The Savan(t) of Madison Avenue   

Leslie Savan's provocative columns on advertising in the Village Voice have twice made her a Pulitzer finalist.

In 1985, when Leslie Savan asked to write for the Village Voice's new television page, her editor, Richard Goldstein, proposed that she critique advertising. He thought that what was in his view "the most powerful medium of communication" deserved scrutiny. Savan was unenthused; she saw television programming as more vital. Now, after seven years of deconstructing commercials and two consecutive selections as a Pulitzer Prize final- ist, Savan's a believer: "I think the best stuff, the juiciest stuff, is in the ads."

In her column, Op Ad, Savan untangles the many associations and agendas in advertising's mini-movies, probing the ethics and aesthetics behind them. Punning, pointed, playful and allusive, her columns have addressed the way post-Berlin Wall ads "piggyback on East Euro Lib," how corporations hype themselves after disasters ("The Afterschlock"), how advertisers appropriate rock music and how they use television monitors as props to create "an artificial reality that can be more real than reality."

Just as commercials may not proceed linearly, Savan's columns often take conceptual leaps. In June, a column headlined "The Off-Road to Rio" examined Isuzu's campaign for its Jeep-like Rodeo. Savan first described the ads, which portray independent-minded kids growing to adulthood and becoming Rodeo-driving rebels. Then she segued to suggest that the myth of rugged individualism displaces the environmental controversy over off-road vehicles and how these days "all roads, or off-roads, lead to Perot. Ads like these plant more fantasies of channeled revolution."

Savan says her role is "to say what I think is unformed but floating around in people's heads." As she has written: "Advertising exists somewhere between the TV set and the viewer like a giant hairball that collects culture's and individuals' associations, projections, dyslexic misinterpretations and thousands of intolerances."

If television commercials are a rich lode, it's one mined mainly by Savan and critics in advertising trade magazines. "She's not the first person to criticize advertising," says Allan Temko, the San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic who chaired the 1992 Pulitzer Prize jury for criticism. "But there was a freshness and visual sensibility that I thought was extraordinary."

Temko's five-member jury agreed, considering Savan its unanimous first choice. The Pulitzer board, however, found none of the finalists (including Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold and Los Angeles Times essayist Itabari Njeri) of "Pulitzer Prize caliber," board Chairman Michael Gartner told the Los Angeles Times. The decision not to award a prize "baffled" Temko.

Savan, a petite 39-year-old with a giant smile and a mop of dark curly hair, is thoughtful, wry and more self-effacing than her pungent prose would hint. She was "stunned" by the first Pulitzer mention and, unlike some friends, wasn't angry at the results.

She didn't expect a prize, Savan says, because her column "doesn't honor a lot of conventions that the more mainstream press does." Though Savan says she's propelled by a sense of injustice and admits her instincts are "towards the left," she doesn't consider herself very ideological.

Indeed, what makes Savan a master channeler of the Zeitgeist are qualities she describes as "kinda schizoid": critical and gullible, cynical and insecure, New York intellectual and Middle American populist.

The daughter of a retired St. Louis advertising executive, Savan learned early not to view ads with reverence. (Her father, who now teaches advertising, doesn't share her views but says he generally likes her column.) She attended the University of Wisconsin but transferred to New York University, where she studied psychology and found journalism to be an accessible means of writing about it.

Savan's apprenticeship was unconventional. She spent seven years at the tabloid Star, for which she chased Elizabeth Taylor into a bathroom and quizzed Dr. Heimlich about his maneuver. Though she went part-time after three years, waiting for a job at the Voice to open up, she learned some lasting lessons: The Star is "about not losing your reader. Ads are about not losing your viewer."

As another influence, Savan cites Norman Mailer's hyperbolic, oblique-angled personal journalism, which melds society, culture and politics. "I think in that excess you can find some truth," she says.

Although Savan says she automatically distrusts commercials, she admits she is vulnerable to ads for vanity products such as perfume. In one column she recounted her (mis)adventure buying hair care items promoted in Cher's ubiquitous "infomercial."

Noting how Savan turns the language and technique of advertising back on itself, her editor, Jeff Salamon, observes, "In a certain way, she's sort of a post-literate writer." Indeed, she closes some columns with lines worthy of a reformed ad exec. "Don't believe the type," she warned, after critiquing Subaru's scrolling messages. "Increase the pitch," she commented in discussing anti-racism ads, which ran after the Los Angeles riots, that she thought were too soft.

Savan gets ideas from trade journals, ad agencies, colleagues and her own viewing. "I don't look for meaning in all ads," she says. "I like to let the ad wash over me... If one thing perks me up, I'll look at it again."

She's turned up mini-scoops, debunking ads such as one that touted NYNEX's role in the Persian Gulf War (actually none), and another suggesting that the unions of Eastern Airlines were happy with management (the "real people" pictured were mostly non-union workers, not rehired union members). She regularly calls the other side – unions, environmental groups, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a magazine called Adbusters – and sometimes even praises an ad or two.

Savan doesn't think advertising is purely evil ("We're all corrupt," she says) but feels compelled to repeat basic truths behind the comedy of commodities. In 1989, after ad industry heavyweights signed up to fight the drug war, Savan noted that the participants "are the same people who have so cheerfully, and lucratively, helped make this a culture of addiction in the first place," and found a drug counselor to express skepticism about the new campaign.

Most newspapers, which require advertising to stay afloat, cover advertising strictly as a business story. Working for the iconoclastic, left-leaning Voice, which has few national advertisements, helps insulate Savan from potential pressure.

Savan says she often gets feedback from readers but seldom from ad agencies. Bob Garfield, the ad critic for Advertising Age, suggests that such columns actually have negligible impact on the industry "because there are forces greater than self-appointed advertising critics."

Though Savan considers herself only semi-schooled in the academics of advertising, she has lectured at several museums and universities, and next year Temple University Press will publish a collection of her columns.

By decreasing her column's frequency last year from weekly to biweekly, Savan can devote more time to exploring the intersection of politics, culture and advertising. Though press coverage of campaign commercials has intensified since 1988, Savan, who that year began writing about political ads, tends to scrutinize them from a very distinct perspective.

In July, theorizing on a possible ad campaign for Ross Perot, she likened the self-styled outsider candidate to a popular new water gun, suggesting the "tense-on-the-trigger but highly colorful Perot is a Super Soaker for angry adults."

"Political commercials are really the essence of all advertising," Savan says. "The psychological tug of war is going on much more clearly in a political ad."

Covering the Republican convention in August, Savan observed that "military-strength grooming" apparently represents morality, that Republicans stole the slogan "they just don't get it" from feminists and that the pillorying of Hillary Clinton resembled an adolescent fraternity rite.

Her take on politics, she reflects, "is all an extension of what I've been doing."