How advertisers are exploiting your hatred of Valentine's Day

LONELY HEARTS CLUB The Herbal Essences pitchman is playing to your inner Scrooge

If you are single like me, you've dealt with the onslaught of Valentine's Day with commendable skill for years. You weather the foiled hearts in the windows of your neighborhood CVS and know how to ignore the white teddy bears that say "I Wuv U" in Duane Reade stores. You arrange to cook at home so you won't have to sit next to some irritating couple as they mewl over their dinner specials while holding hands like they were Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. You may go out to a bar, or even, perhaps, some Love Stinks party, to bond with others who once again must tolerate the corporate love parade of Hallmark emotions.

That's right, your hatred for a holiday that has been shoved down your throat is now, also, being shoved down your throatBut in late January of this year, I started seeing wheat-pasted posters and ads on the streets of New York City with the URL dumpcupid.com on a pink background, no explanation. From the clean graphics and sudden omnipresence, I knew it was some sort of mass-market effort, I just wasn't sure if it was to promote a dating website or a new emo band. Later, when I typed in the address (why do I always fall for this stuff?), I was slapped in the face with the bright homepage for Herbal Essences shampoo that said, "When you've got luscious hair, who needs Cupid?" Even worse than what I feared—major advertisers have turned their sights on a new demographic: people like me who hate Valentine's Day.

This February 14, our feelings of resentment and irritation are being used to sell product, a trend that will most assuredly escalate in the coming years. That's right, your hatred for a holiday that has been shoved down your throat is now, also, being shoved down your throat.

The ball got rolling last June when Budweiser and Universal Pictures teamed up to crown June 2 "National Break-Up Day," a cutesy tie-in effort to coincide with the release of the straight-to-JetBlue classic The Break-Up, starring Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. The day is ostensibly organized to help couples break up while drinking beer and watching a hugely unimportant film. The site has interactive elements to help you turn the end of your relationship into a game, like a forum of favorite breakup lines, a program to help you cut up your pictures digitally, and a helpful breakup "E-Card" so that you and your jilted one will get lots and lots of comforting spam.

NATIONAL BREAK-UP DAY Finally, Vaughn and Aniston get their own holiday

It's unclear if Budweiser and Universal Pictures believed the holiday could be more than a one-off. Maybe they really thought The Break-Up was a significant movie, one to be watched year after year like It's a Wonderful Life. Or maybe they were just practicing for February 14, when a larger demographic of dateless, despondent people could be exploited.

Universal has wasted no time by offering a "blokey range" of "Anti-Valentines DVDs" like Scarface, American Pie, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin in a contest through UK Maxim magazine's website. The contest seems geared toward lad mag Guy Ritchie types: "It's time to stick those red roses in the bin and enjoy this Valentine's Day the proper way—by watching great 'blokey' DVDs on the sofa. You can even scratch your balls in peace!"

On the other end of the gender spectrum, Bust magazine is teaming up with Altoids to offer the event "Curiously Lonely: A DIY Valentine's Day for One" this Tuesday, where participants can "Make your own one-night-stand kit, and hopefully snag some products from Commandos, SweetSpot Labs, Altoids, Babeland, and others." It's a happy aestheticism of loneliness that meshes nicely with our post-9/11 "I'm depressed, let's buy shoes!" mentality.

It's a happy aestheticism of loneliness that meshes nicely with our post-9/11 "I'm depressed, let's buy shoes!" mentalityBut it's Herbal Essences' Dump Cupid campaign that truly heralds in the new era, where anti-Valentine's Day sentiment will become a commonplace commercial alternative to the originally oppressive heart-shaped box traditions. The dumpcupid.com site encourages you to turn your back on Cupid, who appears as a slobby, corpulent, longish-haired man in a comical Grecian outfit. You can help a friend dump Cupid by dragging and pasting refrigerator magnet-style words like "never," "boyfriend," "jerk," and "dump" into an E-card. Or you can watch videos of Cupid pole-dancing in a strip club and another where he's chased around by a screaming, angry woman and performing a rap: "I'm Cupid, I'm not stupid!"

The target audience, according to the Kaplan Thaler Group, the advertising agency responsible for the campaign, is "women in their 20s and 30s, particularly single women for whom Valentine's Day is typically a day more filled with stress than anything else because of the pressure for someone else (eg, a man or Cupid bringing a man) to make it a good day."

It's a big effort, too—one that includes Online Media (programs with YouTube and MySpace), full-page newspaper ads, TV and radio spots, in-store displays, and "bar media (coasters, post cards, mirror clings)." A giant 30' arrow (with dumpcupid.com written on the side) even appeared in Times Square for a product giveaway event on February 9 and 10. And in an ironic twist, Cupid was present to protest the protest.

The magnitude of the Herbal Essences campaign suggests this is just the beginning. In coming years, we may find ourselves not only exasperated with cutesy representations of love but also tired of cutesy representations of its opposite—just another example of our consumer culture's tendency to exploit anxieties it originally caused with more product (see: pharmaceutical industry).

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