have you experienced a “reverse expectation” to an image or ad that made you stop and stare at (much less write a column about) it, thinking…thinking…

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what emotions this oddball ad tapped into in me – help a sister out!

Intrepidly shopping, so you don’t have to. Usually.