Marty Kaplan

A lot of people say they watch the Super Bowl for the ads, not the game. Their declared interest is aesthetic. Which ads are funniest? Which employ the snazziest cinematography, the coolest computer graphics, the cutest animals? They -- we -- are meta-audiences; we say we're interested in the pitches, not the products. We're in it for the aesthetics, not the commodities. We're hip to marketing's wiles. We've got media literacy up the wazoo.

But how true is that, really?

After all, lawyers and judges have become accustomed to having to instruct juries not to apply the forensic science they see deployed on 'CSI' to the procedings in a real courtroom. Viewers of medical storylines in tv dramas --

Marty Kaplan

The elevators in the Beverly Hills building where the Lear Center's world headquarters is located are fitted with little screens provided by the Captivate Nework, where driblets of news are accompanied by dollops of advertising. "Captivate" is a good word for describing what players in the attention economy, from entertainers to educators, want to do with our consciousness, but in this case, it's equally good to describe the audience's status; as captives in the elevator car, we can no more avoid the little screen than we can avoid the E chart while imprisoned by the eye doctor's lens machine.

Now comes a new innovation: the elevator as theatrical space. "Ascent-Descent/Assent-Dissent" is the name of 24 playlets, each less than two minutes long, being performed, live, between the ground and the fourteenth floors of the Starks Building in Louisville, Kentucky, by cast members of the Specific Gravity Ensemble.

Marty Kaplan

It's not surprising that R.J. Reynolds is introducing "Camel No. 9," a cigarette aimed at women. After all, Reynolds' job is getting people to smoke, and based on the statistics -- smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, and lung cancer among women (as a New York Times editorial points out) is "the only major form of cancer whose death toll is rising" -- women are their market.

What's surprising, or at least worth a second look, is the degree to which the tobacco company believes that marketing and packaging -- the dark arts of attention-getting -- are smart investments.