Critical Reading of a Television Commercial

“City folks just don’t get it”
-Farmersonly.com

As part of the Extra Innings Baseball Package, DirecTv nightly airs the feeds of 15 games, along with their local commercials. I get to see ads for Sonic, Carl’s Jr., and many other places that are not represented in my local market. Farmersonly.com airs a commercial in the early innings of baseball games broadcast on the Fox affiliates FSN Pittsburgh and FSN Ohio, which usually place the ads between 7:00 and 8:30 pm.

A dog and a horse lament that “Jill” is “really lonely, out walking the cornfields,” while across fields, a bull asks if “Dave will ever find his true love . . .” and is answered by a cow that points out he won’t “hanging out with us all day.” A cartoon version of American Gothic appears, and the austere, white “farmer” and his “wife” share that they used to be lonely until they met at farmersonly.com, “an online dating site for farmers, ranchers, and good old country folks.” The jingle voice sings “You don’t have to be lonely, at farmers.only.com,” and a scrap of yellow paper is thumbtacked above the portrait on which the words (read aloud by the male farmer) “City folks just don’t get it” are written in handwriting.

The target audience of this commercial is clearly the agriculture and livestock sector, but also could possibly include baseball fans, those that are very committed to their farming and ranching, and the tech-savvy, single population of Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is constructed to appeal to their specific sensibilities, and it is made clear the sensibilities of good old folk are very different from those that currently dominate the online-dating community.

The rural is contrasted with the urban, defying geographic boundaries in connecting “good old country folks” to their ranching and farming kin. There is a clear disconnect between those values and those of the “city folk,” because as the slogan claims, city folk just don’t get it. What is privileged is tending the land, care of animals (pets or livestock), and working so hard there is little time left to take care of oneself and one’s social life. It is so constructed by the use of shots of fields, farm animals with drawls, and in the fact the subjects are dedicated to their work despite their growing loneliness. “Jill and Dave” are both fair-featured whites, dressed in a way that is appropriate to their employment (denim, flannel, work gloves) possibly done intentionally to give a “just as they are” air. The use of American Gothic appeals not only to those in farming-related fields, but those who feel downright American (which may in fact may be a misuse of a cultural artifact, as those that posed for the portrait were actually father and daughter, and the relationship between the two has never been defined; there may joke to be made here about filial relationships in the stereotypical farm families that go misunderstood by “city folk”).

The commercial allows for empowerment of an underrepresented sector within the online-dating community, and it implies that the other services do not uphold the values of this group. As a member of the group excluded by the name of the website and the final note of the commercial, I wonder if the fast-paced world in which I live, which affords me the opportunity to socialize beyond the hands or my family, or with minorities for that matter, should exclude me from the value system of these singles. I do see that there is value to finding someone very much like yourself, especially for dating and maybe marriage. Some, rural or urban, may view this commercial and see it as fulfilling a niche in the internet world; others may find it to be too exclusive.