These meme streets

In this month's column, Russ Swan takes on the dubious world of pseudo-scientific advertising and in the process makes himself a little dizzy

My laptop is powered by Intel, and my phone is powered by Android. Despite the simple observable and demonstrable fact that both are, in reality, powered by batteries, the phrase ‘powered by’ has become omnipresent. Everything has to be powered by something, it seems; if I look closely enough I’m sure there will be a label somewhere on my body saying ‘powered by caffeine’.

The phrase has become a meme – a concept with the ability to self-replicate, rather as a gene is a molecule with a similar ability. Advertising is full of memes, and advertising agencies are full of people who want nothing more than to create the next meme. And that’s where the science part comes in.

Remember that one? A simpering Jennifer Aniston (a popular American actor) coyly holds a bottle of shampoo to the camera, uttering the immortal and only slightly patronising phrase “here comes the science bit… concentrate”.

The science bit in this case is an ingredient called Ceramide-R, which sounds fantastic. It conjures visions of hardness and strength and shininess, like a porcelain figurine but less twee. That’s just what I want my hair to be like.

But the world of advertising – shampoo advertising in particular – is awash with scientific sounding claims and ingredients. Perhaps I’d be better using a product containing pro-vitamins – vitamins are good, right? And pro sounds, well, positive.

We – you and me – we know better. A pro-vitamin is a precursor, a compound that is metabolised into a vitamin by the digestive system. It is not immediately apparent what good this could do in external application, or what nutrition it could offer to the structure of dead material we call hair.

It’s equally unclear what the compound that makes my morning drink so helpful can do in this application, and yet caffeine-enhanced shampoo is one of the latest to hit our shelves. Checking the website for the brand, Alpecin, I learn two things. First is that the caffeine is supposed to stimulate the follicles, which implies but carefully does not claim that it is a treatment for baldness. The second is that the company has gone for Option B when selecting a figurehead.

L’Oreal chose Option A, a person whose career is to make people believe they are someone they are not. Option A is the professional liar, whose word we are supposed to accept because they are pretty. Option B is the scientist, who can be immediately identified because he is wearing a lab coat. Funnily enough, in this context, the other visual cliché of the scientist is absent. This particular boffin has normal, kempt (as in, not unkempt) hair. Well, it is a shampoo company.

This practice – using an attractive celebrity or a goofy scientist to endorse a consumer product with a miracle ingredient, is not a modern phenomenon. Snake oil salesmen in the wild west took their cues from the snake oil salesmen of ancient China, and in turn have been copied by today’s snake oil salesmen. A product called Syn-Ake was launched a few months ago, using a synthetic ‘snake venom-like’ peptide to offer an alternative to botox. Botox is a toxin, and so is snake venom. It all brings a new meaning to the phrase ‘name your poison’.

Syn-Ake, like Ceramide-R, is a classic of the science of ingredient naming. It doesn’t really mean anything, but it sounds impressive. A popular energy drink has a similarly wondrous ingredient: Taurine. This surely is a real (not made-up) compound, and surely imparts the power of Taurus, the bull, to a product coincidentally called Red Bull. The worlds of science and the occult, rolled up into just seven letters. It is a masterpiece.

Someday soon, a manufacturer of these fast-moving consumer goods will have its corporate tongue so far into its corporate cheek that it will take a leaf out of Crelm Toothpaste’s marketing strategy, and name an ingredient Fraudulin.

Meanwhile, this week the supermarket has a special offer on a brand of coffee called Rocket Fuel. That looks promising, I think, anticipating a good old fashioned dose of four-star leaded fuel. The label reads ‘Powered by guarana’.

I think this is where we came in, and I feel slightly dizzy.

By Russ Swan